The Ramones Part III-got wierder

The Ramones: Part Three

Crazy Mama’s was cut in half by a steep stairwell. On the north end of the room there was the bar and a tiny area filled with Formica tables and hard plastic chairs that were most often found in elementary school cafeterias, the easier to wipe them down. To the left of the bar was another tiny room with a pinball machine and one of those machines you could blow into to see if you were too drunk to drive. To the right of the bar was the dance area, small, sticky, and packed to the gills with sweaty bodies dotted by black dyed spiky hair, pierced lips, leather jackets, and more borderline disorders than a community mental health center. A huge mirror ball hung down and splashed white-light reflections over the herky-jerky and morose bodies, and the reflections went on into eternity as all the walls were covered with mirrors. There was a doorway that sat on the other side of the stairwell that connected the dance floor to the sitting area. It was used by those who wanted to avoid the rush of the bar, and it was here that the skinheads were congregating, apparently spoiling for a fight with anyone who dared venture into their territory.

I sat at a table with my two beers, milking the bubbles spiraling from the dark bottles for the courage to twist myself about on the dance floor. I just need to collect my wits. Between the sparkles of the bursting white lights that flecked the pulsating bodies in a projection of phosphorescence the made every person quiver in the haze of smoke and the discomposure amplified by the guitars blaring from the speakers, the room shook with the energy of stripling sexuality fueled by the eagerness that alcohol imbues.  I gazed at my shoes, cracked black leather with heels burnished raw—a fantastical thrift store find that were discarded once and needed to be again. My jeans were frayed, a hairy knee poking out as if it were a rodent looking for a moment to cut free.  I swallowed the last of my beer and walked towards the dance floor. Spinning onto it in swirl of fluid movements, I skirted across the floor, the worn leather soles gliding in the spilt beer as the moment where guitar combines with dance shut the rest of the world out.

The next song, “One Last Caress” by the Misfits, was the most beautiful ode to murder and rape ever written. Part macho bombast, part crooning Jim Morrison, and all Ramones derivative.  That little muscle bound dwarf Glenn Danzig rode a spark of glory for one set of anthem evil demos before morphing into a farcical cartoon of himself. Barely over a minute and a half, enough time to dig into the subconscious isolation that the best punk rock brings to live action. In a moment the DJ blended into “Bring on the Dancing Horses,” perhaps sensing that the tension in the room was now palpable. Echo and the Bunnymen penned a few outright hymns of geeky cockiness for the mascara drenched and lovelorn who brandished tattoos under fishnet stockings, spiky hair, and black lipstick. The whole room swayed to the words of disintegrating love. Wrought over the unfulfilled passions of their twenties, couples collapsed into one another.

As the song petered out I headed to the bar to fetch another drink or two. I stepped around two of the skinheads who were discussing the sudden change to “fuckin’ pussy music.” As I listened to the DJ playing the heartstrings of the mirror people, and Julian Cope instructed the world to shut its mouth, Keith came upon me and said, “Mate, those fuckin’ skinheads are fuckin’ with me.” He gestured over his shoulder towards several glaring skinheads who wore their uniforms of intimidation as if they had picked them from the rack at the local JC Penney’s: ankle high boots with white shoelaces pulled tight, white t-shirts, and gray suspenders making a perfect “X” across their broad backs. They looked menacing, but that was half the battle they were waging. There were roughly seven of them, but through the lens of drunken history and the perturbation of the moment, I can’t recall with certainty. They smiled at us,

“Um, those skinheads over there?” I asked, as if there were skinheads in every pocket of the club.

“Yeah, especially the big fucker.” Keith was short in stature and handsome, with long curly golden locks that had seduced many a beautiful girl. He oozed easy charm and in our own personal battles of seduction he clearly had the battle won before even engaging in conversation.  The big fucker was a big fucking skinhead. He was nearly a head taller than me, with a crooked grin and his big fucking shaved head, the baldness speaking volumes of fear.. We walked over, feeling braver than I ever should have, with guts full of alcohol and a temperament that was as shaky as North Korean foreign policy. I put my beers down on table next to the doorway.

Keith stood next to me. He was smiling. Perhaps the friction of violence energized him or perhaps he didn’t really think there would be violence. With a history of barroom brawls and some frequent ass beatings by my older brother while growing up, I wasn’t scared to take a punch. I also knew when to quit. One skirmish I got in off of Chittenden Avenue lasted one gigantic swing and a miss. If it would have connected, perhaps I would have been like the great home-run/strike-out champion, Dave Kingman for a day, but if I missed I was still Dave Kingman. On Chittenden, the gentleman smiled and punched me square in the front teeth. I yelled out, “Owww!, Ohhh, that hurt! Okay, you win,” and walked over to pick up my pizza, wiggling my front teeth all the way home as the big galoot hollered at me, “Hey, you can’t quit after one punch.” Turning I explained, “Listen, I gave you my best shot, you hit me in my teeth. I It hurts, so you win. I’m going home and eating pizza.”

Knowledge carries a lot in any experience. I don’t believe that Keith had ever taken a punch let alone thrown one. I knew that most bar or street fights ended quickly, in fact mostly in a matter of seconds after three or four punches, the majority never connecting. Take two drunken men, place them in a smoke-filled room with loud music and other people and ask them to try to hit one another and most likely you’ll end up with a PG-13 version of America’s Funniest Home Videos. I leaned up into the big skinhead’s face, stared into his eyes and said, “Hey, are you fucking with my friend here?”

Noticing that several of the smaller skinheads had gathered around him, as if they were the stink on his shit, he smiled and said, “What the fuck is it to you.” As he glanced at his skinhead buddies for support, I hit him right in the chest and he toppled over like a drunken man is prone to do. Immediately, regret rained over me as several of his team plowed into me as if I were a tackling dummy. I was clutching my thick plastic brown glasses in my hand. Flipping over a table with our momentum, I yelled to Keith as I felt big- leather skinhead boots kicking my ribs

I thought, “Oh yeah, these guys kick, I forgot about that. They fight in packs.” I felt a boot against the back of my head, and got scared. Being a twisty sort, I had perfected the practice of escaping from years of fleeing my brother. I held onto one guy’s leg and turned into it. When he fell over I scrambled away and headed towards the stairs. Keith was nowhere to be found.

I ran into Pearl Alley, which runs parallel with High Street, cut through another small alley, and was back on High Street. I ran all the way to Larry’s, where I knew I would be safe. Nothing felt like comfort than being part of something where everybody knew your name, your choice of drink and easily submerged themselves into your drama. I ran like a fat kid from school. I felt some blood dripping down my neck, but it did not seem too bad.

Bursting through the doors of Larry’s I went up to the bar and asked, “has Keith shown up?”

Becky, the tall bartender, looked aghast and said, “No, what happened? Your head is bleeding a little,” as she handed me a drink. There is nothing better for a concussion than a few alcoholic beverages.

“We got jumped by some fucking skinheads at Crazy Mama’s. I didn’t see Keith.” I retold the story to others and the woman I was supposed to meet seemed to enjoy it. “This may work in my favor,” I thought.

Roughly an hour later, Keith sauntered into the bar, flashing his white teeth and grinning. “Oh, thank God you’re okay, mate. As soon as you were flung over that table, I ran. They chased me all the way to 15th Avenue. I didn’t know where to go, so I ran into a party and they were going to kick me out until…I pulled out that bag of weed! It fuckin’ did come in handy!

Two days later we arrived in Cincinnati to meet up with the Ramones. We had backstage passes and saw the show from the wings of the stage, drinking the backstage Heinekens. Joey said that they waited until five because they wanted to take us out to eat but couldn’t wait any longer. Johnny asked if I had brought his copy of the Wild Angels soundtrack. I had forgotten it, so he said, “Well, next year I’ll pick it up.” At the end of the show, Keith pulled out his camera. I suggested he take a photo of the costume cabinets—those huge black leather cabinets found backstage at Broadway shows. Written in white spray paint on the side was “Ramones” and inside there were four leather jackets on hangers. The band had changed into normal, casual t-shirts, and I don’t recall them drinking any alcohol. They were truly salt of the earth. There never was a next year. They never returned to Columbus and broke up about a year and a half later. I still have Johnny’s copy of Wild Angels. If anybody knows his widow, I would love to return it to her.

perhaps an ever better m version by Dave Pajo:

not to be confused with the bad skinheads:

 

Part 51: First Christmas

Part 51: 1st Christmas

I drove several cars that were bound together with loose ends, one with a starter held in place by the end of a broom handle and it was not uncommon for a few bolts to be laying in the gravel driveway when I pulled out, bald tires struggling to gain traction on the small gray pebbles. Every car ride was a trial in hesitation, deep breaths as the engine struggled to turn over, at times a small billow of smoke emanating from the hood, was it more oil leaking or had that brave wooden handle finally caught fire? there was no money in my wallet, a small black cracked bit of leather I had been given after my grandfather had died. It never had any money in it when he owned it as well. At times, I would look in it, hoping that maybe, just maybe a five dollar bill would appear, but it only held an old Social Security card, a blemished and forged ID and my own driver’s license. Getting gas money was a trial in itself, a mad scramble around the house, pushing aside couch and chair cushions in search of loose change, a return of a few Coca-Cola bottles and a quick rummage through my step fathers change jar that sat atop his misty room. Sunshine illuminating the gray room with specks of dust, in calm panic pushing aside old buttons, scraps of paper with scribbled phone numbers and empty match books, grabbing a handful of change, hoping that there was more silver and copper. If luck was with me, there may be $1.75 or so to put into the tank. Gas was hovering around a dollar a gallon, and a gallon and a half could get an anxious high school boy to school and back a few times. Taking the bus was unheard of, an exercise in self oppression that one would avoid at all costs. It was better not to go to school than to take the nausea inducing trail of fear over the rolling hills and creaky shocks that was part and parcel of the bus number 24.

A date, perhaps the first one with a girl from my high school, even though I was halfway through my senior year, the mutual attraction between myself and the girls of Northeastern was unspoken at best, and most likely in complete abstinence. In the world of avoidance that I tended to move in a furtive glance was what I would hope for, perhaps a short moment of sparkle as quip would dart out of my mouth would give me a moment of hope but usually my own neediness in a mountain of farmer boy machismo would have prevented even the most interested gal to think secondly. My high school dates involved girls from other schools or more often during my summer and spring breaks in Athens where it was ok to wear glasses and be of minor stature.

The snow fell in clumps, big, fat flakes that swirled in circles before nestling atop a field of other frozen particles. The rolling hills leading into Catawba were shrouded in white, at times the snow fell so heavily that the road melded into the side of the road, causing the relic of a Toyota to work extra hard as brakes were pushed and coaxed into keeping the orange metal on course. There was sweat dripping from my hands, and next to me there was a portable Panasonic cassette player with failing batteries but was a better alternative to the generic teased hair music that was prevalent in the mid-west during the mid-nineties eighties. Driving with a slight amount of the overpowering testosterone  that coursed through my body, a permanent hard-on for the past four years of my life had now blended into the reality of a date. Passing barns that appeared asleep, with the white powder of snow freezing them into what appeared to a postcard of a fast vanishing America, the car galloped over paltry hills that were more mounds than hills. Catawba lay on a small bluff, that overlooked several large fields of corn and soybeans, with an abandoned corn mill on the edge of town, it provided a picturesque view of the town but upon closer inspection the years of neglect wore off its lumbering metal sides through chestnut colored rust as it crawled alongside of the mill like a giant spider web. Everything in this town failed the scrutiny test, from the perspective on my seventeen year old eyes, but now as the old mill faded into the mist of snow in a cracked rearview mirror held in place by shiny duct tape, that was no concern of mine.

South Vienna, which some of us referred to as “South-by-God-Vienna!” was roughly six miles or so from Catawba, it was itself a tiny burp of a town, located between I-70 and the old National Road, it almost dwarfed Catawba as it had at least five traffic lights, curbs, a carpet store and a grocery. Jenny lived at the edge of town, in a small ranch right smack dab in the middle of the National Road. The car chugged and surged in the snow, with small burps of exhaust it behaved like the Engine-That-Could while snow swirled around in a winter ballet of young lust and the hope of opportunity. I knocked on the door, trying to make the large lenses on my wire framed glasses smaller by leaning away from the porch light. I wore a bigger-than-me camouflaged US Army jacket that my brother had brought me back from his first foreign deployment in Germany. Jenny answered, and I as I stepped hesitantly into the living room, I eyed her family as much as they eyed me. A little boy lay on the carpet with tiny action figures spread around as if they had been blown apart, two younger sisters lay on opposite end of the couch, staring into the television. One I recognized, Rachel, who nodded at me. She was a freshman. The other just a few years older than the boy, said “hey,” and resumed watching the television. Jenny’s mother, got up from an yellow easy chair, “well, you’re this Bela everyone has been talking about. I have heard so much about you, Jenny says you are very funny. And you live in Catawba, did Jenny tell you we used to live there. I grew up in Catawba. You can see how far, I’ve come,” laughing she added, “all the way to South Vienna.” Wearing a shaky smile, I stammered, “yeah, um, yeah, hmmm….Jenny’s pretty funny herself.” “well, I’m Ginger, and welcome to our house” she turned her head, and raised her voice towards the kitchen, “Harry, Jenny’s date is here!”

Upon those words, the insides of a young man’s stomach crunched a little, and for the first time in what would be a lifetime of emotional hesitation reared its head in my belly that I would lead to the fact that I would be figured out. Jenny’s father entered, carrying a bowl of chips, “hey, how are you” with a quick glance, “you kids better watch this quick, me and the boy will be watching the game in a little bit. By the way,” looking me over again, “what have you got planned tonight?” “Well, I thought I would take your daughter back to the parsonage and fuck her brains out” was the first thing that I thought of but instead I replied, “maybe get a pizza or something, I don’t really know, I thought I would ask Jenny”, turning my head towards her for a rescue. “Sure, that sounds good, Bye mom, bye dad.” She said and pulled me out the door. “you don’t wanna talk to my dad too long, he loves to scare any boy that comes to my house.” I had no money for a date, in fact I only had about $7, five of which I had given to Chris Biester to buy a six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. “I thought we would go back to my house, hang out—listen to music.” Jenny thought this was a good idea. She was amazed at my record and tape collection. She had never seen so much music in anybody’s room. My brother Zoltan, home on leave was doing what most young mid-west American’s were doing on Christmas break were doing, getting loaded on a nightly basis. My stepfather was out, most likely at a support group meeting or in Columbus.

Jenny had never heard of much of the music I had, “Who is R.E.M.? Is that short for something? What is the Replacements? I have never heard any of this, oh wait, I know who the Beatles and The Rolling Stones are, you listen to them huh?” She scanned the wall of tapes, “how did you get so many of these, there must be at least a hundred.” Opening the first beer of the night, “Well, I love music, I got to DJ at the Wittenberg radio station for the past few years, so some I taped from them, some from my friends in Athens. You can pick whatever you want to.” Leaning into the wall of cassettes she would pull one out and without looking towards me, hand it over. “Wow, this is a lot. Who is Lou Reed and if he has so many records how come I’ve never heard of him?…..Oh, here play this, I love Pink Floyd and then play this” pushing a Cars tape into my hand. We stayed there in my room, drinking beer, eventually having our first kiss together and with the clumsiness that comes from teenage love, discovered one another’s body’s. When she pulled her top off, she wore an emerald green brassiere and later, to my astonishment, matching green panties which she refused to remove. By the end of the evening we were finishing each other’s sentences, laughing at how we had appeared to know one since birth but had only, tonight really talked to one another. The anxiety I had felt, slipped away, replaced by an inner confidence that, somehow, this is the way things were supposed to be and I was ok with this. The snow covered the car as we left the house, it was nearly ten o’clock and Christmas was just a few days away. Praying for the car to start, the key turned in the ignition, it seemed to have a gasp while groaning, “it had better start, my dad would kill me if he knew we came back to your house.” A deep breath seemed to do the trick, as the ignition turned again, and in some manner looked to have winked at me and came to a shuddering start. The exhaust convulsed with black smoke, the caused us to laugh nervously, and we roared out of the driveway into the twirling snow.

Two days later on Christmas Eve, as we sat in hard wooden pew while Midnight Christmas Services went on, we exchanged notes. Holding sweating hands, one said, “only two days.” It had felt like forever and at the same time as if the future was complete in our twitchy arms.

Below: Jenny playing for only the second time in 14 years, nearly 27 years to the day of that first date. (thanks to Shirley Tobias for the video)

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 49: Thinking 1985/2012

Thinking. 1985/2012

Weaving through traffic, driving the first new car I ever bought on my own at the age of 40, music blaring as I sing along as if I am in a bullet traveling 45 miles an hour through downtown Columbus. The songs reach back to childhood (Springsteen, Rolling Stones, Woody Guthrie) to my twenties, (New Bomb Turks, Superchunk, Sinead O’Conner, Dinosaur Jr, Matador Records) and then into the present, (Allo Darlin, Sea Lions, Luke Roberts), giving me moments of elsewhere while waiting for a mini-van to get the fuck out of the way. Watching pedestrians as they bustle with bags and briefcases across steamy downtown streets, all the seriousness that a suit can imply, stuck on faces that look straight ahead; no doubt they are thinking of jobs to be done. In the car, contemplating visions of the past while guitars blast into my ears, I invariably think of a father long gone–a man who choose to vacate his family years ago, I think of Jerry, who is always just a flicker of thought and finally of Jenny and what her life is like these days.

Bruno shouts from the back seat, “daddy, punk rock, daddy, punk rock” , leaning down I skip from a Puccini aria to the Dogmatics, and he is pleased. One day, he may have the faint impression of a memory, sitting in the back seat as his father dodges slow cars, singing along to the soundtrack of Bruno’s childhood. I feel alone. Sensing that all the other inhabitants feel the same as I do, constrained to their bodies, thoughts limited to their own experiences, yearning to feel together if not for just a moment. But with the knowing of the isolation that rises again, the feeling that not only intercourse can relieve because the moments after intercourse are a reminder that yet, again, we are all alone.

It’s a science fiction experiment, these bodies of our, like tiny droplets of rain, hurtling towards the soil until our souls splash and explode against the concrete and dirt of our lives. Swallowed by the force of the ground. It is the music that keeps the feeling of life while sitting in the white Volkswagen with a boy in the backseat, shouting above the din, “daddy, more guitars, daddy, louder.”

The phone rings, yet another example of science fiction come to fruition, “hey, just want you to know, I’m still alive.” It’s Jenny, in the hospital again. “shit is crazy over here,” she explains, her voice muffled from the sheer tiredness of life, “but they can’t kill ole Jenny.” She has the memory of an elephant, at moments she is able to conjure a piece of the past that, even if I were there I would doubt that it would happen, some of it so surreal and outstanding that I scarcely believe that it happened. “I was thinking of that one time we had that New Year’s Eve party in that hotel in Springfield with your brother and all his fucked up friends. Remember?” Searching the moldiest canals of my mind, past exams I took, under papers I wrote, children saying the most fucked up shit, I bump into the memory, sheltered away some twenty-seven years ago. “Um, yeah sorta.” “Remember, you and I went and fucked in that broom closet and then went back to the party . We paid that security guard $20 to pretend he was arresting Donny Acuff, and then the guy got fired and ended up back at the parsonage partying with us all night. And what’s her face killed Russ, your goldfish? Boy, you told that bitch off.” Pulling into the parking garage, I try to balance the memory with the idea that part of my job is to advise treatment, justice and compassion in court today. “er, yeah, I remember that, but I can’t really think about that right now.” “That shit was funny. Anyway, I’m doing ok, trying to figure out how to get my legs working, and I failed my HUD inspection.” Jerking to attention on this last note, “What, how can you fail a HUD inspection when you are in a nursing home and have been in the hospital for two weeks?” I ask, flabbergasted that some moron at the Columbus Metropolitan Housing Authority would do such a thing. “Do they know you are in a nursing home?” “Yup, of course they know. They said I still had to do it, so I called a friend to go over there. Everything has to be fixed within ten days or I will lose my Section 8 voucher. But my friend said he’ll fix it.” Thinking to myself, the same friend who beat the shit out of you last month.

“Find out who your worker is over there and I’ll send a letter over and make a few phone calls.” There is a pause, “I don’t know who it is, all my paperwork is at the apartment and I can’t leave here, fuck, I can’t walk.” blowing an air of frustration, with cheeks in full puffed mode, I answer, “Ok, I’ll find out.”

Being poor is not easy, especially in America where people tend to be shuttled between bureaucratic paths that resemble something between a Kafka story and the story of the little girl who feel down the well, at times frustratingly sad but also bold in the ironic malice of workers whose job it is to guard the most basic rights of the poor. I see this on a daily basis, the vilification of the poor and mentally ill, as if those who are blessed with opportunities had in some astral manner, earned these opportunities. The belief that being born into opportunity gives someone the license to dis-empower the powerless.

Every state in the Union has its own laws and guidelines for social workers, counselors and outreach workers, with some states requiring a four year college degree plus the passing of a licensure test to practice the art of helping. Others, have laws that have a minimal requirement, with any four or two year degree sufficing in allowing, someone, usually with good intentions to work with the poor, mentally ill, homeless and addicted. Sadly, in the midst of slogans, uninformed opinions, we, collectively wage war on the underclass as if brandishing their shortcomings in front of them, we will somehow protect our own. Draconian voting laws, every form of stereotype, whether under the guise of patriotism, religion and or capitalism is used as a weapon to keep ourselves from looking at what is barely ours. A fragile shell that is protected by the opportunities that most of us are born into. It is a skinny path we walk, one filled with dangers that can dart suddenly from the underbrush of our lives, in the form of an accident, cancer, job loss, addiction or mental illness. I choose to do what I do as a way to relieve my own guilt for the underprivileged and at times, I do it with a chip on my shoulder, as I have no use for the shaming of the people I choose to serve. I am blunt with the truth as it is the only way I can make sense of the suffering I see, perhaps, I do it to make sense of  the confusion I was brought up with or maybe it is a calling.

There was a large farm next abutted next to the tiny chuck of yard where the tiny ranch house stood, a house that resembled one of millions in America, this one set right of the old National Highway. Three small bedrooms and an unfinished basement where Jenny and her younger sister slept, a piece of 1970′s frayed green carpet kept bare teenage feet from slapping against the concrete. Upstairs their little brother Tony slept in the same room with another younger sister, Megan and down a “hallway” that consisted of two medium steps from the closet sized bathroom was the parents room. This was the third house the family had lived in over the past four years, all of them less than a mile apart. The farm behind and next to them was abandon, the silo standing as a white beacon of failure to every passerby. This was the mid-eighties when the scorched-earth polices of Reagan capitalism cindered many a family farm, but the workings of these policies were cloaked in the feel good speech of an old actor who while robbing the heartland blind made us all feel a little safer. Jenny and her siblings each raised a lamb for the annual Clark County Fair, active members of 4-H, they realized the fragile lesson of life, death and the meaning of the cycle of hardship. The sheep would be slaughtered after the fair, and hopefully each child would be able to sell the animal for a good price, money to be invested in college, a car or to help the family out.

After school, we would climb into my tarnished Ford Mustang, bits of it chipped at the bottom with bucket seats that sat so low to the ground you could swear you could feel the heat of the asphalt under your ass. She would run the sheep, who by nature are not the brightest animals, trying to get them in shape to tone the muscles that would soon be ripped from bone and consumed. The animals would stare at her dumbfounded as if she were an alien, they had no reason to run in circles, besides they thought, “it’s hot and we are wearing wool for christsakes!” I would laugh at her efforts, drinking sun-tea while her mother shook her head, “it looks silly, I know, but she wins every year.” This was true Jenny won a lot of contests, her intelligence hidden by her quick wit and outrageousness. She won first place in the State of Ohio Soil Judging Contest sponsored by the Future Farmers of America, as a junior in high school although she was neither a  farmer presently or in the future. She twice won the State of Ohio Wool Judging Contest sponsored by the FFA. She was in the National Honor Society and was warned by several teachers to be wary of me, due to my mischievous nature and poor grades although I came from a long line of professors and professionals.

We would walk the abandon farm, in the cold and the warmth of spring, trasping over withered husks of corn, clumps of dirt that remained unmoved season to season, the massive wooden doors of the farm remained locked, shackled together with a rusty thick chain. We tried in vain to get into the barn, with the simple reason to unhinge our teenage lust in the dark shadows and moistness of mildewing hay that was waiting for us behind the tethered doors. The raspy corn would crunch beneath our shoes, the wind would sail across the unproductive patch of earth that surrounded us into our chest, holding hands the questions of our adolescent minds abounded as if compelled by the chilly wind. She would explain things to me as we stepped over forgotten plants, pockets of dirt that remained upturned and why certain crops could grow in Ohio and how crop rotation works. This was all new to me, I had assumed through my lens of persecution that farming just involved listening to Hank Williams Jr while riding on a tractor and telling nigger jokes. Of being provincial and dismissive of outsiders, like myself, although it would take me nearly thirty-five years to come to terms that I was an outsider nearly everywhere I went, including, at times my own house. The lump of distaste and protection I had accumulated over four years in living in rural Ohio slowly melted during this time, and an understanding of the wisdom, care and struggles of my classmates and neighbors came into focus. As Jenny called me out on my class snobbishness, one that was rooted in a liberal sense politics, as we were by all accounts poor in a monetary sense, I felt more at ease in my surroundings.

Nestled in the dirt roughly 200 yards back from the farm, her own house a dot in the distance, we found the carcass of a cow. Almost complete, it’s bones, weathered white  and picked clean by birds, rodents, bugs and seasons, we crouched around it in awe. Who would let an animal die out in the field, let alone wouldn’t the animal be noticed? “How does this happen?” I asked, crouching down, examining a hip bone, half buried into the dirt, the white bone resembling a conch shell in the middle of Ohio. She pulled it out, clumps of dirt sticking to its side, it was too cold for any insects, “it’s weird, huh?” I took a few steps back, resting on my haunches, keeping my balance with my left hand I felt something hard in the dirt. There was another carcass and soon we noticed roughly four or five cow skeletons. It as if we had managed to slowly walk into a cave, and slowly brushed a beetle off our arm and noticed that there were thousands crawling around us. “Christ, look at all these fucking bones.” The sky was gray, with soft rolling clouds hanging above the earth as if they were licking their collective lips readying themselves to unleash a torrent of cold rain. A splash of lightening shattered in the distant. I looked at Jenny and she stared at me, a large thick raindrop exploded between us. Wind seemed to gurgle in our ears, and she tried to put the hip bone back where it had submerged, as if it were never disturbed. “I don’t know why anyone would let these poor animals die out here and never collect them”, she said more to herself than me.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae pt 48: Dampness

Pt. Dampness

Jenny’s coat wrapped around her body as if it were beaten into her, the rain fell between the cracked plastic and settled into the rotting poly-cotton stuffing that peaked through as if it were making baby faces to the outside world. She huddled into herself, shivering on my porch as the rain whipped behind her. At the end of our walkway, William, waved shyly, his blue eyes a stark contrast to his brown skin. I stepped out onto the porch making sure that none of the cold could slip into our warm house, my wife stood in the kitchen, head bobbing in the background wondering who would be knocking at the front door in this weather.

We didn’t have too many unannounced visitors, and as we settled into the house we had planned to remake into our own, we preferred it this way. As sobriety surrounded us, the clamoring for social affirmation diminished and we simply kept to ourselves. Jenny was swaying, almost to the vibrations of the house, the wind, or some internal song churning into her ears. It had been a long time since she swiped makeup over her face, put a line of lipstick around her lips or wore a necklace around her neck; the skin on her face was taunt, tan from the sun and as weathered as the paint peeling off the side of our house. Her hands were leathery, the ends slightly yellowed by cigarettes, light brown spots a gift from the sunshine, it was hard to believe that just five years prior she wore silver bracelets and pearls.  She had been through a lot this past year, from living in South Beach, in the mansion of a millionaire, to the streets and jails of Miami to the streets of Columbus. During this time she went from making a record with a new collaborator in Boston to having almost everything she owned put out on the sidewalk. I had been given her trumpet and a small suitcase that held a few of her CD’s and records but the rest was gone. She had nothing to play them on and her lungs were no longer capable of blowing a melody into the trumpet.

Her artwork, which she created in manic bursts, had been dumped into trash bins, which would happen anyway over the years as she would gather up some of her belongings and then discard them within a few years as the urge to move would be greater than the need to stay. She had painted hundred of doilies with thin limbed characters holding glasses of wine or playing skinnier pianos, other creations where painted coconut shells that appeared to be a mash-up of dive-bar art with deranged arts and crafts that would horrify most average JoAnn Fabric’s shopper. At one point, while living in Florida my wife and I drove down to Miami for an art show my wife was participating in. We went out to dinner with Jim Williams and Jenny on a beach front restaurant that not only smelled of seafood but of money, the wait staff knew Jenny and Jim and brought them there drinks without them asking what they wanted. The next morning we went to the sprawling house that Jim lived in with his elderly mother, he inhabited a sort of mother-in-law suite that was attached off the living room. The house was stuffed with garish art work and a baby grand piano collected half a room of dust in one corner, as we passed it Jenny said, “His old bitch of a mom won’t let me play it, we had to move to this other part because her and Jim kept yelling at each other.” Jim’s unit was crammed with recording equipment, keyboards, guitars and a big red bass the bounced the sunlight off of its shiny exterior. “Jim bought me all this shit, even if I can’t really play guitar, he wants me to make another record.” The back yard was complete with a bar and dozens of painted coconut shells with dangling baubles, gold chains and the hair of the shells were combed down to make glamorous “sea” models. Jenny said she was trying to make a “whole platoon of these things, I wanna string them around the whole yard, so when it’s night time, the moon can bounce of their jewelry. I have about forty of them done.”  These too, in their ruffled glory were tossed to the trash bin when Jim died.

“Hey, Bela, I know you’re busy,” she stuttered, “but we need to use your bathroom real quick, the Tim Horton’s power went out and William has to take a shit and we don’t have anything in the tent. In case you didn’t notice, it’s kinda raining out.” She grinned when she said this last line. Jim waved in the background as if waving to the President in a motorcade, weakly smiled back, I turned and said, more to my wife than Jenny, “sure come on in, but be quiet the baby is asleep.” Williams started stomping and rattling the rain off of his soggy body as he trudged up the steps, Jenny with arms folded refused to go farther than the front entrance. “Jenny comes into the kitchen, do you want some water?” my wife asked. “No, I’m cool, I’ll just hang here, I don’t want to wake the baby and I’m real wet, if you can’t tell.” The smell of alcohol shrouded her voice, and I realized that breakfast had been served in the homeless camp.

William smiled as he entered and was prone to over thanking us so I nodded at him and casually mentioned that anytime we could help we would. When manic and drinking, Jenny usually spoke with pressured speech, jaw set tight, and her lips stretched around her teeth as if they were made of crystal. Her blue eyes held droplets of water, and for a moment the room was illuminated in these gobs of heavy water, she looked like a battered Christmas tress waiting to be cut down. “I’m sorry to come over here, especially when we have been drinking, we have to get a little bit in the morning, you know, I don’t want Merijn to see me like this.” She paused. “It’s embarrassing.” Most of my life I have never been at a loss for words, but at certain times in dealing with Jenny I was. There were a few moments when all was quiet, the sound being interrupted by William unloading in the other room. We laughed, “I swear to God, I’m going to kill him. Jesus, his ass is going to wake the baby,” she muttered. I heard my wife go upstairs, “bye Jenny.”

Earlier that year, after Jenny had been evicted from the Ohio State School of Music I woke up one morning and found her sleeping at the end of my driveway under the front end of my car. A congested mass of hangover, twigs, frayed nerves and sweat, with a large piece of Little Debbie Snack Cake plastic stuck to the side of her face. “Shit,” she said when I aroused her, “I didn’t have any place to go,” wincing as she pulled the plastic off her face, “what the fuck, I don’t even eat this shit.” “It’s probably from the plasma center customers, they are always throwing shit in our yard, candy wrappers, cigarettes, roaches, I even found a crack pipe in our yard.” That night, I let her sleep in our garage but told her she couldn’t drink in it and couldn’t tell Merijn. I found her gone the next morning, the garage door open and an empty bottle of vodka upstairs next to her make-shift bed. She walked in while I stood standing there, my head trying to shake the disappointment from my shoulders. “Oh, shit, sorry,” she tried to explain, I told her to leave and she started screaming at me, “God-damnit, you’re so fucking uptight, I can’t believe anybody would live with your ass. You fucking control freak, what the fuck, you are such a son-of-a-bitch. Fine, I’ll fucking find my own place, I don’t need your fucking help if all your gonna do is try to control me!” Taking a breath as if it were water, I paused, counting, “Jenny, there is some expensive stuff in her, what did I say, this is Merijn’s studio.” “Fuck you, it’s not that it’s you want to tell me what to do, always.” She continued yelling as I went into the house and called the police; by the time they arrived she was gone.

A small pool of water collected at her feet, looking into the puddle she bent her neck slightly like a scientist gazing through a telescope, “I don’t think we’ll stay out there long, some guys from the shelter are trying to get us out of there. But I and William want to stay together, they think I could get my own place but I want him there. The apartments they give you are in the hood, I just don’t feel safe. We saw a few of them; can you imagine me stumbling out there in crackville central? I’d be eaten alive…no, I want him there with me even if he can be a pain in the ass. He doesn’t smoke that shit anymore, he did once and I told him to forget about me if he was going to do it, I’m done with coke especially after Jim died.”

Jenny’s apartment is on the east side of Columbus, it is her second apartment since living on the streets in 2005, it’s a bit safer than her first one she shared with William, the one with gun holes in the walls, roaches openly defying a person who chose to sit on the threadbare couch, and the group of young African-American teenage boys, conferring in the parking lot at all hours who would always acknowledge be with a nod. I would do my visits there, with my work badge attached, the one that said that I worked for the largest community mental health center. Even drug dealers have a soft spot for social workers. It gave me access to the most dangerous of places.

Her current apartment is still in an unsafe part of Columbus, especially for a mostly single woman who has no income and who battles inner demons on a daily basis. She doesn’t go out at night and takes great care to make sure she has the required reserve of alcohol in her cupboards, under her bed and strews around the house before night falls. She drinks bottom basement vodka, which is usually Kalashnikov, long gone are the days when she would drink Stoli’s, Grey Goose or even Skyy her needs are more basic at this stage of her life. At one point her liquor cabinet was full, with Dewar’s, Makers Mark, Jamison’s and imported beers stocking her refrigerator and pantry, her vodka at that time would be housed in the freezer, as it would not be consumed entirely during the course of the day. Breakfast, lunch, dinner and late-night keep me grounded. She pours it into a large tumbler that she keeps next to her bed, mixed with a splash of fruit juice, a twisted reversal of a standard drink. Her artwork climbs the walls, paintings of landscapes, black and white photographs she has torn and forged from discarded library books and old Life magazines. Photos of young romantics, cuddling in outdoor cafes, the scent of love on their necks as they take in the scents of whatever far off city they happened to be captured in, Paris, Antwerp, and Brussels, whatever. The smells of the cafes mingling with the cigarettes that hangs, as if they were props, from long thin fingers while the other hand is intertwined with their lover. For Jenny, it’s the idea of romance and the reinforcement that desire is not tossed asunder as one age, the fact that ideas live in a person’s head regardless of circumstance. She is proud, and her defiance to her situation, while at times appears to threaten her life, is one to behold. The photos of a young John Kennedy and of a determined Leonard Bernstein attest to the culture that have sprung from her well of life in spite of the pain she has tunneled through over the years.

Life is difficult for everybody, and as age grows around our ears, crowding our brains with the trivial and the serious, oftentimes in the same moment it is easy to take the burdens of daily life as a personal Odyssey although for the most part the majority of people I know have a journey paved with soft beds, scrumptious meals and a fairly easy commute to work, there are many where life is a continuous botched attempt to find a moment’s solace. Nearly every time I want to cook an elaborate meal, I run to the store in my 2009 VW, complete with MP3 player and heated seats. There is one mederterian store across the street from my house, and two large grocery stores within one mile of my house as well as five pharmacies within a one mile radius. I mutter under my breath while I stand in line holding a bunch of cilantro and a habanera pepper, thinking of my valuable time.

Chronic, long-term alcoholism can result in a condition called alcoholic peripheral neuropathy, which in laymen’s terms means that muscles cannot receive vital minerals, potassium and calcium due to liver damage. This can result in an awkward gait or at worse the inability to walk; it was one reason why many alcoholics die from taking a tumble down the stairs even though they might not have had very much to drink or anything at all. At times, both William and Jenny have a need to use a wheelchair or a walker, a startling experience for those of us who knew her in high school when she used her young legs to run cross country on a team that won the State Championship, or the young woman who graced the field of Ohio Stadium during half time of a Buckeyes game while marching in The Best Damn Band in the Land. One afternoon, circa 1996, I was leaving Bernie’s Bagels, stepping into the sunlit afternoon from the damp underground bar after taking a short beer break from Used Kids; I passed Jenny replete in gray sweat pants, running bra and white tee-shirt, running down High Street. “Jenny,” I shouted as she galloped past, “what are you doing?” She turned, blowing out hot breath, “shit, I got to get into shape; I thought I’d start running again. What are you doing?” Glancing down High Street, I answered, “oh, I just went on my beer break, Larry’s isn’t open yet so I went to Bernie’s. I’m on my way back to work. I have time for another one, if you want?” Jenny looked down at her brand-new running shoes, glowing white and unblemished from any dirt, fresh out of the box, “sure, I can always run later.”

Running became a passion of mine, shortly thereafter; I started in 1992, to ward off a beer gut that started creeping over my jeans. It blossomed around 1998 when I took to running roughly five miles a day and erupted in 2000, when a personal life that was crashing around me, and an inability to quit drinking once I started I trained and ran a marathon. I did not let a hangover cripple my runs and at one point ran eighteen miles with a hangover that would have immobilized a small dog, cursing my legs and my body the last two miles, I found solace in the long runs where music would guide my emotions and for a brief period I had a purpose even if it were only to put one foot in front of the other for two hours while the OutKast or Superchunk provided the background to the pleasures of my thought.

The journey of running has little to do with the physical aspect, which is easily solved through practice and finding a pace that fits one’s body, but the key is the isolation as feet pound against concrete, step by step, mile by mile until there is nothing. At about forty minutes the brain releases a flood of dopamine into the body, about the same amount as a small shot of heroin, and from there, feeling the runner’s high, a runner finds relaxation and perhaps the glow of creativity. Shortly prior to the summer of 2001, while training for my second marathon, my spouse got a job in Gainesville, teaching Fine Arts at the University of Florida. A dream job for her. I was running daily, drinking roughly four days a week, staying out as late as I could and starting arguments with her on the nights when she wanted me home, so I could escape into the bar lights and the mist of alcohol. Jerry had died shortly before then, Jenny had moved to Miami and I was unmoored, restless with pangs of secrecy and self doubt, even music did keep me grounded. In June while I was in Oklahoma for my cousins wedding I got a call from my wife, “honey, I have some bad news,” she said as I stood above the toilet, willing a minor amount of urine to come out, my head balanced against the wall as my wedding party hangover threatened to dis-rail the soft grip I had on my dick. “What?” She answered slowly, “the record store burned down last night, it’s in ruins, and everything is destroyed.”

Running became something that helped absorb whatever thoughts I had mounting in my mind, diverting fear into the pulse of my headphones zapping mix-tapes into my ears while sweat poured down my back, it was a daily practice that I still continue although the fear has since left me many miles ago when the drink found another person to occupy. The fear now is of age, of finding time to cram the lilting dreams that still drive me today, dreams for my children, dreams for my job, dreams for my friends, and dreams of finding time to write all my ideas.

Jenny is frail, with thin arms and legs that are slivers of skin, her clothes hang off her as if she were truly skeleton pried up by skin. She shakes and wobbles when walking, and with William in a nursing home, she has taken to wheeling herself around her small apartment. She needs medication but does not have health insurance and no income; both she and William live off of his Social Security that she helped him get. She has been hospitalized at least five times this past year but in an all too frequent encounter I have daily, the system has failed her. Several times, I have spoken with social workers while she was in the hospital to help her get her Medicaid as she easily qualifies, it has never been done. She was linked to a mental health center some years ago and got awful service, where her case manager lied to her and never followed up. Her case was eventually closed as her case manager stated “she refused services” although I had spoken to her case manager directly explaining her needs and advocating for her.

The nearest grocery store to Jenny is roughly two miles from her house, it takes her three buses to get there, and fare for a bus is $4. There is a convenient store about half a mile from her apartment as well as a Dollar Store, she buys pasta and tomato sauce and sometimes sells her food stamps for a ride to Kroger. She is given prescriptions when she leaves the hospital but is unable to fill them as she has doesn’t have insurance. She has not been able to have any mental health service in five years as she doesn’t have any insurance. The only alcohol and treatment center in town will not pick her up, she will need to call every morning by seven am and the get herself there by eight if a bed is available. It is nearly an hour and a half bus ride to get there. At times, she feels stuck, hiding in her apartment, huddling in her bed, watching reruns of the Golden Girls, at times feeling the inspiration to paint a picture or play some songs on her keyboard.

Days clog into one another; the fermenting carpet that is dotted with vomit, coffee and vodka and juice droplets makes the apartment more oppressive. Lately, with William sleeping against death’s door, Jenny is again reminded of what she has lost. Her eruptions are always on the phone, and while the anger has long since been wrenched from her voice, the fear remains steadfast. She calls and I listen. Listen. And then I listen some more. While my son points out the back window of the car, noticing the fire engines, a dog or the billowing blow up advertisement of a Jiffy Lube sale, Jenny issues a play-by-play of the madness in her world. Her life is one of frustration, of a beginning that never really begins and an ending that is clouded in the annoyance that the little things never get done or have never arrived.  The oddity of my own life is that I have spent a good deal of my days the past seven years helping many people like Jenny, at times helping the person leave the shell of poverty, mental illness and addiction but most of the times, offering a concerned ear to the decimation of their lives. I get paid to be compassionate. With Jenny, there is always the wish that something would click but I have learned in my life that I cannot put my own expectations for her life as a guide to measure her life, so I listen some more.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part 47: The Hospital

Part 47:  The Hospital, 2012.

 

My beautiful son is now three. He has soft, curly, blond hair, almost transparent blue eyes, and is a giggling machine. He wakes up early—usually around six AM—while I slumber away, still wanting to spend the day in bed at the age of 43. He runs free through the house, with every new discovery a surprise, from the falling snow to being told it’s the weekend. He says things like “yeah!” and “yippee” when you tell him that we are having pizza or going to the playground. He has a sly smile that he inherited from me and, like me, he has no idea that he has this secret, charming tool in his arsenal. It took me having a son to realize that if I had one physical attribute that women found attractive, it’s that smile. He slays people with it, and has no idea. Unbeknownst to him his charms can blow a bad mood asunder.

Thinking back to a time in my life when it was not uncommon for me to wake up pants less in the bushes, or making desperate 4 AM phone calls to someone, anyone who could assuage my fear of being alone, I could not foresee what has become my life. It is different in so many ways. While my circumstances have changed, the strains of being a father, the effort of being a husband and keeping my addictions at bay, is in some way more of a challenge than hiding in the bottle or in the arms of a one-night stand. But back then I always woke up dreading the day and facing what happened the night before; it was a constant reminder of my emotional shortcomings. It was as if I could barely communicate, holding my breath in every relationship until whoever I was with learned that I never learned the proper rules of engagement.

Bruno sits on my lap, telling me in his fractured vocabulary what happened today at school, everything shaded by his imagination and perceptions based on innocent and basic emotions. His fears are of ghosts, of the lights being out. His favorite word is “spooky”, and in his world everything is spooky, from the cover of a book on about gorillas to the sound of a hemorrhaging muffler that croaks by our house. Bruno’s fears are in stark contrast to my own. I have no fear of ghosts or the devil—it is hard to be scared of the things I no longer believe in or even think about. Nonetheless, fear shakes me awake at night. I dream of the dead and of leftover resolutions that were never resolved as I am besieged by my past. I dream of Jerry and he is always dead. I encounter a roomful of records as I am transplanted back to Used Kids, trying to resolve the misery that I felt leaving that community. At other times, I dream of shitting and vomiting. I tussle with dreams of being “discovered” that I still don’t know what the fuck I’m doing, despite being a forty-three-year-old man with two young children and three college degrees. I strive to be spiritual but I’m drawn to the physical. I am still a boy wondering just what the hell I am doing.

Bruno looks at me with benevolence, surrendering himself to what he thinks is the vessel of all knowledge, his father, who struggles to find the patience not to scream at his wife, “I just want to sleep! That’s all I want, for everything to be quiet!” I hold him; he is an exquisite hugger—one of the best I have ever known. A few nights ago, he rolled over and held my head tight in his arms, my ear pressed securely to his chest. It made me wonder, just who was fathering whom?

Bruno talks in his sleep, yelling out to his mother and, at times, giggling, which is a most wonderful sound. I stare at him sleeping, my wife next to him, and listen to them breathe. Invariably I turn to my side and either drift off to sleep with my back to them or wander downstairs to stuff chocolate into my face.

I once had a dream that I had to beat the devil—I literally had to conquer him. In the dream, he was completely black, like a shadow but also shiny and metallic. He had no features, just a solid mass of black, marbled metal. But I felt him as I hunted him down, I felt his presence, and in the dream I could feel the hairs on my arms stand at attention as I came face-to-face with the devil. In an instant, I realized that I would be consumed by the devil if I could not think of how to beat him. I thought of my young daughter and all the love I had for her while I hugged the devil, and that, the action of love, a love with no-strings-attached, was what beat the devil. The evil from the devil melted away in the dream—I had beaten him. I woke up thinking, “That was a crazy fuckin’ dream.”

Jenny calls me. Her voice is hoarse, tired, and cracked like piece of plastic that has been sitting on hot asphalt the entire summer, faded around the edges, brittle but still with the essence of itself. “I’m in the hospital again,” she croaks. She is tired and speaks feebly into the phone. Her voice on other calls may sound the same, depending on how late in the day it is. If it is late afternoon I know that she is drunk, no matter what she says. I have made it my profession to understand drinkers and addicts. If it is morning, she is usually lucid and able to display some of her caustic wit. We laugh hard at these times, sometimes enough to make tears stream down my cheeks. These times are fewer and fewer and on most occasions when I talk to her, I am resigned to the fact that she is drowning in the sea of addiction

“Which hospital?” I ask, as I slowly turn my car out of the downtown parking garage. I am annoyed by her call. Annoyed that it is ten till six and I have to pick up my two children from school in the next ten minutes or pay a fine. Annoyed that the motherfucker with the inappropriately large 4 X 4 truck from another county has no idea how to drive in the downtown of a city of 1.4 million people. Annoyed that I didn’t finish all the work I needed to do. Annoyed that I have yet another phone call that is asking me for help.

“Hold on,” she replies. “I’m downtown. Grant, that’s it. I’m at Grant. I’ve been here for about three days but only felt well enough to call now. They took me by squad again; they should just park one in our parking lot because of me and William.” I picture her in a hospital bed with tubes stretching out from her arms, hair matted, and a tray of half eaten Salisbury steak and applesauce in front of her.

With a pause that would swallow the ocean, I maneuver through the outbound traffic, spying the time on the dashboard, the clock’s blue lights yawning at me to hurry up. I ask her what room, knowing full well that I will forget it and just ask at the desk. “I dunno, it’s Grant. I’m at Grant, the hospital.”

Another pause as I close my eyes for as long as the road will let me. “I know that.” Now I am obligated to ask what room again. “What room, I said?!” Even though my wordy prowess may be stronger than her drug induced lethargy, she will still win this verbal tennis match, as her obliviousness is far superior to my impatience.

Another pause. “Oh, what room? I thought you asked hospital. The hospital is Grant. I don’t know what room I’m in, but I’m pretty sick. I was puking for about two weeks.” I can hear her struggling with the equipment that is dug into her arms. I can almost see her wince. “Ah, fuck,” she mumbles, “I ain’t doing good. They don’t know what’s wrong with me.”

Mutual history with addiction and mental illness doesn’t always give a person the required composure to remain calm. Although I have been trained to stay calm in my profession and in my own Buddhist practices, this all flies out the window when I talk with Jenny like this. I say, “Okay, um, I’ll try to come by tomorrow.” I start to hang up the phone, as I have arrived at the children’s school with two minutes to spare before the fine kicks in.

“Wait! Wait!” I hear her screeching into the phone.

Closing my eyes again, and injecting my words with a heavy dose of discontentment, I say, “What? I have to get my kids!”

She is shifting herself in bed. I can hear the phone slipping and her voice gets small for a moment, as if she is laying at the bottom of the bed and crawling towards the receiver. “Hold it, hold it,” I hear her say. “Okay, so I had to tell you one more thing, so hold on, just hold on. Sorry.”

Pulling open the door to the school, I shake the snow off my shoes. “Okay, go on., you have about a minute before I have to hang up.” The hallways are strung with construction paper artifacts of volcanoes erupting, dinosaurs, and handsome colorful drawings of gardens punctuated by glitter scattered amongst the flowers. Small girls wheel by me in the hallway, rushing into the gym where the older children will have their winter dance this evening. Kids are lugging backpacks that are larger than them—they look like ants carrying giant morsels of food. A few parents smile at me as I pass. I wanly smile back as Jenny tells me how William and her little brother smuggled a bottle of vodka into the hospital earlier in the day, a stunt that had the Columbus Police searching her room.

“You wouldn’t believe it. I woke up and I had this bottle of vodka in my lap, under the covers, and the cops start looking around and they start asking me where William and my brother are. I mean I feel like fuckin’ death. I can’t believe they did that. I mean, my brother and William.”

My first thought is to ask her, well, did you drink any? But I let this thought float by. “Well, you sound very sick. Just do what the doctors tell you to do. If they want to call me they can.”

“So, where are you?” she croaks.

“At the kids’ school. I’m picking them up.”

After another pause, and with a far away voice, she says, “They must be getting big.”

With that, my daughter runs into my arms. “Daddy, daddy, guess what? We got our Daisy forms to sell cookies. Can we sell some this weekend? Can we call Grandma and Grandpa?”

“Of course,” I say.

Bruno is infatuated with music. He sits at the piano at six AM, plinking away, blows through a plastic flute when wandering through the house, and is always getting out his ukulele and an old guitar that Jake from Moviola left behind when we bought the house. He loves to watch his grandfather play guitar, and for Christmas he got a guitar from him. He started lessons about a month ago. There are no real expectations, just that he practices when he can and make it to his lesson every week. Carrying his guitar, he looks and walks proud, with a purpose unusual for a three year old. His steps are careful as he climbs up the porch where he gets his lessons. When Sean, his guitar teacher, opens the door, Bruno stays back, hiding behind my torn jeans, themselves relics of a past that seems far more distant than the gray hair on my head.

He acclimates himself rather quickly and well. As I sip coffee with Sean’s wife, I can hear Bruno strumming vigorously away on his acoustic guitar, sounding not too different from the opening strums of Phil Ochs “Pretty Smart on My Part”.  He stares up at Sean looking for approval. Although he can’t yet count very well, his effort is noticeable. The routine is to get lunch with daddy afterwards, but on the way to lunch I say, “Bruno, we have to go see Jenny in the hospital.”

Bruno replies, “crazy Jenny?”

“Yup.” He hasn’t seen her in almost a year, as she lives in a part of town we only come close to when we drive by on the freeway. As I back the car up, Bruno shakes his head. He is frightened by the size of the hospital.

“Daddy, let’s go eat.”

Pulling him from his seat, he hugs me and I reassure him, “Hey, we’ll only be a minute.” He clutches me and won’t let me put him down as we stroll to the front desk. “Jenny Old, what room is she in?”

“Hmmm, let’s see…there it is, room 535. Go down the hall and the first elevators on your left. If you see some on your right, you’ve gone too far.”

“Wow, Bruno, we’re going to ride an elevator.”

“I don’t wanna. Let’s eat.”

It’s still morning, so we are the only people in the elevator. As we get off the sign reads “Gastric and Pulmonary.” We wind our way through the hallway. Bruno starts to shake, “I don’t wanna go, Daddy!” The hallway is crowded with a plethora of machines, all with wires and beeping noises; nurses have serious looks on their faces. “No, Daddy, let’s go!” he yells.

“Hey, look, we’re here,” I say as I try to subdue his struggling. Entering, we see a woman rolled on her side, a bare arm hanging to the side; it is as thin as a small branch, with bruises up and down the wrist. “Hey, Jenny” I say quietly.

Bruno is shaking his head, whispering, “Daddy, I want to go.” Jenny turns and smiles broadly, her matted hair is unclean and mussed. Her face is red, with deep lines over her forehead, and her skin is blotchy.

“Don’t worry; I look like shit,” she says. “I think I was in the ICU before they put me here. Hey, little Bruno,” she says softly. “It’s your aunt Jenny. My, did he grow.” Bruno looks at Jenny, eyes wide as he takes in the apparatuses that are plugged into her arms. I gaze at her arms; they are so thin, like those of a starving child in Africa. Noticing, she answers my stare, “I haven’t eaten anything solid in a few weeks. Everything comes up.” Pause. “Of course it’s my liver, my pancreas, and something with my intestines. They don’t know what that is.” Pause. “And yes, they say I have to quit drinking.” Her lips are chapped, bits of white skin flecked out from her bottom lip. “I’m so thirsty but I can’t really drink, so I crunch on ice. You should have seen me yesterday. How did you know I was here?”

Smiling, trying to put something positive into the room, I say, “You called me. Listen, have the social worker call me and I’ll see what I can do to help. They should be able to get your Medicaid started here.”

Straining her neck, she says, “She was in this morning. I can have her called.”

I kiss Bruno on the head. “No, it’s okay, just have her call me.”

Bruno whispers in my ear, “Can we go now daddy?”

Another kiss. “Yes, of course.”

Jenny smiles at Bruno and me, “Thanks for coming, hearts.” I look down at her in the bed—hearts—and we leave.

“Thanks, Daddy,” whispers Bruno.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

Jenny was discharged later that day and took a 45 minute bus ride home. The social worker never called.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XL6wc1MnZDE

 

 

Jenny Mae and Jerry Wick part 46: Guided by Voices, Part II-The Beatles, The Grifters, and Sparks

Guided by Voices, Part II: The Beatles, The Grifters, and Sparks

The house on Patterson looked good in every season, as it was constructed of bulky, brown, stained, wooden clapboard and had stony, raised gardens. In the winter it looked lonely and almost haunted, while in the summer the peeling brown clapboard was blistered by the sun, but in autumn the house was in it element. With its tarnished grass fading gray and brown and yellowing leaves bulging out of its overstuffed gutters, it could be a grimy wooden effigy or the loss that October seems to bring.

The days and nights shuddered and burped along. Every package we received at Used Kids came bearing gifts of sound, and the mail box on Patterson always seemed to contain some letter requesting music from Columbus. Time was as still as a television station that was always on but never watched. Nobody paid heed to it.

I had fallen hard for the sound of the Grifters, a band from Memphis that annihilated sound and built it back up with blasts of melodic sounds that were at once disquieting and soothing.  I had received their first full-length, So Happy Together, from Scat Records. I listened to it while working at Used Kids one morning, and by the third song I was on the phone with Robert Griffin, seeing if he could get me in contact with them. By the end of the afternoon I had booked them a show at Staches with Moviola and Gaunt.

Onstage, the Grifters were a shuddering, calculated, belching wreckage of sound. With a cloud of distorted guitars straining to stay out of tune and, in a spurt of electric coughing, the audio version of a halfback darting from the pile into open space, they would bend into a melody as breathtaking as a dive into a warm pool of water. They were, in a sense, a counter balance to Guided by Voices. Where GBV would inject a heavy dose of smiling hope into their minute-and-a-half epics, the Grifters were more concerned with the disappointment that tragedy brings, a sorrowful blend of noise and crankiness.

At that first Grifters show at Staches, there was hardly anyone there, only myself and a few patrons who had managed to pick up the band’s record at Used Kids. Jerry Wick was not yet too impressed with the Grifters, but the Ted Hattemer and the other fellows in Moviola were enamored of their sound. The Grifters took a step into the freedom of feedback and built something that was as extraordinary as a stone castle, a noisy blackened musical hook to hang yourself with.

The next morning over coffee in my dining room, I played some Guided by Voices for the Grifters, explaining that I thought they had a lot in common musically. It was apparent that Dave from the Grifters was every bit as much a music fan as Bob Pollard. We spent the morning playing records and talking music.  This listening together was a form of breaking bread, and the bond of kinship was born.

There is really nothing as a stranger asking, “What kind of music do you like?”

I always think that a good response would be, “I really like the idea of Anal Cunt, but I never really liked their sound,” or, “I really like the first Cars record because I got my first blow job to it, but after that they went completely and embarrassingly downhill.” There was a difference in the world I inhabited. It was common knowledge that we all obsessed over sound. The knowledge that the mechanism of sound could be used to transport a person somewhere else was the adhesive that held our community together.

Bob and the rest of Guided by Voices were making monthly visits to Columbus, usually to record with Mike Rep and drink beer with Ron House, Jim Shepard, Jerry and me. Shuffling into the store in the late afternoon, fresh from the hour drive from Dayton, they would arrive just in time for the five o’clock God-given right to a beer. Dan Dow once made the outrageous claim that getting stone drunk at work was not always a good idea. Ron replied, “Well Dan, that’s why we fought the fuckin’ revolution!” There was no argument from us—how could anyone dispute the constitutional right to happy hour? After sharing Rolling Rocks or vases of Budweiser at Larry’s or BW-3, Bob would huddle with Mike in the annex and mix and mash-up the tinny four-track recordings he had made. We talked music and sports mostly, because in Ohio there is really nothing else that matters. The weather is always gray, the economy is grayer, and politics is just a slick slope to traverse over beer..

One afternoon Bob asked me if I was familiar with Odyssey and Oracle, by the Zombies. “Yeah, I love it. It’s kinda like Odessa by the Bee Gees. In fact, it’s my girlfriend’s favorite record.”

“Do you have a copy?”

“Yeah, it’s not on CD yet. In fact, there’s only a crappy best of on CD. I actually think I have a first pressing as well as a Rhino re-issue. You can have the reissue or I’ll trade you something for the original.”  Bob offered to trade his copy of Slay Tracks, the first single by Pavement, which I gladly accepted.  We also talked about new bands we liked, especially the Grifters, whose tarnished, feedback-laden sound had made an impression on Bob.

He wondered aloud, “That’s what I’m trying to do, get that sound, but maybe my songs are too poppy.”

“Oh, you have to see them live. They pull all that noise off in person and it’s like watching a choreographed car wreck.”

Bob excitedly replied, “Lemme know when they play next and I’ll make sure GBV plays with them.”

Guided by Voices were playing in Columbus quite a bit. Dayton hadn’t embraced them  yet and they were not quite polished enough to get shows there, so they would come to Columbus and play with the Slave Apartments, V-3, Belreve, Gaunt, and Jenny. One of the most memorable shows they played around this time was when they opened for  V-3 and the Dutch noise band The Ex.

Roughly a month or so later, Flower Booking called me and asked if I would be willing to book another Grifters show. Although I had already brought them to Columbus several times, losing a pocketful of money on every occasion, I gladly accepted. By now Jerry had become a fan, mostly on the basis of their single “She Blows Blasts of Static”, a song of epic, noisy wreckage that pulled you in and then pummeled you with leathery hooks before offering release, so Gaunt was on the bill. I phoned Bob, who said that because it was on a week night not everyone could get off of work to play the show, but he would come up anyway. During the show, Bob, Jerry, and I were just to the left of the stage. As the Grifters plied their splintered sound in front of thirty or so souls, Bob turned to me and Jerry and yelled, “The three best bands ever: the Beatles, The Grifters, and Sparks!” Jerry and I would repeat this often to one another, nodding our head with laughter at our own inside joke. “The Beatles, the Grifters, and Sparks!” Indeed.

Bob wearing a Used Kids t-shirt on this early video

no Jenny Mae on youtube:

go.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part 45: Gay

Gay.

Steve was interesting; unlike anyone I had never met, especially in Springfield. He was somewhat short, with wispy blond hair that was cut in layered steps, and he was lean but athletic, with veiny forearms and biceps that bulged slightly under his Little Caesar’s pizza shirt. He had a trimmed mustache, which wasn’t odd in 1986, when Magnum P.I. mustaches weren’t yet ironic. The only suspicious thing was that he had multiple gold hoops in both ears. I couldn’t remember if it was a right or left earring that meant a person was gay, as nobody at Northeastern High School would come out of the closet for years. He was funny, hysterically funny in fact; cracking jokes while he plied the dough, rolling his eyes at the serious assistant manager who wanted every pizza pie to contain the exact amount of cheese, sauce, and pepperoni—deviating from the scale meant a loss of revenue! This couldn’t happen if Little Caesar’s were to ever usurp Dominoes. The fact that the pizza tasted like the cardboard it was served in didn’t seem to matter.

Steve had recently left the Navy and was working at the pizza place to get enough money to return to San Diego. It was obvious that he was worldlier than all of Livingstone Avenue in Springfield, Ohio. I awkwardly kneaded the dough, weighed the cheese, and constructed pizza boxes, never ending pallets of pizza boxes. I was shy, so I kept to myself, singing my favorite songs and hiding in my car during my breaks so I could listen to WOSU, finding the strength to make a hundred more pizza boxes with college radio.

He asked me what music I listened to and it turned out that he was familiar with the same bands. He had also seen R.E.M. a few years ago at the Wittenberg Field House and he said he saw Husker Du in San Diego. He asked me to go party with him and his friends after work the next time we worked together.

That night, I told Jenny that there was one island of sanity in the Little Caesar’s Pizza shop, one person who didn’t talk about his truck, niggers, or pussy. There was a sense of loathing when it came to the pizza shop, not just due to the awkward anxiety that presented as laziness, the co-workers with their constant hate filled masculine chattering. Jenny said I should go out with him and his friends the coming Friday. She would be working at the drive-in theater, and I could pick her up afterwards.

Friday rolled around and I went to work, flush with my first paycheck, all $85 of it. I was ready to hit the bars. I looked old enough and had a smudged up I.D.; the drinking age was only nineteen at the time. He asked if I wanted to go out after work and I said, “Sure, but I need to leave at midnight to get my girlfriend.”

His eyebrows rose. “Oh, you have a girlfriend? I would have never guessed.”

That’s odd, I thought, replying with, “Why not?”

He laughed and said, “Oh, I just assumed you were gay like me, that’s all.”

For a moment, the world flipped-flopped. Gay, he thinks I’m gay, and furthermore, he’s gay. Nauseated, every assumption I held true was under attack, Maybe I’m gay and don’t know it, I thought. I made excuses and left early, telling him that I would catch him next week.

What now? If I’m gay, then I can’t be in love with Jenny. Is this why I want to move to Columbus? I had been told that Columbus was a “smorgasbord of homos”. Two years prior my father had tried to convince me that Lucifer walked the earth, and that he would try to tempt me, most likely in the guise of a gay man. I paid no heed to this—even as a fifteen year old I knew the absurdity of it, but it may have watered the seed of homophobia that was the norm for any high schooler in rural Ohio.

I picked Jenny up and we went back to the parsonage, where I confessed my fear to her that maybe, just maybe, I was queer. I couldn’t remember ever being attracted to a man before, though, and I had a stack of Playboy magazine’s next to my bed. That had to mean something. “It’s okay if you’re gay,” she said, stroking my head, “although I don’t think you are.” She put a soft hand on my lap. Afterwards, I couldn’t shake the feeling that maybe I was gay. Steve had no gay behaviors, no lisp. He was built like a running back and he liked the same music as me. And I liked him—he made me laugh, made me feel welcome in the shit-hole fast food pizza place where I worked.

I ran to the toilet, barreling through doors, and crouched on the floor to empty my guts into the toilet bowl. “I want to go to my mom’s,” I said, tears streaming down my cheeks. The world was asunder.

My mother drove me to Galion, where she lived with her boyfriend, and I spent a day there contemplating what being a gay man might be. Everything would be different, my relationships, my family, and the way I socialized, and, most importantly, sex would change.  Where I grew up, kids were fed hate and ignorance about gay people. We weren’t taught that there are many kinds of relationships. Instead, people who were frightened, who wore their racism, homophobia, and sexism as badges of honor, told us the world was black and white.

While I tried to reject this worldview, it could be difficult, especially the homophobia aspect. Bewildered, I didn’t understand that a person could have relationships with gay men without having gay sex. I came to the realization that in order to be truly gay, one must want to have gay sex, which I didn’t.

On the bookcase in the living room of my in-laws house, thousands of miles from the Franklin County Courthouse, there is a small photo of me and my wife standing across the street from the courthouse, a small bouquet of flowers in her hand and an expectant smile on her red, flushed face. I’m standing next to her with a freshly pressed powder-blue shirt with a crooked grin that seems to say, “This time I will get it right.” We married just four years and two days after the end of my previous marriage in the same courthouse where both that marriage and the subsequent divorce took place.

The courthouse is huge in Franklin County, three towering buildings that mete out justice between marble and drop ceilings. They are a trifecta of fear, loathing, and, in some rare cases, joy, with the Justice of the Peace sandwiched between Adult Probation and the Public Defender’s office. Dizzyingly busy at times, they are filled with pleated skirts, blue suits, leather-bound briefcases, and lawyers carrying piles of documents in the hope that the sheer magnitude of paperwork will turn a judge or jury in their favor. By contrast the other inhabitants of the court house, are the poor and economically malnourished, many of the men brandishing neck tattoos, and women pulling along toddlers, at times picking up the child by the arm, the frustration of the day being put into action. Parking is a chore, with few parking meters available. If you’re unfamiliar with how the courthouse works, then understanding how long a marriage or divorce takes is a puzzle.

Today, one of the responsibilities of my job is to appear in court with mentally ill clients, who approach the courthouse with a very real sense of trepidation or fear, not knowing if they will be leaving the courthouse in a bus with corrugated fencing over the windows via the basement entrance. The fear I once had of the courthouse is a far cry from the fear of my clients.

 

Me and Robin, my soon-to-be-ex wife drove to the courthouse in the same car, a white Metro that I had bought with money borrowed from Dan Dow (a sum that he would largely forgive a few years later). I was going to give the car to her as part of the divorce—that and temporary custody of Istvan, my beagle-collie mix who liked to eat records and shit on the floor. I would have given anything to rid myself of the pangs of guilt caused by yet another failed relationship.

 

We drove to the courthouse together to untie the knot that we had just months prior banded together, hoping that this dreadful day would never come. We were nervous and somehow on this particular morning this energy somehow brought us together when we were publically tearing ourselves apart. I had arranged for our mutual acquaintance Mark Fisher to handle the dissolution. Mark is known as the “rock and roll lawyer” in Columbus circles. He helped organize the annual Community Festival, a somewhat self-congratulatory endeavor of the bohemian, left-minded wing of Franklin County that celebrates local music, liberal ideals, and lots of alcohol. I have never cared for the festival, although it tends to be the one gathering that brings the Columbus music and arts scenes together for one mud-filled and alcohol-soaked weekend a year.  Mark did the dissolution for the low sum of $500, and, since we owned very little, it was easy. We appeared in the courtroom, signed some paperwork, and our marriage was dissolved.

An emptiness came with our failure, a type of vacancy that blended the present moment with the past, muddled together to wipe out any sense of body or emotion. For a moment, when the realization hit, I couldn’t feel the outside, as if I were a flag, shifting with the wind, the skin like bare thread bouncing but not feeling anything expect the lack of feeling. Stepping to the curb, Robin and I looked at one another, nervous smiles across our faces. We had a permanent public scar on our history; the brunt of our deteriorated relationship would be in the newspaper tomorrow. We looked at one another, trying to figure out the next step. On the car ride back to her apartment we stopped for a drink, and then another drink, before finally succumbing to one another. We got a twelve-pack and drove to her house, with nervous energy bouncing off of one another like invisible emotional darts. Did we feel sadness, anger, relief, or shame?

Heading to her room, we undressed to engage in the one activity that lifted all oppressive emotions for at least a moment. Afterwards, she laid her head on my chest. Feeling as if I were standing too close to a campfire, my eyebrows singeing, I bolted upright. “I gotta go, now,” I stammered.

Scowling, she replied, “That’s just like you, you are such a fucking asshole. God, I hate your fucking guts. You’ve RUINED my fucking life!” I listened to her screaming while I wrestled a pair of jeans on in the other room. My little dog Istvan stared up at me, wondering where I was going.

Lurching home, I picked up a 12-pack of Milwaukee’s Best Light and, with drama in every step, plodded up Ted Hattemer’s wooden porch steps. The dazzling sun was in stark contrast to the grayness that filled me. Plopping down in front of the stereo, I listened to “Dear You” by Jawbreaker, a favorite of both me and Jerry Wick. And looked back at the drama I had set up for myself as if it was something straight out of a John Hughes movie. In reality, everything about me that week was a wreck. That night, after a quick drunken nap, I decided to go out. I went to Larry’s and quickly started a conversation with a dark-haired woman who had tattoos stretching up one arm and down the other. A few hours later I found myself in her bed. After sloppy and guilt ridden sex, I laid on my back, trying to see if the ceiling in her room really had a tapestry pinned to it. I wanted an inner shower.

The next day, sauntering in to work with a large black Buckeye Donuts coffee to purge my sweaty hangover, my colleagues were kind enough not to mention the day before. The drinking started early again that day, as it would for the majority of the next year. It usually began at five p.m., but sometimes it started earlier, at around three. A quick double shot of vodka and lime juice at Larry’s followed by a six pack of Black Label to get me through the last few hours of Used Kids and I was ready to stumble into the coming night.

That night I went to Staches and ended up at The Blue Danube, where I ran into Jerry and two women drinking at the bar. Jerry cracked to the women that I just gotten a divorce, which somehow impressed them. Either they were amazed that someone would marry a schlep like me or that I had lived long enough to be married and divorced. Nobody in our scene actually married. We eventually ended up downtown, the four of us, dancing at the Garage, better known to wizened souls as the Gay-Rage. Our bodies twisted and we flicked our sweat onto all the gay men hurtling themselves to the heavy techno beats of the time. Feeling lost, I went home with one of the two women. I urgently needed to be held, smelled, and felled. Waking up the next morning, in another strange house, was unnerving. She was gone, and she had left a note on her dinner table that directed me to the still-warm coffee and gave me her phone number and name. Walking home, I was overcome with an even heavier sense of loss than I’d had the day before.

Rinse and repeat. The next night I found myself at Dow’s on High and then at Dick’s Den, two havens for drunken outsiders who were fond of classic country music and jazz. I ran into Eric Davidson’s girlfriend, Heather, and a female bartender from Bernie’s named Jen. Jen and I had been flirting for several years, trading gazes across the bar that implied we both wanted more than drinks. She was short, with solid blonde hair that wasn’t dyed, and she had a quick wit that works well when serving drinks to the cynical crowd. At Dick’s Den, under the influence of a mixture of Maker’s Mark and Pabst Blue Ribbon, she said “Good” when I told her I had gotten divorced three days ago. Later, on groggy, loose legs, I asked her if she wanted to go back to my house to listen to records. This was the indie version of asking a woman if she wanted to have sex. Although on this night, as the effects of the PBR and Maker’s Mark went from pleasing to drudging up more guilt, listening to records was actually what I wanted to do.

The attic of Ted’s house had been reconstructed to handle me post divorce. I had asked Ted if I could move in with him some months earlier, and he had converted the attic into a two room area with a half bath for me. It was lined with records, CDs, books, and a few barely alive plants. The floor was littered with t-shirts and most of the free areas on shelves and the dresser were filled with empty beer bottles stuffed with cigarette butts.

I had my grandmother and grandfather’s huge bed, which was nearly an acre across in order to hold my grandmother’s enormous girth and the dying body of my grandfather. The bed filled the room, with sheets twisted across it as if they had been lifted by a tornado and deposited at the other end. The dog hair was thick on both the bed and the carpet beside the bed, but I kept it as clean as I could. I had slept in enough strangers’ beds to be aware of how it feels to lay back naked on a filthy mattress. I explained all of this to Jen in a drunken, laughing dialect that only alcohol can create. “It’s clean,” I said as I pointed to the bed, “except for all that dog hair. I mean, the dogs are also clean. I bathe them, you know? Those beer bottles are new. Smell them. They don’t smell like Bernie’s or anything. I drank them in the past few days—same with the clothes. I mean, I didn’t drink the clothes…I wore them, but just the past few days…I’m not dirty.” At this point, I started to move my hips ever so slightly to the rapturous sounds of Les Thugs. She smiled. “I mean,” I said, casting a mischievous smile her way, “I’m dirty but not like dirt dirty.” I thought that this sounded wiser than “I’m horny.” I leaned in to her and we kissed, but suddenly I wasn’t feeling so dirty any longer, just sad.

I stopped kissing Jen and sat on the edge of the bed until “I Love You So” faded into the next song, which wasn’t nearly as epic. Putting on the first Bee Gees’ record, I left to take a piss. When I came back, talking to myself about the greatness of the Bee Gees, there she stood, completely naked but for her earrings. Shit, I thought, I can’t do this—three nights in a row with different women. I had plenty of hang-ups about sex, even without considering the divorce I had gotten a few days ago. I hugged her and then perched myself back on the corner of the bed. She kissed my neck, placing a hand on my chest. I said, “I can’t do this now.”

“Why? You know we didn’t come to your house to listen to records.”

I looked down, not knowing what to say; even though this scene was something out of a fifteen year old’s fantasy. “Well, I just got my divorce,” I stumbled over words as she pulled my shirt up. I was listless both inside and out.

“Yeah….” She purred. I waited a few moments, taking some breaths, thinking as the moments ticked by. What do I say? I thought, as my mood was quickly changing. “Ummm, I got my divorce because I’m gay,” I stammered.

She waited, thinking, and then turned my head. Before kissing me fully on the lips she said, “you ARE NOT gay.” And we completed the task.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part 44: Meeting-1986

Meeting. 1985.

 

The hallway was cluttered with back-packs, books with torn homemade paper-bag covers littered with hearts and the numerals of a favorite football player, who would try in desperation to capture the heart of the book owner on a chilly autumn evening, frayed twigs of swirled notebook paper scattered over the floor, and the invisible angst of teenage years filled the hall with the nervous oppression of puberty, giddy chatter and nervous glances before the bell rang. I slunk, as I always did, to my locker, carrying a paperback and one notebook, I had no use for the textbooks that the teachers were obliged to teach from. Some of these were already old, dating to the late sixties, oblivious to the history that had redrawn the world but in some instances, I felt that nothing had changed here in decades. In front of my locker, I stood staring at the calendar where I marked my potential escape.  A handmade, numeric docket that empowered me to make it through another day; there was only six months left of high school.

I was known as the wise-ass, the one who would say and challenge everything, I read voluminous amounts, demolishing books and magazines at a quick pace as if the knowledge I poured into my head would undermine the apathetic distaste of what I perceived from my instructors. I doubted them and their skinny world view, as my family had seen the world outside of the huddled burg of South Vienna and Catawba, Ohio. The memories of childhood tales spoken from my grandmother, the wall of degrees on my grandfather’s office and the importance of education fortified me. Looking back, from the vantage of twenty-five years, I was too harsh on my surroundings, surely as harsh to it as I felt it was to me. But the anger I felt towards the school still smolders at times, as several guidance counselors and teachers tried in vain to steer both my brother and I away from college, we were not the chosen ones in the small insular world of Northeastern High School. In the mid-eighties, before cable had cracked the shell of information wide open, before the internet allowed people to live as if they were part of some science fiction novel I read, nobody had heard of the term “global village.”

The locker was crammed with disjointed books, a frazzled green army jacket, with strands of thread parsing out from the collar, and an old sandwich that I dared not touch at the bottom, a continuous active biology experiment. The bell had just rang, I didn’t mind being late, it was a talent that I had been fortifying for years, building it class by class, day by day only to manifest itself as an adult fear that I would be late to work. Everyday.  She ran next to me, a bundle of wild energy, wearing a black and white stripped pant-suit that showed off her seventeen year old breasts quite well. I tried not to notice her, although our lockers were next to each other. It was the last day of school before Christmas break, and she had to be a National Honor Society function five minutes ago. She was carrying a box of chocolates and as she grappled with her locker, it spilled to the floor. Small chunks of circular and square confections rolling on this god-awful floor, “Shit! now I am late!” she stammered. I shelved the paperback at the top of the locker, and gently bent down and helped her pick them up. In that moment, I suppose was when the flickering of first love bellowed up from the spilled contents of a chocolate box. “She must have a boyfriend” I thought, but I said, “Here put the spilled ones on this side of the box and give that part to your friends, they’ll never know.”  “Good idea, a bit of dirt never hurt anyone.” As we crouched down placing them into the box, with bit of flaky, drug-store bought candy, we managed to laugh and look at one another. She stopped my being for a moment when she gushed, “You have to most beautiful eyes I have ever seen.” “er, ahh, thank you. I’m late for Mr. Wasserman’s class.” “Just tell him that you were helping Jenny Mae, he loves me.” It worked; he didn’t count me tardy that day as he usually did, as I was an outspoken thorn in his side. Everybody loved Jenny Mae.

Jerry Wick and Jenny Mae part 43: Waiting.

Waiting.
The moments of contemplation were rare; grabbing them when the opportunity would present itself in the helter-skelter of the my twenties, the din of the previous evening still fresh as the waning bits of alcohol was absorbed within my body. This was a challenge and for one who had only learned of reflection only through the impressions of childhood the effort was great but clumsy at best. My father, who jettisoned from modern life after divorcing my mother, voyaged to the Benedictine monastery, St. Vincent located in Latrobe, Pennsylvania-home of Rolling Rock beer and summer camp for the Pittsburgh Steelers. He had expressed to me several times in my worrisome childhood, as I was fraught with anxiety and trepidation, that his two years there were the happiest times in his life. Fatherhood obligations, led him away from the hidden and quiet secrets of the contemplative life and most likely, the stress of contemporary life led to continued mental isolation whose manifestations suggested something far darker.
Living by proxy through books, music and magazines, I envisioned myself as a traveler in a world that was populated by barriers that clouded the simple view. Jenny would recoil when I slunk deeper into silence, as if the sensitivity that brought her closer to me, would bend so far under the weight of mental oppression that there was no other choice but to retreat into silence. A fondness for classical music was a refuge, especially upon hearing Pergolesi’s “Stabet Mater” when I was nineteen, it was also a happy coincidence that the copy I had purchased was on Hungaroton Records, performed by the Hungarian Radio and Television Chorus. In some way, the soft epic reinforced the mysterious relationship I had silently offered to my father, unbeknownst to him. I retreated to books on Catholicism, “City of God” by Saint Augustine, “The Lives of the Saints” and of course the New Testament. All the while, I ingested biographies both political and musical in nature, fanzines, newspapers, The New York Review of Books and of course, Spin magazine. Concocting an intellectual brew that was filled with pop culture and a sense of both entitlement and utter waste, was an odd way to find simplicity.
Holy Name church, sat just a few doors down from two of my houses, one on Adams street, I shared with the two feminists who helped nurse me back to mental health through humor, long talks and the an openness I had only encountered a few times. The second home was on Patterson, just two buildings away from the large church. I started attending mass twice a week, shuffling to 5:30 mass on Wed. afternoons after working the afternoon shift at Used Kids. For a campus church, Holy Name was not the norm, there were no long-haired glad-handers here, parts of the mass consisted of Latin, there were no “rock-and-roll” styled guitar songs, proclaiming the happiness of Christ. Much more sober than anything around, the hymns were sung a-capella and tended to be slow, as if the way to salvation consisted of miniscule movements of breath rather than the frantic pace of the ringing strings of caustic guitars. The congregation was older, and at times barely existed, just a few slow moving gray-hairs and myself, huddled alone in the back pew as I resisted the urge to leave and grab a drink to wash away the sins of anxiety and the persecution of unknowing. Tall columns lined the chapel, built of marble and thick chunks of stone; this was a building for the stern who quietly bellowed for safety.
Used Kids opened at ten am, and in the late eighties, early nineties, there was nary a person who would come in before eleven, perhaps the UPS driver delivering a box of untold secrets of longing and sexual urges, driven into the grooves of vinyl with names such as Beat Happening, the Vaselines, Bette Serveert and Yo La Tengo. But this was all; the person who opened the shop had the place to himself until eleven. This was a time for meditation, record store style, which meant an hour of coffee, an open front door and the warm grooves of whatever record we used to commune with our inner thoughts. The playlist at this hour, for myself consisted of either classical (Dvorak, or the choral music of Shultz or Byrd), Townes Van Zandt (usually “Flyin’ Shoes), Van Morrison (“Into the Music”, “Enlightenment” and “Avalon Sunset”), Phil Ochs and Gram Parsons. The search was ever-present. Sipping the bitter coffee of Buckeye Donuts, and slowly pricing out records in silence was our way of carrying water, chopping wood and washing dishes.
Most people, who knew me, were aware of the tendency that I had towards some sort of spiritual life, although it was odd that I gravitated towards the orthodoxy of Catholicism. Jerry was always respectful of my choice, and although we never really spoke of spiritual matters he was conscious enough to know my mass schedule, at times volunteering to meet me later, after mass. Jenny was at times dismissive of the yearning I had for quiet, as if the barrage of noise in her head could not comprehend, and was, in fact threatened by the fact that I had an itch that only the quiet could scratch. With the exception of Dan Dow, who was utterly dismissive of my proclivities towards the Catholic church, it was as if he wanted to punish me for some idea of a God that had been foisted upon him, all of my friends were extremely considerate of my pursuit of something that had no name or shape. It should be noted that Dan, was appreciative on the importance of early morning record listening, a feeling of calm brought out by a needle and electricity, he seemed to know that the way to peace is found at times through the application and communion of caffeine and brit-pop.
Next to the vast stone entrance of the church was a small walkway that led through a wrought-iron fence, around a statue of Christ, arms extended outwards, welcoming the repentant sinner and then into a small side chapel with five rows of pews. There, underneath the shiny polished wooden beams, I would sit in silence waiting for some sort of answer. I sat here when the hangovers were too bold and the alcohol dripped out of my pores as if I were a pungent flower, emanating the sweetest yet sickliest odor known. Listening through the small door that led into the main chapel, hoping that I could catch redemption through osmosis although, I only wanted to hear nothing. Not the drumming of my thoughts, not the fear of being alone or worse yet, the fear of acceptance. I would cobble together a prayer, feeling the awkwardness of solitary unskilled appeal. Leaving, under the guise of sheepishness and clumsy guilt, I would slink away as if I were a gawky lover who had left his partner unfulfilled. “Nothing is good enough” I would think about myself.
Today, my daughter asked me about God, and who God was and how do people believe in God. Trying to explain this to a five year old is more difficult than one would think, I said that I didn’t know and I gave up trying to find out long ago. When I gave up the booze, I decided that I would no longer allow myself to be stomped into submission by an idea that there was a mystery that could only be found through prayer. I explained to her that I thought, we should try to be helpful to those who are suffering, easing the lives of others and that in this way we will find our own answers. She asked what other people believed, carefully plucking the words from a stream of muddy thoughts, deliberating choosing the words that she could only understand. “Try to just be a good person.” I believe now, that God is an action and that is all.