Jerry Wick-20 years later

Twenty years ago today I walked into Used Kids Records and Ron House told me that Jerry Wick had been killed by a hit and run driver earlier that morning while riding his bicycle home after a night hanging around the places that felt like family to him: Used Kids, Larry’s Bar, Bernie’s and even BW-3 where the confines of warmth, music, alcohol and friendly faces made the world outside a bit safer, softer and easier—it’s ironic that the world outside, literally killed him as he rode home with a pizza on his bike handles.  Jerry was, for a period in the nineties my best friend and was family to me and for many of those whom I regarded family during that period of my life, the other staff members at Used Kids, the members of the New Bomb Turks and a few others from our insular scene—we were family and Jerry was the prodigal son who would at one moment make a comment to have us all erupt with laughter and the next somehow insult all of us with a single utterance.

                When I think of Jerry I think of his toothy grin and his laughter that would cause his shoulders to chug up and down as if they were the wheels on a locomotive, and his energy was like a train, even down to spitting black smoke into the air. We were drawn to each other by our love of music, by the one thing that never turned on us as we staggered out of broken and at times abusive childhoods into our early twenties, knees wobbly from our adolescence years but fortified by vinyl records, alcohol, and a charm we didn’t even realize we had. We were broken but confident that no matter what, we knew what we didn’t want and that was enough. We also had a built in soundtrack which was the music we created and took part in, our lives were a mix-tape to ourselves with our evenings filled with bands we would tape and plaster ourselves to in the form of the flyers we hung around High Street to have people join in our party, our lives: Guided by Voices, Sub-Pop bands, K records, Ass Ponys, Karl Hendricks, Superchunk, the bands were endless. Anyway, this was our life and it was safe, it felt safe even though we walked on the invisible line of life precariously, we had friends die of overdoses, car accidents and by suicide which haunted us both.

                Jerry pulled me from the rubble of a failed suicide attempt, something that was an exercise in both courage and fear—mostly fear but that has been something that I have had to accept in my life, like buying an old house with a cracked foundation. That’s me, I have learned to tend to it. Jerry nursed me back to health, mostly with laughter some music and even ambition, it was his idea to make Anyway records a viable thing and although it was something that drove a wedge between us after a few years it provided hope and even the simple thing of having a plan for anything even if it is as minor of putting out a seven inch record by a punk rock band that played the smelly cramped stages of Stache’s and Bernie’s. It was something. And something we clutched onto. My partner is a poet, she is nine years younger than me and we have realized that we had been at Larry’s at the same time, her stepping into her twenties, and me stumbling into my thirties. Jerry and I would dread going to Larry’s on Monday nights-poetry nights and we would grumble to each other as we headed over to BW-3 or Bernie’s until 10 when the poetry would end. We were too scared of the honesty I suppose while Jerry was comfortable hiding his words behind his guitar the bravery of reading in front of people was something we could not do. In the early 90’s Gilmore Tamney asked me to read some of my writing at Monkey’s Retreat, my hands shook so violently, and I clutched the beer I brought to the reading—I can still remember it. I did not read again for years and the last time I did, with my children in the crowd of an audience of poets and writers, I wept as I read with only a glass of water for assistance. Braver now than I was then.

                Jerry and I soon exhausted each other after a few years, he grew annoyed (and perhaps jealous) of my wanting to have a more traditional relationship—I was involved with my (now ex) wife and was trying to grow up—to limit my drinking which I was failing at. When he died in 2001, we were hanging out more, his band-Gaunt, had mostly broken up but he was working on his solo music and as a chef. He had newer dreams he was starting to form, he had bought a house, and although the dreams we had bought into in our twenties did not come out the other end of the decade as we had hoped, there was some semblance that something else could be possible. I would not call it hope at this point, perhaps it was more a rickety awareness that things could be ok even if they were different. We were now in our thirties, old in our punk rock world view but quite young from my vantage point of a fifty-two-year-old.

His final day was spent doing what he loved, he hung out at Used Kids most of the afternoon, drinking and listening to records with me and Mike Rep, we had a beer at Larry’s and I walked home to my more domesticated life and he was later seen at Bernie’s and Larry’s before picking up a pizza and taking the last ride home.

                His death was a turning point for me, it shook me deeply then as it does now—Jerry dying made me look more honestly at my own life, my own struggles and what I needed to do. In 2001 and more importantly 2002, I did not know what I wanted but I was certain what I didn’t want and that was to continue drinking and hurting not only those whom I loved the most but also myself. I was tired of hurting. Jerry was a critical man, one who had opinions about things he did know anything about but of things that hurt him—love, women, family, institutions—of course most of us have these same opinions about the very things Jerry did, things we know extraordinarily little about at that young age. Although pain and love seemed to brighter than, sharper and stinging, I realize now—twenty years later that they arrive in different packages and colors, some slide in softly, a hand clutching mine, the roll of my lover’s feet against my toes on the couch, a nuzzle, my son’s soft curly hair bobbing up and down as he laughs and my daughter asking me if she can make me food. I used to think of beginnings and endings which I no longer believe in, things just change, morphing into something else—shape shifting over time like shadows across the floorboards, almost unnoticed-I do not judge the shadows and I am trying not to judge anything anymore—things just move into something else. Jerry died and his life ended, I do not know about what came next for him, and there isn’t a day that doesn’t go by where he does not cross my mind—my own big life changes started with Jerry dying. Although Jerry has not been physically with me as I have gone through my life since that day, a long marriage and divorce, two children, falling in love again, three college degrees, writing, music, lots of pizza…sobriety, his memory has been with me every step of the way. A constant encouragement.

COVID Clouds.

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

 

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

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

 

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

I love my new job as well.

 

 

 

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Walk.

My son calls me at eleven p.m., perhaps I should be concerned that my eleven-year-old is calling me while I am in bed and why isn’t he in bed? “Hi daddy, what are you doing?” he asks, oblivious to the time. “Well Donks, I’m in bed—it’s late why aren’t you bed?” “I am” he replies cheerfully, “I’m working on my game, I’m designing a skate park. I’ll show you tomorrow.” He plays a game that allows him to design games within the game, I can’t complain, he’s not shooting things or invading kingdoms, he’s actually making a game and using different skills but still, I realize I don’t understand it all. “I’m looking forward to it, I need to try to sleep buddy, maybe go to bed?” “O.K. daddy, I just wanted to say good night.” He hangs up, I do not know how much longer he will call me daddy. When my grandmother died, my uncles both held her dead hand, it felt like wax and wept, “I’m so sorry mommy” they bawled, long tears stretching across the years of their lives, dredging up painful and beautiful memories of their lives with her, fleeing war torn Europe, arriving with empty pocket and stomachs in Caracas—the stood at her feet while she toiled. The water from their eyes, tumble out in slow quivers, “I’m sorry mommy.” They were in their sixties when she died, themselves old men. “Good night daddy.”

We walk every night, the four of us, my daughter Saskia, Bruno, myself and our small dog Pearl who pulls her leash like it was a flame chasing her down and we talk. We talk more now than we did two years ago, when at the end of a marriage I had closed and almost folded myself in half, or more appropriately quarters. I didn’t know how much I had isolated, perhaps that is what people do, we learn to never talk and the walls build up inside, the inside soft-made of cotton but the outside is made of brick. We never feel the hardness we exude only the tenderness of ourselves, and wonder why can’t the other see? Anyway, looking back I realize what had happen, but these revelations only come when I want to be aware, like looking for a four-leaf clover except the field is in my head. “Hey dad, make a funny voice,” Bruno is now skating ahead on his longboard, over the past year his feet are glued to a skateboard, he takes the leash of the dog and they scamper off ahead of us, she’s pulling him down the hill, both are alive. Saskia takes my hand, I am hesitant and finally wrap my hand around her soft hand, “Tell me about work” she asks, “I want to know.” I tell her of adult stress, of the politics of being an adult in a work place and how sometimes, things are not always easy but I emphasize that doesn’t mean I don’t love the work I do, how I enjoy helping people and working with a team of people who are committed to improving people’s lives. I explain that COVID has changed a lot of things, people are scared and there are demands from all different sorts of people. When people are scared, they are not always aware of how they respond to others, but she moves on, I have lost her. “Uh-huh. So, how’s grandma?” We just saw her grandmother yesterday I remind her, “Oh, yeah.” She is quiet, she’s trying. We walk in silence. “Dad, can you tell me about why some people can’t understand how they are racist?” She is opinionated, we talk about race and systems and people having beliefs in big ideas just because they think they should. These ideas can be family, nations, religion. Bruno runs up, “Pearl’s rolling in shit! Look at that dumb dog!” he giggles, in the distance the dog is on her back, wriggling near standing water. She will smell like goose shit. “Fucking dog.” I shake my head.

A spinning platter of pressed wax sparks sounds from the other room, always whirring like a heart that cannot be tempered. That is me, with a music box heart that lunges forward, clutching at the future like the sounds from the turntable-frozen in the past, the notes make marks in my mind—etchings of feeling. Outside, the leaves seem to dance to the music in my living room, swirling in circles with all their green partners, reaching high but going only so far. A ballet for the rooftops but only a lucky few notice. I realize that I carry less with me than I used to, although I feel the weight now more than before, as if the emotional scale that is plugged within my being is calibrated to notice the smallest twitches, as if it were made by NASA. Living alone offers an affordability that takes some time to notice, especially riding in the wake of a divorce, sort of like an entire new movie after the credits have rolled. Some details reveal themselves in quiet moments, sitting on my morning couch which coincidentally faces evening couch-I realize that I operate with a veneer during the day, one that protects and keeps out. Invisible and easily hidden behind humor and reservation. It takes time to dial it down, and then I realize that there were years where this was just the way I was.  I operated within my own veneer, keeping closed. A way to keep out and keep in, the soft underbelly of myself kept close, kept inside. Sometimes the hope for the day is to allow just a fraction of a space within me, an invisible cushion of air to let someone else sit in, an invitation. But if I never knew that I had to make room for the doorknob, that meant that the door never really opened correctly—I was pummeled with silence and resentment for years. I breathed in dust and exhaled disappointment.

I read her words; she builds sparsely but every word has intention she creates academies of ideas on the page. I shift in my seat, I look at my coffee cup, the steam rising out of it like it was a chimney of comfort and I feel small. Sometimes my demons have made and make me feel shrunken, a version of my adult self that is a scolded child, someone looking to evolve into something else, something sparkling, wise, an adult. My gray hair laughs at me from the top of my thinning dome. Addiction works in odd ways, conflicting ways that at once appears to empower a person but also in very subtle ways disempowers and eventually isolates until there is extraordinarily little except weariness and hardness. It is silent, hidden in darkness and cloaked in shame that builds out and attacks everyone close, until the only way to communicate is be being aggressive or defensive; there is no longer a way to act natural or to be safely vulnerable. Living alone has allowed for the space to breath more, at least within myself—to process and to sit with my own defensiveness. I walk every day, usually two or three times a day, I watch the trees sway, leaves shimmying to the wind—a most perfect dance partner.  Being alone means confronting oneself on a daily basis, the biggest fear may only be arising from the fact that there is a thought of always being alone, or of course being discovered.

I work with people who wear their lives in the folds around their eyes, in the blackness of their fingernails, in the corn-cob row of teeth and the way in which they may look down when talking, beaten all through life, they are weary and at times, they are hopeless. Their despair and addictions alive on their arms, riddles with marks and scars, and I find that I must respond to their silent ask, to breath in their anger or frustration and breath out hope for them, to blow acceptance into their lives. I do not always succeed but they do not have to know that. One thing I have learned from my own battles with addiction is that it has always been difficult to let myself be that person on the receiving end, to allow myself to be open to say, “this is me, but it isn’t me. I need help.” In the winter of 2001, I was on a self-imposed island on 4^th Street, living temporarily with my friend Tom in the duplex he shared with his bother Dave. They would ask me why I had not already moved to Florida to be with my then-wife, I would not know how to answer so I would joke or leave the house and head to the bar. An instant cure for not answering. Years later after I had successfully quit drinking, I would hide behind other things, mostly a screen and not be present in the lives of those around me. In a very odd way, living alone has given me the opportunity to be more present, more alive in those whom I love the most and of course to discover new love. To hold hands and not feel afraid.

Saskia is fourteen, she will be fifteen before the summer ends and she is witty, a bit goofy and awkward—like I was. But she is confident and believes passionately in human rights, she speaks her mind and doesn’t suffer fools. Jenny Mae once wrote a song called “Gem” and part of the lyrics say, “Gem says that when you are in high school you either have a ton of friends, or you just have one.” And of course, that one friend will most likely last longer that the ton of friends. She asks me what high school was like for me and I tell her a story of when I was fifteen, not as a gesture of wisdom but more of an odd compliment for how she is living her life-making wiser decisions than I ever did at her age or even learned to do until I was more than double her age. “What was your summer like when you were fourteen?” she takes the dog leash from my hand, behind us the moon hangs over the large field where we walk the dog, a canopy of trees rustle their nightly farewells to us. When I was fourteen, I was stuck baking the summer away in the parsonage we lived in, boredom moved at the same rate that the surrounding fields of cornstalks. We didn’t have cable, and we were miles away from town, the only things to do was to walk to the store, pick up the mail and venture back. I read and re-read science fiction and rock & roll books, played my records over and over and yearned to be older. At least two years older, even then I was planning my escape.

I jump ahead a year, to when I was fifteen and spending my summer in Athens, working at Casa Que Pasa, the soon-to-be worker owned restaurant, cleaning chickens and washing dishes. That summer was my coming of age summer, driving in cars, drinking a lot and trying to get laid (which didn’t happen). Of course, I don’t tell Saskia all of this, but I do want her to dream, to let her know that adventures are everywhere even in COVID. Even when you are fourteen. I tell her one story, of skinny dipping and getting caught by the cops.

The summer was coming to a close, I would have to pack up my blue hard-shell suitcase that laid in the middle of my sister’s bedroom since I arrived in early June. Soon I would be back in Catawba, getting ready to start my junior year of high school but transformed from the Michael Moorcock and Beatles listening young man I was that May. Now, I was furnished with armfuls of records: Lou Reed, R.E.M., the Replacements and Garland Jeffreys. These were the sounds that would forever bend my life trajectory towards the underbelly, to the elimination of myths, a life of DIY. That the greatest beauty is found amongst the wrinkles, the broken and laughter-genuine laughter that lifts the despair of reality into something grander. “Hey, meet us uptown in half an hour” Rick Winland was on the phone, it was still early evening, but he had a plan for us. Soon, I was at Dexter’s Sub-Shop playing Space Invaders and drinking a Coke. This was the first time I had ever had any money in my pocket, earing minimum wage while peeling chunks of gelatinized chicken meat from a giant cauldron of cold boiled chicken, but I didn’t care about the small or the chilled chicken thighs as I was allowed to drink Heineken while I pull the slimy chicken meat from the thin bones, and there was a continuous loop of Lou Reed’s “New Sensation” and The Tom Tom Club blaring over the speakers.

Rick bounced in, next to my best friend Eric Zudak, we were all dressed up as teenagers are prone to do. I was wearing a vintage blue and white bowling shirt, with pleated creases in the back framing a large bowling ball superimposed over a palm tree. How this bowling shirt found it’s way to an Athens’s County thrift store is left to the past but it was my go-to shirt, Rick wore a vintage felt hat that he must have cribbed from his grandfather’s and Eric wore as usual and nice short sleeve button-up shirt that showed off his newborn muscles, a result of his older brother John showing him the benefits of 100 push-up’s a day. Rick moved in a bigger way that his slim stature, he had a certain confidence about him, either from him being the son of a dentist, having a keen if not disturbing interest in firearms or just the weird confidence some teen-age boys tend to have, maybe it was all of that. But nevertheless, he would flex his shoulders out when he walked, buttressing his confidence while he told, not explained, the plans for the evening. “O.K., when Bela is done with his video game, we are going to go to the Greenery and see what is going on there, then, if need be I will call John to have him pick us up. My mom is gone to you guys can sleep over at my house. At any rate, I can get John to drive us out there.” John was a kind of sad-sack of a kid who lived in the Plains, a small town just outside of Athens, he drove a small Chevy Citation that the sun had bleached out—and even though he would always complain when Rick ordered him around, “my mom needs the car for work tomorrow” to which Rick would reply, “do you want to wait on your mom or do you want to get laid?” Nobody every got laid.

The Greenery was a bar that like many in the college town allowed high school kids to drink, especially in the summer when the college students were off campus. The town was a ghost town every summer and the bars needed the business and it was a different time as the drinking age had recently been raised from 18 to 19, so all someone needed to be was to look just a little bit older, which we all did and have a fake ID handy. I still have my fake ID from the 80’s, just in case. As we drank our beers, we talked to a few local high school girls, one of them a blonde-haired girl named Janelle was one I had a crush on in middle school. “You guys should come over later, to the pond and go swimming with us” she offered. She lived on a small cul-de-sac, roughly seven miles outside of town. At around ten the girls left, and Janelle came up to Eric and I and asked if we were for sure coming, “We will be at the pond around one, make sure you are there.” She and her friends waved as they left. “I supposed I need to call John and have him pick us up outside of Dexter’s at midnight.” He went to the payphone to arrange the pickup and Eric and I grinned at each other. “Bela, I think she might like you.” I shook my head, “no Eric, I think she likes you.” “Nah, I think her friend Laura does, we made out last year. I am guessing that Laura planted the idea. If only we did not have Rick and John with us, but oh well.” We spent the next two hours drinking and walking up and down Court Street, it was hot out. Southeastern Ohio is especially humid in the summer, we watched the same cars and large pick up trucks making the loop from Court Street, to Stimson, to Congress, to Union and back to Court Street, there was very little to do except get drunk and drive in circles. Something that I would metaphorically do for much of the next fifteen years.

John picked us up and drove us out of town and into the rolling hills of Athens County, the moon grew larger and the landscape darker as the hills looked like blotchy shadows around us, the trees making the hills more ominous as they cast themselves even blacker against the sky. John pulled into the cul-de-sac, “Hey John, why don’t you pull down the road some more and not in the cul-de-sac, there is another drive up the way and we can walk up. We don’t want to be caught in the cul-de-sac in case somebody calls the cops.” Shaking his head, “nah, I don’t want to keep my car unguarded. Someone might fuck with it.” Rick shot back, “John, nobody is going to fuck with your Chevy Citation, it’s a piece of shit.” John mumbled to himself as he drove deeper into the cul-de-sac, “it’s not a piece of shit.” “Hey, let us out here, go park the car and join us.” We quietly exited the car, cut through someone’s yard and walked up to the pond. It was small with a little diving dock in the middle, it was encircled by back yards. As we approached three girls stepped out from the trees and shout-whispered, “Eric, Bela—hey, you made it.” Standing awkwardly, they asked what we wanted to do, I was buzzed from the hours of drinking and having my fifteen-year-old hormones firing away in my brain. “Swim. That’s what I want to do.” “Did you guys bring suits?” one of them asked, already knowing the answer. “errr no,” I looked at Eric who already started undoing his pants. Soon enough most of us were naked and swimming towards the dock, the water a black pool of ink, I swam under water but there was nothing to see, when I stuck my head up to breath I had actually swum away from everybody who were all clamoring on the dock where they hurriedly jumped off so as not to show too much of themselves. On the bank, John sat, legs folded up to his chest as he smoked a cigarette. We swam for a long time and then suddenly a light went on in a house nearest to us and we all dove into the water and scrambled into shore, somebody on the back porch yelled, “I’ve called the cops!” The girls were instantly gone, “go get the car John!” Rick snapped, and he and Eric said they were going to head towards the main road and that we should split up. “Bela you head that way towards town, and we will go the other way, if you see John tell him where we will be.” They ran the opposite way, I had grabbed my clothes, the sun was starting to come up and I ran behind a tall pine tree and slowly put the clothes on over my wet body. The police car inched by and soon I breathed a sigh of relief as it passed me. As the car rolled up the road an old crank of man, dressed in a bathrobe yelled from his front porch, “I don’t know who you are looking for but there’s one of them right there!” He pointed at me, while I murmured “asshole.” Sitting in the back seat of the police cruiser I phoned my sister who told the police she oversaw me that summer and she would be there to pick me up in twenty minutes,

“You’ve got a nice sister otherwise you’d be arrested for trespassing.”

“We were invited to swim, sir.”

“Well, you are still trespassing.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“You better hope your sister gets here soon. Was there anybody else swimming with you?”

“No sir, just me. I was going to walk home afterwards.”

In the meantime, the cops found John as he tried to drive past, he handed them over his license and while he was waiting he looked over at me with a sad-sack face, “What happened to Rick and Eric?”

Cop number one, peered at me from over his sunglasses, “Thought you were alone? Who is Rick and Eric?”

“They were going to me us, I mean me.” I shot John and look, and he nodded slowly, I internally rolled my eyes. My sister pulled up in her tan Chevy Chevette and the cop number one walked up to her car while she got out. Nodding solemnly, she thanked him and followed him to where I was standing. John was not sitting in the back of the cop car. “Bela, I’m so disappointed in you. How could you do this?! I don’t know what mom is going to say when I tell her.” Walking back to the car she grinned at me, and when she shut the door she giggled. “Oh my god, this is so cool where you actually skinny dipping?!” I sheepishly answered, “yeah, it was pretty wild. Are you going to tell mom?” The last thing I wanted to do was to go back to Catawba, Ohio for the rest of the summer. A summer that would have been spent daydreaming about Athens, girls, getting drunk and hanging out, as well as literally watching the corn grow. “No, I’m not going to tell mom. I wish I had something so cool when I was fifteen.”

That entire summer was electrifying in so many ways, it was partially due to my age of fifteen, becoming an adult in slow motion, all the neurotransmitters firing off because of hormones, all the new experiences marking deep paths in my brain: sex, music and alcohol, all of which would control much of my life over the next seventeen years and beyond. Some of which would always been subconsciously compared to that summer in Athens. It would take another few year for me to lose my virginity, it was certainly a few years long exercise in summerhood, as all my summers would be spent in Athens until I graduated high school.

My drinking started that summer, a harmless exercise in fear, bravery, excitement and escape—it would not turn into a problem for many years, the benefits far outweighing the consequences which were hardly mentionable—a few hangovers was all I would encounter until my early twenties. It was so much easier to drink, the drinking age changed from 18 to 19 during my high school years and it changed to 21 the summer after I graduated, I skated by. That summer in Athens was filled with mostly Pabst Blue Ribbon, Old Milwaukee and bottle of Jack Daniels which we would mix with grape soda or Coke, the grape pop was disgusting but we needed something sweet to wash it down. Sometimes my sister would buy a bottle of Jack for us but mostly she disapproved of the heavy stuff, we shied away from marijuana—I had tried it during my sophomore year and didn’t like it at all, in fact I never would enjoy it. Rick was full of destructive ideas, some of which involved truly asshole things such as driving around egging pedestrians, shooting guns and breaking into cars. The guilt I had over the few times we did this provided enough of a lesson that I would never engage in this type of behavior again, in fact these are things I usually did once and opted out afterwards. The drinking and trying to talk to girls were enough to keep me occupied for the rest of my teenage summers.

We would drink out in the country, drive deep into the woods, park the car, throw rocks into the river and balance our drunken selves on railroad tracks before heading into town to go to the Greenery or the Nickelodeon, and then head back to Rick’s or Eric’s where we would sleep until noon and get up and do it all over again. When I got back to Catawba at the end of that summer I would be well versed into what I could handle alcohol-wise, I very rarely drank to the point of getting sick and had learned to pace myself up until I discovered shots at the age of nineteen on the bars of the Ohio State campus, that was another years long lesson. From what I can see is that my children have very little interest in drinking, with several social work degrees and counseling licenses, I believe I am somewhat an expert on detecting these things but I also know how well I hid it when I was in high school. But my ex-wife and I don’t hide from our past and my children understand the work I do, it is not uncommon for them to ask me about the people I work with, how some die of drug overdoses, their lonely corpses to be found by myself or my colleagues. These are things I speak openly about, there is no benefit in hiding the realities of addiction and what it does to people, at times they ask me about my drinking and depression for which I answer honestly and openly. “Do you ever miss drinking” Saskia asks me, “No, not really. I might miss the taste but that’s about it” I answer and realize that sometimes when kissing my partner, I might kiss a little bit deeper and longer after she has had a few drinks, my tongue tasting danger but not living it.  A little inner wink to myself.

When I was fifteen, in 1983 (I turned 16 during the summer of 1984) my mother turned forty and my father was forty-two although he was very much out of my life by that time. She had turned 15 in 1958 a decade that started out in black and white and ended in black and white, the bright colors of the 1960’s would not hit until she was already an adult, as such her past seemed to be eons before my own coming of age, the world was under the cold oppression of Ronald Reagan but we still had MTV, punk rock and teenage films such as Porky’s, Sixteen Candles and the late night soft-core movies of Cinemax—if you were lucky enough to have cable television. My brother and I listened to a lot of the music of the sixties, the Beatles, the Stones, Doors and Kinks were all heavily played on our turntables and the Stones were still making viable music to our ears (“Emotional Rescue, “Tattoo You” and “Undercover” were all heavily played in our living room.) But Elvis Presley and the doo-wop sounds my mother listened to in high school were literally from another era-another century, hell another world entirely. Today my daughter plays music from the 60’s to the present, most of it as interchangeable as tee-shirts. Looking backwards while trying to balance my feet in the present, not always and easy feat (feet?) it’s hard to believe that punk rock was barely seven years old or so—but the movement that the music made in my life at that age was as powerful as my first orgasm.

I was divorced nearly a year ago, although every time I write or say that we are now divorced I feel the need to put a tag on it, an asterisk which is, “but we remain friends.” As if those four words can describe spending nearly half your life with someone only to realize that what ever the relationship was at the end was not what it was at the beginning. The buzzy-high of early love and lust was burnished away over the years, through arguments, silence and quiet resentments, although the relationship was bruised and battered the fact remains that we created two incredible people who will carry on whatever we supplied them—our DNA, the lessons we teach them and of course, the memories we create and pass on to them. We are lucky, because we still love one another and we know we tried to keep the marriage together, partly out of love, partly out of fear of being alone, partly out of the sake of our children, all of which seem to be better off and more functional than living in the same house and sleeping in the same bed. Every so often I have to return to the house we shared, the house that our children will always associate as the home they grew up in, my small temporary two-bedroom apartment notwithstanding, and at first I felt trepidation in returning. Seeing the hallway where our daughter took her first steps, tongue firmly stuck outside her lips in effort as her mother held her shoulders, encouraging her to move forward. The lines drawn on our son’s bedroom, marking the children’s growth in lead, a quarter inch this year and a full two inches that year, but oddly I never feel like a ghost floating over the house’s floor but more of a welcomed visitor. My home is up the road, off High Street with my records, my books and new memories I make with the kids and the people I spend my time with. New and hesitant love that finds me perplexed and happy at fifty-two, love that has me feeling secretive as if I don’t want the world to know yet, a different perspective than what I had at seventeen-when I wanted to scream to the world, a bit more quiet but also as intense.  Slow burns.

 

Jenny Mae. April 9th. 2020.

“Don’t come to the fair, you will only get hurt, I don’t want you there. It’s my time and I don’t need you to bring me down,” she said this over the phone, we were ready to go off to college soon and the Clark County Fair was the biggest event of the summer for most of the kids who went to Northeastern High School. My brother and I had to go every year, to work at the Catawba Methodist Church Sausage House, or something like that. Bob, our minister/stepfather, would tell us of our responsibility to the church. We would go, ditch off somewhere, looking for the other kids who had beer and some weed to smoke in the campers that lined the back of the barns filled with fancy chickens, hogs, lambs and cattle. I would dart around the mid-way, the summer drawing out all the moisture I had, I’d be covered in sweat, and the flies would fawn over my limbs. After a few hours I was ready to leave. The fair held very little for me. This was different though; we were recent high school graduates and ready to go off to Columbus. She was my girlfriend. My sweetheart. “Jenny, c’mon. Why wouldn’t you want me to go?” I was annoyed and pleading. Distrust hung over the line. “Because you won’t like anybody there, Mark Markley, Brian Stoops, you’ll just get drunk and be annoyed. Its’s a tradition, we girls get a camper and play quarters. I don’t want you there. Period.”  Later she would come around, giggling, and pulling me close in my bedroom, a photo of Lou Reed torn from Rolling Stone stuck besides my bed, “you shouldn’t worry about those guys, I’m just teasing them,” she climbed on top of me pulling off her shirt. She liked to flex her love until it finally cut me down. This would be a lifelong pattern.

I couldn’t wait to move out of the house, I felt smothered, a fear growing in me that the longer I had to stay, the less chances I had to leave. The rituals of high school did nothing for me, they were something that happened to the other kids-I watched from a distance, books and records fortifying me, but Jenny pulled me into that world. The world of institutionalized rituals, prom, Friday night football games, hog roasts, pep rallies, the American Flag strung up on porches every morning, the fair, all of it fell at my feet and I tried in my adolescent way to step over it. But Jenny had other ideas and if I was her boyfriend, I had to take part, but only at a distance, her choosing.  Which left me at home, feeling humiliated and filled with anxiety.

I wanted to collect the smiles she offered me, put them in my back pocket for later when the depression or sadness rose around me. She was easy to laugh, maybe the easiest I have ever known but underneath that laughter was a razor that would cut the flowers that seemed to pop up behind her. There was a restlessness that rose and washed away everything before and after her, and for myself it only increased some of the doubt that was already present from the beginning, before I could name it. Happiness was temporary, but the mundane lined with murky darkness was always present. I went through my life looking for the smiles, the raised eyebrows and laughter of lovers, like a child in the lawn doing cartwheels, “lookie mom, mom…look!” It was a way to live, hopscotching from one smile, one beam from a beautiful face to another, with one hand on the door. Temporary was the norm, change was not. There is a difference of course, change involves introspection, motivation, encouragement. From Jenny, who resisted change as if she would choke on it, wrestling it with teeth bared, her viciousness at her peek, she would rather destroy everything around her to stay the same. Over the years she would eye me skeptically and with a sense of judgement, “you think your life is better than mine” she spat at me one afternoon, her yellowed hands and red lipstick smudged from the can of beer she held in a brown bag that wasn’t fooling anyone. “No, I don’t” I sighed, “I just want to help you.” She would scowl, “fuck you” followed by an apology, “I’m sorry, you have a nice life, a beautiful wife and kids…I’m a fucking mess and I’ll never change.” Gazing over my shoulder, High Street just a parking lot away, “why don’t you go on home?” I asked. She had made her way to campus to watch the Ohio State Marching Band warm up before the football game, and bounced around the bars while the game went on and now, nearing seven pm, the early fall sun sinking away, a slow pull of the curtain, she was wasted miles from her tiny apartment. “I don’t want to….why don’t you go home to your fucking perfect life?” she blurted out followed by another apology.

There was of course, nothing perfect about the life I lived, underneath it all was doubt, anxiety, fear and of course there was happiness, and love. A large mixture of what-the-fuck, thrown in but in some ways she was correct, the life I had lived just six years prior was one that was on the verge of ending, one thought decision of not wanting a Motel 6 cleaning woman from not discovering my blown-out brains, followed by the loving kindness of a wife who gently coaxed me into treatment, into sobriety, literally one moment at a time. When she said those things it stabbed at me, like a soft poke into my underbelly because I doubted it all. Nothing lasts, this was burned into me from the earliest age, with every moment of pleasure, of calm the drift towards pain was inching closer, not even over the edge but from the sky, it was a cloud that crowded everything out. At least that is what it felt like, but of course everything changes, we move through life like we are on the longest escalator, a moving sidewalk where we can either run forward but it’s never going backward, we are stuck on it. I did learn to breath in the happiness of childbirth, of holding hands, of whispering in the dark. Later, when my marriage was slipping away, broken up by bits of mis-communication, hiding and frustration, there below me, around me, I shook in the darkness of a depression that had been fed by secrets and the hiding, oh the hiding and the fear of being alone. It was there in all its’ resplendent murky gloom. There seventeen years from the last Natural Light, that somewhere, half-finished, it was still waiting for me to pick it up, lifting it to my lips and swallowing the last of the bottle, I shimmied out of my clothes, climbed and slowly sunk in the water, it was cold, bracing my body didn’t help, after a few minutes, the rain falling softly, my teeth started chattering, not from fear but because it was cold, early spring. The water didn’t hold me that day, but it calls at times louder than ever. That night, as I felt the muck under my feet, the rain hitting my face, splashing the brown water around me, I felt the string of love, that traveled from twenty miles away, I was pulled out—once again by a woman.

We were in Athens, it was Springfest during the mid-eighties, most likely 1987—we had done an evening and half a day of drinking. Night-Day-Drinking. Chris Biester lived on Mill Street, just a few blocks from the annual free music festival, one I had fond memories of as a boy, my very first concert. Jay Ferguson, he of Spirit and Jo Jo Gunn, hot on the heals of his break-out hit, “Thunder Island” although his new single, “Shake-Down Cruise” has aged about as well as the title would imply, later I saw Commander Cody and other acts, from the age of 10 to 14 I went every year. This time, Jenny had grow her hair long, she had entered a phase where she was dropping acid, listening to the Grateful Dead and wearing long skirts. I had entered my serious-music phase, had curly locks, and had started working at a corporate record store on High Street, I would forgo the weed and acid for Black Label and Natural Light—my tastes were simple. It was mid-afternoon, we had been eyeing a bearded man all day who had been carrying around a bottle of Jack Daniels from the moment we arrived around noon, he was fully clothed at the time and as Jenny nudged me towards Chris’s apartment for an afternoon nap she pointed out the poor fellow. Laid bare in only his ripped jean shorts, zipper undone and soaked with piss, he was laying on the ground the empty bottle near his head while several police officers tried to rouse him. “Guess he can’t handle a whole bottle of Jack” Jenny cracked, as she took my hand. He hobbled to Chris’s, laughing all the way and made our way to his bed room which was down a long hallway off the kitchen. He lived with a bunch of other musicians, he must have been a junior or senior at Ohio University and his room was a mess, piles of clothes on the floor, posters on the wall, empty beer bottles used for ashtrays. In the living room a beer light hung on the wall, a giant Bob Marley poster, several foot long bongs next to dog hair covered couches, the entire house smelled of must, marijuana and foot. Climbing into bed, Jenny grabbed me, “let’s fuck” she cooed and soon we were in one another’s arms. Out of the blue we heard voices down the hall, “where is the bathroom?!” some college girls were heading down the hallway, “Bela, go block the door, I’m fucking naked” Jenny ordered. Flinging myself against the door to protect Jenny’s honor, the door suddenly opened out, and I fell down the hallway through a chorus of “ewww, he’s naked!”, “Oh my God!” and one “he’s kinda cute” as I tumbled through a small pack of drunken college girls. On the other end of the hallway Jenny yelled, “Don’t worry girls, he’s mine and we were just finishing up!”

This was the Jenny I like to remember, the one who during an absurdly boring cookout said, “hey, why don’t you put your dick in a hot dog bun and bring it out on a platter?” Somehow, I thought this was a good idea and she lathered it up with some mustard and yelled, “Bela has some franks right off the grill!” into the living room, we were promptly kicked out and lost that friendship. “Totally worth it” she cackled on the way home. She of course told everybody that story, even my grandmother, “hey grandma, guess what Bela did last week? He put his youknowwhat in a hot-dog bun!” My grandmother, who always got a kick out of hearing bawdy behavior would howl, “Bela, you deeed vat?!! No vay, you did dat?!” “Well grandma, it was Jenny’s idea.” “Noooo, she would not tink of someting like dat, no vay!” “Grandma, I told him not to do it! But, you know if he’s drinking, you can’t tell him anything” she smiled at me while shaking her head. “Wash your hands” instructed my grandmother. We were at Larry’s one night, I was with a new lover and Jenny was with her boyfriend, the booth was crowded, Jenny went to the rest room and came back laughing. “Bela, I thought you should know that some slut put your name up on the dick tree in the women’s rest room but I just crossed it out to spare your new girlfriend from seeing it.” “Hey, is my name on there?!” Jerry howled. “fuck no, you actually have to fuck someone to get your dick on there,” Jenny replied while drawing her drink to her lips. She spared no one in her antics. Jenny would have turned 52 on April 9^th.

 

Jerry Wick & Bela Koe-Krompecher (Jay Brown photo)

Jenny Mae & Jeff Regensburger (jeff was also in Gaunt, photo Jay Brown)

January 10th.

There is quiet devastation that comes with depression, it is insidious and even the word depression brings about a plethora of connotations, most of which can cause others to recoil, roll their inner eyes and sigh. Sometimes the other person will recognize this feeling but at this point of meeting on the subject both may quickly change the subject as two depressives are always going to try to feel better so humor is the most frequent response.  Melancholy is a much more beautiful word, and perhaps is giving more leeway for acceptance.  Two depressives will laugh together more than they will ever cry together. The tears they birth will come from joy not from pain. Those they will hold for when they are alone.

There is a park near where my ex-in-laws live in Tilburg, a medium sized city in the Netherlands. It is situated just a block or so from their house, behind a large apartment building and it has llamas, deer, and horses. There are ducks and swans, who all swim around a pond that extends the length of the park, a few small bridges and a fishing area. They paddle and shake their wings, walk awkwardly around the bank of the pond, dip their heads deep into the green water and slide back in. I could watch them for hours. Every trip we took I would do a daily run, which started with me running out into the country, through a small village, past a farm that raised miniature horses and then into the park where I would circle the pond and maybe stop and stare at the llamas. In the summer the Dutch heat can be overwhelming, and it has gotten hotter over the past twenty years with the temperature rising into the 90s and over 100 degrees the past few summers. These runs would leave me drained and covered in sweat but always revitalized, there is something about the Dutch air and light that is invigorating. There are theories on how this inspired many artists and great thinkers of the Enlightenment. For myself, the runs pulled off layers of sadness that I had not known were there, with periods of my life spent with the silent attachment of sorrow surrounding me although I was one was unaware of it. Drinking, music and the cast of characters I hung around with helped deflect any feelings of bleakness I may have had.

We collect things, comics, records, books are all a part of my culture, insular as it is. Others collect different things, stamp collecting is dying—killed by progress, Longaberger baskets—perhaps too killed by progress in the form of tote bags, Matchbox cars, vintage postcards, trinkets. Every trinket tells a story. Some collect memories, the cobble them together, splay them out in textures, a fabric of the past in the form of stories. I am guilty of this, and my memories have holes like a well-worn tee-shirt. Every missing piece has its untold story. In some ways, there must be a reason to collect the past, to make the present easier—to lessen the impact of now, the present. But in looking back, there are memories that are built in stones constructed of suffering. I see this in my job, when I am talking with someone, trying hard to listen—to be present to their story, a story for many of them they have never shared. They have kept the past at bay, from their earliest days of living, when childhood should have been filled with riding bicycles, forming friendships, they were instead, succumbing to horrendous abuse of (until they tell me) that lay dormant for decades. Some memories are deadly.

I plan memories for the future, simple ones of making someone dinner, of feeling white sand under my toes and my children as adults. These things, in some ways could otherwise be described as hope but I like to feel, although they have not happened yet, they are the seeds of future reality.

My friend Jerry died nineteen years ago this past week, left for dead on the side of the road just a block from my house he would die shortly after arrival at the hospital. Sometimes I think of him, silent on the cold asphalt, unable to move or yell, staring up at the cold January sky, waiting for the sirens to help him. Waiting for help. The moon and fuzziness of the city lights, frozen above him. Was he in pain? His neck was broken so was his pain knowing he was dying; he could not cry out. He was helpless. These are some of the things I think of on January 10^th. The adult me, the father in me, the lover in me wants to go back in time, get up out of my deep sleep and run to him and hold him in my arms. I want to comfort my dying friend Jerry and let him know he is not alone dying on the side of Hudson and Summit streets, that even if he dies, he will be thought of every day by many people, that his cackle and his pointy teeth and the utter ridiculous of him, of Jerry Wick will last for so long after this miserable moment of his slipping life. It seems every January 10^th, I am offset emotionally, and this one was no different. I had, for the most part a terrible day, I was anxious, cranky and it wasn’t until someone sent me a message reminding me of what the day was did, I realize. Trauma changes people on a cellular level, in fact people who suffer from depression and addiction tend to feel the environment around then much more acutely than others, which makes someone explaining depression or even unexplained sadness difficult. Once I realized what the day was, I was able to regroup, and eventually get what I needed.

There are two photos I have in my small apartment, one of Bruno aged three, walking on a broken pier, where the sea reclaimed the audacity of fisherman leaving only wooden poles sticking out of the sand and water. He is naked, a bag of chips in one hand and his other arm outstretched. Bruno Swallowing the Sea. On the same trip, I have a photo of him, naked staring straight into the camera, folding a piece of pizza in his mouth. What Every Man Wants. The other photo is of Saskia, head wrapped in a scarf, staring out into the Dutch countryside, she is beautiful. The Dutch Girl. My memories of the Netherlands, built over years, are perhaps my favorite memories of all. If I could only remember them.

Laughter is the sunshine, although it only peeks out at times, some of us seek the absurd because it is the only way to manage the inner and outer environment around us. And we give, until the feeling of giving is replaced by the nature of us, our brittleness. Constructed by doubt, shhhhhh, we say to ourselves. And we laugh. And we dance.

One Month Later, more or less (not edited, sorrynotsorry)

A Month Later-2017

 

A little over a month later, the leaves are turning, millions every night go from green to red or orange,  some even straight to brown. Instant ghosts, dropping and floating their slow-motion dance to the ground. Autumn weather is an unpredictable guessing game, where one day the sun floats humidity down like moist blanket and the next day the October wind bites bare legs that were fooled into wearing shorts just the day before. On Friday nights, marching bands stand in lines, blowing on cold fingers, cracking jokes to split the awkwardness of teenage sexuality in half, they bleat out pop hits, odes to the gridiron and dream of life after high school. Meanwhile young men slip on shoulder pads, long socks, form fitting pants with laces to make help tie in this perfect American male package and slap each other in locker rooms, waiting to smack another kid across the grass as bright lights illuminate the field. In kitchens, onions are diced carefully, to be added to simmering pots of chili. Young women take to stores of all types, Macy’s, boutiques, thrift stores, buying sweaters, scarves, leggings all for the coming months. We all prepare our nesting in certain ways.

Jenny used to decorate the apartment with whatever season or holiday it was, at Halloween she would tack up pictures of jack-o-lanterns, sinister witches and tape up the crinkly fallen leaves. It was not uncommon to come home in the early evening and be welcomed with a spinning Halloween record on the stereo blaring the spooky sounds of Halloween.

Insomnia has settled in my bed, a thin invisible itch that pesters while trying to drift off to sleep, and when slumber finally arrives, the itch comes back I am shaken awake only to face the dread of not being able to sleep. In some ways, due to the long-term nature of Jenny’s death, the grief process has happened by degrees over the years. As her alcoholism and mental illness carved out small parts of me with every crisis or every worry stacked upon another as if they were made of a million tongue depressors stacked on top of one another over a twenty-year period. Her life spread out over the years like a sinkhole, swallowing everybody who ever loved her, and if the hole could talk it would have been screaming with every inch it widened. She had become invisible in her own life, an apparition at the end where those of us who could still muster the energy to care for her, would huddle together outside of hospital rooms or over the phone and repeat the same script we had honed for years. “If only she got away from _____(insert any man she was currently living with), she could quit drinking”, “if only she’d quit drinking, then she could be herself again”, “if she could just stay in the nursing home, she could walk again” or “I can’t understand why she drinks like she does if she knows she’s going to die.” Although she had always drank, the only sober times she experienced was when she was in the hospital, jail or nursing homes—the reality of her mind was too much to handle without numbing it. Towards the end, these conversations came with the resignation someone feels after their football team went down by four touchdowns with seven minutes left, it was all over but the time ticking off the clock.

Numbness isn’t a feeling but a state, as is the resignation of being helpless as an event happens, no matter how long the event may last, whether it is the eventual separation of California from the west coast as the San Andres Fault finally, cracks, shivers and splits in two, or as quick as a glass of milk being spilt. Age tends to temper the feeling of invincibility, logic reminds a person of the interconnects of everything comes the realization that despite this truth it is also truer that one has very little control over anything, including thoughts, emotions, and triggers that are made bolder, scarier and taller by addiction. It is as if anxiety were a giant looming over a city, swooping in and smacking cars and punching holes in the asphalt of the mind.

Some are born more sensitive than others, the ability to feel, to feel alive or sad or dead is amplified into something grotesque or even sterling beauty. Leaving all the other mere humans, left to be enthralled or disgusted with mouth agape. We would talk long into the night, as the morning light peaked through windows covered with sheets, towels and tee-shirts, “I’m going to go to Italy in the spring whether you go with me or not, then I’m going to Spain and drink on the beach. You can go if you want or you can stay here.” Staring at the ceiling, playing all the scenarios in my mind, “of course she’s going to go, and of course she’s going to fuck some guy(s) over there, and of course she needs someone to babysit her…. And I’m really fucking sick of this shit.” Eventually, she did leave, multiple times she saved her money purchased a ticket and left for Europe. She always called me to help bail her out, one night sometime around 1992 I answered the phone. “Bela, listen I just left Jeff in Germany, he doesn’t drink, and I can’t stand it. Fucking people need to lighten up anyway, I needed to get away. I was mean to him, you know how I get. I feel bad but not really because I HAD. TO. GET. AWAY.” Even though I was 3,000 miles away she knew I was shaking my head, “Don’t shake your head at me, if you are going to be an asshole then I will just hang up and I won’t talk to you.” Even though she had called me, the emotional pull of her predicament overrode all semblance of logic, ‘who will fucking help her then” went the thought in my head, it might have well been on a lite up billboard, “Who Will Fucking Help Her?” “What the fuck do you want me to do?” and just a few inches from me, a voice from the other side of the bed whispered, “Bela who is on the phone, is everything ok?” “yeah, it’s Jenny calling from Germany….” The resigned woman breathed out, “of course it is.” They never knew that they got her in the bargain when they dated me.

“Here’s the thing, I met this guy in the Netherlands, at the Vero, this awesome bar–you’dloveit.  We saw the Turks there, anyway he and I made out so I’m going to go stay with him. I met back up with the Mummies guys, they are really cool, and I’ll go with them to Belgium, then Peet will come and get me, his name is Peet, like Peter I always want to call him Uncle Peter and have to stop myself. Can you imagine if I said that shit while we were fucking?! Me screaming out “Fuck me Uncle Peter! Fuck Me! Hahahaha.” Her speech was rapid, one word sliding into another, almost lapping the word spoken before it, like they were racing one another  Some people can stand rock solid while the winds of the hurricane swirls around them, the waves of life crashing against them, trying in vain to pull them into the murky depths of their own depths (or should that read deaths?), they appear to be oblivious to the violence that pounds every aspect of their lives. This was Jenny in Germany, and later in Spain where she had went on a whim and quickly ran out of money until she charmed a wealthy Spanish woman who took care of her for nearly two months until the woman, undoubtedly, exhausted by this funny and outlandish American from Ohio purchased her a plane ticket back. My head was heavy in my hands, the sheets bunched up around my thighs, I stared outside the bedroom window as the streetlight glowed yellow against the row of dormant cars—patiently waiting to be driven in a few hours, and replied,

“what do you want me to do? I have no money, what the fuck Jenny, why do you do this shit?!”

“I didn’t call you to be judged by you, you are always fucking judging me! Your life isn’t fucking perfect Bela, quit acting like it is. I thought you would want to know where I was, plus I told the guys from the Mummies about you, I knew you like them. They are really fucking funny. I told them they should come to Columbus and you could make it happen. But they stink, that shit they put on to play, it smells like ass.” She was off on a tangent.

One moment vindictive, and defensive the next excited about something that gushed out of one neuropathways in her ever-moving brain, “oh, cool” thinking to myself, “why would she mention me to the Mummies, just cause I like them?” although I was excited about maybe bringing them to Columbus to play.

“So, you are going to the Pits to meet some guy named Peet?” The woman got up from the other side of the bed, and crossed the room, I followed her hips as she walked out of the room, she was beautiful, my next thought, “god-damnit Jenny, don’t ruin this for me.”

“No, the Pits is in Belgium, I’m going to the Vera—that’s in Holland, you’d like those guys—the Turks loved it and they know Jerry Wick, I asked them if he was an asshole to them as well.” She cackled.

Yawning, “ok, great—be careful, let me know if you need anything when you get there. When are you coming back?”

“I dunno, soon, maybe call my mom and tell her I’m ok. Poor Jeff, I’m an asshole.” She hung up.

Sitting at the end of the bed, I stood up and looked out the window, the glowing red numbers on the digital clock read 2:20 a.m., and the ache in my stomach grew around the rest of me and settled in my head. “What did she want?” said my friend with the perfect hips and she climbed back into bed, “Ah, she left Jeff and is hanging out with Supercharger and the Mummies, she met some guy in Holland, I guess she’s going to go stay with him….” “Why are you friends with her, it seems like all you do is bail her out of trouble?” I didn’t turn around but felt my neck grow red, this was hard to explain, impossible even—why do people care for others when there appears little in return?

Choosing the words carefully, “I dunno, she’s really a terrific person. Oh well, there is nothing to be done now” I slide under the sheets as she allowed me to intertwine my legs with her, I pulled her close and let me self be held.

When the gray sky spits the first cold rain of the fall, and the wind touches through skin into a body’s bones, I am always transformed backwards, to 1991 or so. Maybe 1992, at this point these are just numbers, signposts on a backward highway that really leads to the abyss, fading into the vanishing point on our own inner canvasses. The memory is New Year’s Day, the night before I spent with another woman named Jennifer, and our friend Haynes. A farmhouse on the edge of Athens County, Ohio, the house straddled a hill, with a small winding road that curved up and around the old farm the house sat on. An old fence, faded from years of neglect was broken in spots, the wood an almost gray-black as the white paint had long been rained and burnt out by time, a small pond with a dilapidated dock half submerged in the brown water gave one the thought of a once more prosperous and happy time. It wasn’t used to grow anything anymore, just memories and junk in the yard, the land gone fallow with weeds sprouting around abandoned tires, an old truck sat bare in tall grass that was holding tight to the carcass as if the metal hulk was a savoir in a sea of desperation. It had once been a proud farm, and now it was a backdrop built for my faded memory. The night before we had listened to music on a small boombox, shuffling cassettes as the mood suggested, “Nevermind” had come out in the fall, and I was infatuated with “Loveless’ by My Bloody Valentine and Superchunk’s “No Pocky  for Kitty” and as the new year turned over, I put on “Flyin’ Shoes” by Townes van Zandt whom they women had never heard. As we listened and relistend, I succumbed to the pressure of the wine bottle, having gone mostly four months without a drink the atmosphere of the evening called for it. At one point, I knew this would be my last night with Jennifer, I knew this was not going to work—we were too different, she was much more organic than me, more Athens county than I desired, she was a stark contrast to the cosmopolitan-New York Sharon, Jennifer wore poncho’s, sandals and oils—and while conversations went into the deepest part of the night, I felt no spark-I felt incapable of love in any sense. We made love that night, with me knowing this would be the last time and as we spoke in hushed tones afterwards, she confessed her love for me and my reply was silence, my skin getting hot as I knew I was incapable of the same. The next morning, I arose early, made coffee on the stove for all of us and ventured outside. It was New Year’s Day, and everything was fragile as I ventured across the road to a field that slopped down into a small thatch of woods. It was cold, with dried corn stalks crunching and snapping under leather boots, barren trees looking painted on against the forever gray sky. There was nothing there but thoughts and the wind, that was kept at bay by a thin brown jacket, a revelation happened as I walked along into the woods, listening to the crunch of my boots, that in the end I was destined to be alone regardless of what I had in my life, whether it was the bottle, friends or a lover. The thought wasn’t frightening, it was as if a riddle that had been clawing in the back of my mind had suddenly been solved—and it was ok.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Homeless and Flashlight Tag.

Walking down High Street in the spring feels like liberation, when the bleak chilly overhead carpet of clouds slip into their summer hibernation, the bluest sky awakens while people peel away the dreariness of winter by wearing cut-off shorts, tee-shirts, and glide down the sidewalks on skateboards that were shuttered for the winter months. Along the Olentangy River, small pockets of fabric appear amidst the overnight greenery of woods that line a fifteen mile bike path. It is here that many of the homeless camps sprout just like the green buds and purple flowers that awaken in the spring. A stroll through the various parks along the way brings many passerby’s next to men with rumpled men, whose breath wheezes alcohol and whose shoes are cracked and frayed from years to pounding asphalt.

At some point, usually in the middle of July or August within the woods of the bike path the heavy humidity of Ohio is fertile ground for millions of mosquitos to breed, it is not uncommon for a person to resemble a welted corkboard of mosquito bites when strolling through the trees and bushes. The homeless carve out tiny homes within the thicket of bushes and the muddy shoreline, these homes are big enough for a body and not much more and some may consist of walls of pallets, thin slabs of sheet metal and discarded plastic while other may be as simple as a one-person tent or sadly, a sleeping bag and backpack. Bikers, joggers and mothers pushing baby strollers may well be unaware that within the small bushes of the path they are using a person maybe sleeping, brushing their teeth, taking a shit or drinking a tall 40 bottle of malt liquor.

From the explosion on youth culture in the nineteen sixties, where the campus area became a magnet and a beacon for some, a five mile stretch that disaffected kids, drug users, college students and dropouts flocked to. The sidewalk across from the University was a bustle of energy, where pamphlets were handed out, kids with frayed jeans and threadbare tee-shirts smoked cigarettes while playing guitar with a small coffee can on the side to catch silver coins, and later a contingent of homeless African-American men spouted poetry, shaking plastic coffee cups, plying their vocal gymnastics trying to get by on a daily basis as the mined white college students for the change in their pockets. “Help is on the way” one fellow bellowed for nearly twelve years before the heavens took his ghost away. Help indeed. Later, when the wrecking balls bullied their way onto the campus area, smashing memories and campus landmark to bits all in the name of retail progress many along High Street gave up their hawkish ways, it is just a wisp of what it used to be.

After a while, the panhandlers, street crawlers and even many of the students have left, scattered to other parts of the city. Mid-town suburbs, former working-class neighborhoods and, the woods. Each crack in the sidewalk has a story to tell, but as the years sigh by they get forgotten, small bits of an image that dissipates like smoke. From a small-town boy’s point of view the rising mountains of steel and concrete of big-time cities spun tales of bustling people, elbowing one another while scrambling for space and for others in the small towns of Ohio, the cities were to be avoided lest one wanted to get robbed. But for many it was a potential escape from lives that were told that high school was the best time of a person’s life when for many it was the worst time of a person’s life. The idea that this would be the pinnacle of existence felt like suffocating under the weight of the sky. “Your fucking kidding me, right?” is what I would think when my high school teachers told me to enjoy those oppressive days.

We moved apartments as if we were hunters and gathers; a new one nearly every year—from one broken-down, roach filled apartment to another. As if one patchwork wall with faded paint was a step up from another one, but in our minds, as we carried boxes of books and records, Hefty trash bags bulging with clothes from dilapidated cars to the newest old apartment a small pillow of pride burst out from our shoes with every step towards the new home. Each place birthed new experiences and stories, the tales piling on top of one another as our existence and lifestyles invited characters that could have sprouted from thin paper-back novels, some of the characters with stereotypical nicknames, Dan “the man” From CleveLAND, Barefoot Jeff, Crazy Jim, and more that have been replaced by fresher memories.

Working three jobs at the age of twenty was difficult although two of them were at record stores and one was the overnight shift at a Ohio version of 7-11, but with a right-wing religious streak that had the chain refusing to sell condoms, porn or rolling papers—alcohol and Mountain Dew were ok by their strict standards but not the prevention of disease and pregnancy. I walked off the job one night after confronting a drunk frat kid who was harassing a homeless man, “shut the fuck up man, and get out!” I shouted in his slobbery fatty face, “ohh, who are you to tell me, overnight UDF guy?” From there a verbal admonishing to his friends for having such an asshole as a friend, he staggered out screaming “I’m going to tell your manager!” After checking on the homeless guy, not charging him for his food, I undid my apron and said to the co-worker, “I really don’t need this bullshit for $4 an hour.”

Jenny was usually in an elevated mood during her twenties, with a mind twirling as fast as a window fan, thoughts and ideas would spin out of her as if her mouth was shuffling cards. As much as she could spit energy into a room she could also ingest the energy and suck it dry, leaving the inhabitants sweaty and uncomfortable. Oblivious to the fact the propulsive interjection of her far-fetched and usually hilarious words would continue unabated. It was transfixing. She gathered men in her wake like sex infused pied piper, all the while many of us would sit and watch. For some there is a well of sadness that stirs underneath the essence of a person, like the deepest darkest sea under lurking under miles and miles of ice. The rustling of life that tramples above, stirs the sadness is quiet waves, a slight turn of a phrase by a friend or the leaving of a lover turns into a slow ache that upsets the balance of living, spiraling out in waves. The darkness expands in small shadows the crawl over the soul by miniature degrees, a Chinese water-torture of the psyche. A rustling would build inside her, stirring softly and then exploding into reckless behavior that was galvanic, with shards of emotions dripping from every aspect of the persons involved. Some of these escapades caused deep wounds, and dug into the skin of whatever emotionally frailty I had at that age, for Jenny, she would take for whatever hurt was no fault of her own but of my own stupid expectations about her actions. “you know what you were getting into and I can’t help it if you are always so serious” as she tugged a mouthful of smoke from her cigarette, other hand peeling back the wet label from her Natural Light. After a few years of sleepless nights, and anxiety, there was a point where a person gets used to this sort of treatment and it would be addressed with a gallows humor, an emotional brawniness had formed within me. Built with chips of disappointment that had calcified around my core. Nothing was shocking.

Rubbing his sweaty hands against his filthy jeans, which were so soiled that they could have caused his palms to turn even more grimy. On the table in front of him was a flashlight, gloves, his wallet, a pair of cheap women’s pantyhose, a ring of car keys with a plastic blue tag that read “Ricart Ford”, his cracked black wallet and half a can of Busch beer. His patchy beard twitched as he gathered them all up, stuffing them into his pockets, they were soon bulging with the tools for his evening adventure. It was summer, in Ohio the summer was constructed of sticky sweat and mosquitos but the Ohio State campus area was devoid of students apart from graduate students and young people whose lives revolved around the campus.

Jenny was working at the Travel Agency, an odd name for a campus bar the didn’t know if it wanted to cater to the Greek crowd, be a dance bar or even cater to the burgeoning underground music scene (Royal Trux and Urge Overkill both played the odd little bar.) She worked as a bartender, which was akin to having largest man on the block working the buffet table at Ponderosa. These were easy times in her life, where responsibilities meant how late to stay out, when to do laundry; job choices were dependent on lifestyle choices and not the other way around. Nights merged into mornings while eyes were wide awake, and the turntable was in a constant motion. Everything a person needed was within walking distance, record stores, bars, carry-outs and grocery stores made the life of burgeoning alcoholics easy, it was as if there was an invisible sheet being pulled over our collective lives by Anheuser-Busch and Jim Beam. The secret would be revealed years later with devastating consequences but the twirling dances of trembling nights of those days brushed aside any thought of the future.

I wore Dockers to two of my jobs, cheap imitations of professionalism that spoke to the truth of low wage management and sales job, “just who are they fooling” was my thought every time I put the stiff pleated blue or tan pants on, the mild annoyance of the fabric streamed up into my mind blossoming into an infrequent rage when the poverty of hope tripped up any semblance of aspiration. Casual business attire was code for supposed professionalism, collective bullshit by men who had never scrapped quarters from couch cushions to buy a hamburger. A soft seething blistered inside of me on a daily basis. Home life didn’t help, trying to piece together fragments of what domestic life was supposed to be, culled from prime-time television, after-school specials and Sunday morning services, to the reality that every person brings every experience that has ever occurred in their life to each moment. Every. Single. Time. Blending expectations with reality is fiction without practice. Jenny worked several jobs, one at the bar and the other at the Ohio State Faculty Club, her quick wit saved her from getting fired many times. The bar gig allowing her to stay out later, be the center of attention and of course, have access to an almost endless supply of alcohol.

Walking through the alley, stepping over shards of broken glass, empty fast food bags, pieces of broken furniture and massive green dumpsters filled with rotting garbage and piles of empty liquor bottles, he was deliberate in where he chose to go. He started off on high street, and within a few steps he was in the alleys, lurking behind apartment buildings and campus duplexes. After a long day of working two jobs, one selling cassette tapes to young college students, at one point that year I sold a new Kids on the Block tape to a young Chris Jent who later became Lebron James shooting coach, and the other job selling Twin-Tone and SST records to young men who lives almost depended on the sounds being sucked up and through the small needle cruising across the spinning vinyl. Jenny wasn’t home, which wasn’t expected-it was a Friday night—even though summer had come and settled over the city like a moist shawl, campus on the weekends still blossomed the young in need of dancing and sex. I sat on the floor, legs outstretched, with the sounds of High Street floating through the open window while the television flickered a semi-forgotten Steve McQueen movie, with the sound off the record player blared out the sounds of The Rolling Stones “Beggars Banquet.”

Drinking alone was becoming a habit, although listening to music can make the exercise an almost spiritual experience, I brought a six pack into the living room. Three cans in, flipping the record over, looking at the small plastic clock that ticked past two am, a small fear clutched my chest, it was hard to breath as I contemplated the fact that she may just not come home until five am again. Sleeping alone, even briefly-for the initial slumber was frightening, the drink could help put the mind into the warmness of rest, as if the mind was sinking into a steamy bath. The motivation to enter the bedroom alone has hidden in the murkiness of myself, it would need to be cajoled as thoughts went to the scary unreal, the imagination that pictured my partner giving head to someone else or moaning in pleasure while, I sat alone with a six pack of Milwaukee’s Best, an old Steve McQueen movie and Mick Jagger warbling. With every late night excursion she had a small part of me would harden, a kernel of steel would form around my chest, never to be dislodged for years. The cicadas had landed that year, digging out of their seventeen year slumber, with only a days to find a partner before death swept over the mass of them, they sang songs of courtship that filled the air with a lovelorn chatter.

The Travel Agency was roughly two blocks from our apartment, as the ache built in my heart, of Jenny not coming home after close I debated walking over and fetching her as if she were grammar school aged and staying out too late with her friends. “Jenny you are missing your supper.” But that was a trip I had made before, walking in while she stood in a circle of people, performing her jokes and dropping her wit as if she was a firework of laughter. I would enter unsteadily, unsure of my role only knowing that I wanted her next to me, the surety that she made my other half whole and I felt naked without her. Every time as I approached, I felt the eyeroll, the invisible needling of an elbow in my ribs, to my heart, “uh, Jenny it looks like your boyfriend is here” some drunk would mutter and turn away, another would raise eyebrows high and her boss, Randy, the balding former wrestling coach who had repeatedly professed her love to her many times in my presence or on our doorstep would rush from behind the bar and yell, “she’s still working, she has to help clean up. You can leave now.” Turning, she would offer a shrug, “well, Bela, yet again you arrived too late at the party, just go home and wait for me.” On some occasions, she might be weirded out by some creep and ask me to stick around. Oddly, it would take me years to realize the waiting I held fast in my chest, the anxious energy that built up within me, the wondering, the visions of awful deeds that would dance in my mind as I waited for her would be the same behaviors and fears that I would cause my future partners as the hold of alcohol gripped me tightly, holding my feet fast to the bottom of the bar stool long after the doors had closed. Tonight, I opened another beer, found another record, Tim Hardin “II”, and listened as Tim sung about the deepest loneliness a person can feel. Outside, the car horns beeped, drunken students screamed at each other in the streets, bumping into one another as they bleated whatever ideas that sprung into their minds and the cicadas sang away, wrestling with their own doomsday heartache.

The front door opened, footsteps landed on the creaky linoleum kitchen floor, “Bela, I’m home. I brought a few drinks with me, aren’t you glad I’m home on time.” She wasn’t but it was better than four a.m… Plopping down on the floor, “why are you watching the television without sound?” “because, it’s stupid” I did not turn her way, the enjoyment of drinking alone had elbowed everything else out. After a few moments of silence, she moved to the couch, speaking into the air, her words landed around me, as if they were discarded plastic army men left for on the imaginary battlefield of childhood.

Outside on the street below, he had found a window with a light on, with enough space to remain almost safely hidden from passerby’s but enough in the light to be dangerous, to push the envelope just enough out of his pants. He placed the pantyhose around his head, mashing his black greasy hair over his forehead, splashing his beard across his cheeks, putting the large silver flashlight, the kind the police use to club someone over the head on the ground in front of him he fumbled with his zipper. Anxiety climbed up his ankles as the anticipation almost swallowed him whole. With one hand he tossed small rocks against out window. High Street was roughly a few hundred feet away, as he stood in a small empty parking lot, just off the curb of Chittenden Avenue. “what the fuck is that?” I asked Jenny. “I dunno, someone is throwing rocks at the window.” Nobody had knocked on the front door but since we lived on the second floor it could have been somebody who wasn’t sure this was our apartment. After a few more rocks had smacked against the window, I roused myself up and walked to the window. Twenty feet below a small bearded man with pantyhose pulled firmly over his head, a cap and dark clothes held a long silver flashlight (the kind that cops use to beat people) in his right hand, pointing it carefully on his midsection. In his left hand, which was working furiously, was his penis. The whites of his eyes shined through the woman’s undergarment mask as he worked away. He was truly a man on a mission. Pulling away from the window and sat back on the floor. “Who was it?” Jenny asked. Deadpanning, “I think it’s one of your boyfriends, go have a look.” I took a sip of beer. Peering at the window she laughed, “what should we do?!” “I suppose call the police.”  She handed me the bulky plastic phone and I dialed 911 explaining the circumstances, “so there is this guy masturbating outside our window, he has a flashlight and panty hose on his head.” “Sir can you describe him more accurately?” Pausing, I replied, “well, he has a penis in one hand and the flash light in the other. Its aimed at his penis, really illuminating what he’s doing…. if you don’t hurry up he’s going to finish up.” A deep sigh on the other end then the reply, “A squad is on their way, your comments are just going to hold them up.”

Slipping my bare feet into my shoes, pulling on some pants I rose to go outside and wait for the police, “I don’t think it’s safe to go out there, Bela” Jenny said behind me. “What is he going to dick-slap me to death?” “No, but he has a flashlight.” “Oh yeah, although he might be too tired to use it, I’ll wait on the staircase just in case.” Walking half way down the metal staircase, I sat down and took a sip of my beer. The man was gone and I took in the smell of the alley, rotting food and urine hovered in the backyard, the alley and small parking lots that lined the back ally were flecked with small tiny pieces of glass, sprinkled around the black asphalt. They made it look like miniature stars were imbedded in the blacktop, and when the lights of passing headlights shone upon them, they resembled rhinestones. The apartment building just to the north of us housed a George Cooper a giant of a running back who played for Ohio State, and next to him a gay man who was prone to wearing dresses, lipstick. The gay man was one of the first openly gay men I had met, he was quiet and kept to himself but would wave at us, and Jenny would talk to him quite a bit. ‘You should talk to him, Bela, he has some good taste in music.” I was hesitant, as I was still trying to shed the homophobia that going to high school in Springfield, Ohio had tried to instill in me amongst other bigoted ideas. The apartment below us was empty for the summer as were most of the apartments in the building just to the south of us, campus got fairly quiet-the exception being the drunkenness that occurred on High Street every weekend. Soon, a police cruiser pulled up, I walked down and explained to the officers what had transpired. “He was holding his penis and a flashlight? That’s a new one for me” said one the officers. “Yeah, he was quite ambidextrous” I chimed in. They set out looking for him, Jenny came and sat down next to me—we drank some more beer, the feelings of betrayal had left me, replaced by a closeness to her brought about by the absurdity of the situation. We always had laughter to pull us towards one another while our actions pulled us apart.

After ten minutes or so the cruiser pulled up, with a small bearded man in the back. “We saw him walking in another alley a few blocks from here, he had a flashlight and some pantyhose in his pocket. Can you ID him for us.” Wanting to make a crack about needing to see his dick, I refrained. They pulled him out of the back of the cruiser, he was short, with greasy black hair, a scraggly beard that was a pockmarked as a fourteen-year-old boy. He had on a pair of worn out black tennis shoes, his pants were about three inches to short, exposing his hairy legs; he wore no socks. Hunched over, he resembled Charles Manson, when the police asked him to look up at me he sneered, “I didn’t do any to you man!” His teeth were yellowed. Asking one of the officers to come and talk to me, I whispered, “what will happen to him if I ID him?” “well, we will take him to jail.” Thinking I walked towards him, “I don’t know if this is him, so I guess maybe let him go.” The officers told him to stay away from our house and he sauntered off into the night. In the darkness, while pale light from the streetlights made his small frame glow he turned, scowled back over his shoulder and kept walking.

It would take some time, years in fact for an understanding of the mentally ill and the homeless to swell within me. Of course, seeing the slow-motion avalanche of Jenny over the years proved a valuable albeit painful lesson in perceiving the far extremities of not only mental illness but also addiction. Issues that have swarmed inside of my own life and mind throughout the years, depression can suck a person dry from the inside as if the soul is being slowly burned by an inner sun, where the result is a deadened feeling. A feeling of desperation that acts like a tranquilizer in a person’s life, unless a person has felt this, it is very difficult and, exhausting to explain. Akin to describing a color that doesn’t exist or an apparition that dances only at night whilst a person sinks into slumber. For many, the task of this explanation proves to be too difficult, the already awkwardness of being different tends to push a person away for help, the inner recoil which may have proved to be a safety valve is the method that may save them but alas, many times it is never used. Jenny always embraced the absurd, as did Jerry and in my own way, I have tried.

Mike Rep.

Mike Rep.

The back room of Used Kids was cramped, a musty claustrophobic din of shelves, boxes of records, large bundles of brown paper bags that were as thin as dust, that would tear if someone slid a record in even half crooked and Dan’s desk. His desk was shoved into a tower of peach crates, stacked sideways to form a make-shift shelf where all the receipts, tax paper, and unsold cassettes of Cordia’s Dad and the Wolverton Brothers held down the leaning tower of almost splintering wood. In the middle sat a furnace that had seen better days, whose piping was in fact rusting while in the far corner lay a darkness that only the High Street rats would venture too. Crammed in the rear of the room was the bathroom, itself a frightening hazard as one was not sure if one of the rodents the dodged around the clutter may suddenly appear behind the toilet while someone had dick in hand. There was a period when a series of Chinese restaurants were housed above us, the last one that somehow miraculously dodged the health department despite leaving uncovered tubs of slimy chicken meat by their backdoor and a grease trap that attracted all types of animal life, even in daylight hours. At one point, the rats were dying within our cinder block walls at an alarming rate, and the Chinaman who operated the restaurant would suddenly forget his English when I addressed him, scowling at me, “no rat here!” to which I usually replied, “yeah, cause they all fucking died in our walls!” Finally, one day, he was gone, his shop turned black but he had left all the food and soon enough after repeated calls to the landlord, some poor fuckers came and loaded out all the spoiled food. A heavy blanket of rotten stench coated the record shop for nearly a month before this happened, the heavy summer heat only poured gasoline on the problem. The rat problem slowed to a trickle after that.

Some of the boxes in the back where marked for our Goldmine auctions, Goldmine was a record collector magazine that ran nostalgia interviews with everybody from Mike Nesmith, Nancy Sinatra to Captian Beefheart’s guitarist, Gary Lucas. The back of the magazine was chock full of various record auctions, set sales that small shops across the country would advertise whatever collectable records that they came across. Many of these were of the “bootleg” variety or the always sought after radio shows. These radio shows were really a goldmine to independent shops, mostly put out by Westwood One these multiple LP sets were pristine recordings of FM radio bands. Some were much more famous than others, Fleetwood Mac, Heart, and Bob Seger but there were other, lesser known bands—fly by night artists that barely made a flicker on the charts or even rock radio, bands such as Frankie and the Knockouts, Greg Kihn, Quarterflash and John Cafferty. These smaller bands fetched very little, $5-$20 but the superstars, Bruce Springsteen, The Eagles or even R.E.M. could fetch hundreds of dollars. A needed influx of easy cash for us, but a pain in the ass to assemble as all the auctions had to be done via mail or phone. Record keeping and knowledge of what was more collectable were essential, when CD’s came out the shows and programs expanded, In the Studio, Hot Wax and others came on the market and the CD’s were much easier for various DJ’s and radio station employees to smuggle out and sell to us. Besides the radio shows the auctions would also be made up of other collectables, garage singles from the 60’s, rare art and jazz LP’s would sell well. The task for keeping track of these sales fell to two of the most colorful characters on High Street during the past forty years.

Mike Hummel was one of the first people along High Street to record his own music, and then press it to vinyl, his “Rocket To Nowhere” (Moxie) came out in 1977 a blistering blow-out-speaker of a song that at once seemed to capture the sonic waves burping out of Cleveland but infused with Mike’s love of all things Alex Harvey. Mike was able to straddle a fine line of the freedom of punk rock but with a keen eye of the art-y flamboyant sounds of the aforementioned Alex Harvey, early Alice Cooper, and glam-era Lou Reed. Initially he was a shaggy haired figure who would drop by the store, carrying loads of white record boxes to the and from the furnace of the back room, to his car, and later that night it wasn’t uncommon to see him manning the pool table at Larry’s with large leather hat and long leather coat casting a shadow over the table, a large glass of whiskey nearby. He was usually with Jim Shepard or Ron House, frequently one would find them by the back door of Larry’s smoking a joint and talking in hushed tones, probably exactly like they did in high school.  Dan had a contentious relationship with Mike at that time, and if there were any mistakes in the auctions or record show sales, he would berate Ron, “Well, he’s YOUR best friend” as if Mike was responsible for every fuck-up that went on in a store full of fuck-ups.

For Jerry Wick and I, Mike was somewhat of a mysterious shadow, he would slip in on Friday’s picking up a few of the white cardboard LP boxes, huddle in the back with Dan and return the next Monday with a manila envelope holding the winners of that months auction. That night, we would spy him and Shepard at Larry’s poetry night, grumbling that we were constantly shooshed while various nervous types, wearing berets, scarves and inky mascara stood before a bar full of people and read poems and prose from tattered notebooks. “Jesus, I forgot it was poetry night, let’s to go BW’s at least we can drink in peace and play trivia”, Jerry would say as we slumbered to the still local BW-3, that hosted trivia amidst a juke-box the poisoned one’s ears with the latest Jock Jams. Peace indeed.

Soon enough, we discovered the genius of Mike as he was soon working part-time in the Used Kids Annex smiling a broad smile, with his ruffled hair and white teeth he was handsome enough to have been a model for a hybrid of Creem and Playgirl, if such a thing existed. It was easy for us to find fault with Mike, as in our curmungendy-wary twenties, we tended to dismiss a great deal with a thought that would leave our mouth before being properly matured, as Mike was prone to listen to the Doors with the same ease that one of us would put the Stooges or MC5 on. What we didn’t fully realize was Mike came of age when rock and roll turned suddenly more dangerous, when the infuse of psychedelics, marijuana and Quaaludes were stuffed into tight jean pockets to be consumed in Detroit made cars as long as speedboats while the click-click-click of eight-track players boomed out the sounds of “L.A. Woman”, the Bob Seger System and T. Rex. Ron House once remarked that he had felt as if one had to make a choice in high school between Alice Cooper or the New York Dolls, Mike Rep defying both sides would proudly choose both. We all realized that like Jim Shepard, Mike had been making a mix of punk-infused art rock since high school. For the first Datapanik single, label head Craig Regala asked the Boys from Nowhere (themselves a mishmash of punk and 70’s hard rock, that never achieved the success of east coast counter-parts such as the Lyres) to cover “Rocket to Nowhere” while the b-side featured future Greenhorn brothers, the Spurgeons blasting through Peter Laughner’s “Dear Richard.”

“Rocket from Nowhere” is now a highly sought after single, an almost sinister and gleeful three minute announcement of boastful destruction of which Columbus had not quite seen; the Datapanik single was our first introduction to the capabilities of Mike Rep and the Quotas. When the Used Kids Annex opened up, Dan Dow recruited Dave Diemer from Capital City Records down the block to run the shop, Mike came on board full time and usually worked in the afternoons and evenings. There was a large concrete supporting wall that separated the two stores, one tip off that Mike had arrived was the musky scent of marijuana that would seep through the back-room wall. Mike would flip the “Back in Five Minutes” sign up and go to the back of the Annex and fire up, when Lamont Thomas (Bim) worked for us, he would also slip next door for a five-minute escape. Almost like a high-school kid trying to cover up his tracks, Mike would gargle some Scope, and light some incense to cover the smell—it was comical but the fear of drug busts, even for marijuana was still a possibility twenty-five years ago.

One day as I brought over a stack of records to the Annex, Mike was busy pricing 45” records in his shaky chicken-scrawl and singing loudly along to Phil Ochs, in his smooth tenor Mike sang along “I’d like a one-way ticket home, ticket home….” Records can be used a silent code, opening the possibilities of connection almost like nothing else, and for many it is a bigger escape than alcohol, drugs or most anything else. My own fascination with folk music and singer-songwriters started early, an affinity for Richard Thompson whom I saw open for R.E.M. when I was 17, and I had been fed an endless supply for Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger and Leadbelly as a host of Folkways records as a very young child. Discovering used records stores along High Street when I was 18 was akin to getting into a doctorate program at an Ivy League school, swallowing the songs of Tim Hardin, Townes Van Zandt, Butch Hancock, Gene Clark and, of course, Phil Ochs had an incredible impact on me. To find others who held some of these songwriters as close to their hearts was inspiring, the songs and artists were small fireflies of light in a life drenched in darkness. In the eighties and early nineties most of these acts were still obscure, Ron, Dan, Captain, Mike and I had all seen Townes Van Zandt at a small nightclub/eatery called The Dell in the early 90’s there were only eleven people there and Townes got so drunk during his brief intermission he ended the second part of the show basically telling stories while strumming laconically on his guitar.

 

Phil Ochs was an inspiration, not only because he grew up in Columbus and used to drink at Larry’s but because he was a man who appeared to hold his principals above all else, whose sensitivity to the world around him would eventually lead to his death by suicide. Looking back, it is easy to see that he as many other artists we admired suffered from Bi-Polar Disorder (Mark Eliot’s “Death of a Rebel” is essential reading on art, alcoholism and mental illness), but as young man who himself battled oppressive bouts of depression, including a suicide attempt, Phil was a revelation. When Mike sang along with “One Way Ticket Home”, I stopped in my tracks, and although we had known each other for several years we immediately connected  about Phil and records.

Later that year, a small band of excitable men from Dayton were coming up to the shop to hang out in the Annex, I knew one of them as Bob Pollard who would come up sporadically to go record shopping. Mike had helped mix one of the first New Bomb Turks and Gaunt singles as well as record some of the early Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartment singles, gutting the almost smooth farfisa college rock sounds of Ron House’s Great Plains for a big rock via muffled cardboard 4-track  recordings of the Slave Apartments.

At one point the valley of Ohio was the furthest west the country could have imagined, beyond the mountains of Western Pennsylvania and Kentucky, with the Ohio River holding an almost mythical hold that the Ohio Valley held on the forefathers of America were epic, a land of dangerous promises that appeared almost laughable 200 years later as mid-west promises collapsed under the girth of rust-belt nightmares. The fertile soil in Ohio was bathed in the blood of British, French, American and sadly, Native Americans who were massacred by degrees during the 17^th and 18^th centuries. Frontiersmen such as Daniel Boone and Simon Kenton, trudged through the swamps of Southeastern, Ohio marking claims with rifles, knives and gunpowder leaving a trail of destruction from Marietta to Toledo. The fables that grew out of the carving up of Ohio by these men were the tales that little boys would play throughout vacant fields and the patches of woods that dotted small town Ohio. Even today, supposedly, there is some buried treasure hidden by Simon Kenton somewhere near Springfield.

The ancient history of Ohio goes back thousands of years, the earthworks of Fort Ancient, specifically the curling 1,300 foot Serpent Mound dates anywhere to 400 BC to the 11^th Century, other earthworks dot Southern and Central, Ohio and in a sad commentary on 20^th Century capitalism, one in Newark has a private golf course sitting on top of it. One can imagine the ghosts of Native Americans dodging errant golf shots whilst crying paranormal tears. One wonders if the people who grow up in the proximity of the Grand Canyon or the white tipped waves peaking off the coast of Maine realize the beauty and wonderment of the world they live in, or does one just accept these everyday astonishments as melting into the background of their existence, to finally, with just the shadow of a shudder, turn into the mundane? Serpent Mound is one of the great American treasures, as mystical as Stonehenge but with nary a speck of explanation left the builders. Serpent Mound is hidden in the deep Southern portion of the state, at least 100 miles away from Columbus, 250 miles from Cleveland and 80 miles from Cincinnati, the region used to be filled with coal miners and poverty cuts a deep wound into this region of Ohio. Nonetheless, the fascination with Serpent Mound has been relegated to mostly outliers in Ohio, pagans, Native American groups and those who tend to lose themselves in dog eared books, long hikes and the passing of pipes.

Mike Rep was transfixed with Ohio lore and more specially the history of Native American spiritual sites, the importance of locale has been steadfast in Mike’s world, a walking internet of facts about the region, Mike was the first person who told me about the Mothman. It was easy to dismiss Mikes fascination with the buried myths of the past, not only with the historical aspects of the Native culture but, in a shock for Jerry and I the self-myth making of musicians such as Jim Morrison and Donovan, musicians we had dismissed as we climbed out of mid-adolescence to our late-DIY-infused teenage years.

It was somewhere around this time, 91 or 92 that we were introduced to Tom Lax, who runs the fantastically spot-on Siltbreeze records from Philiadelphia. Ron and Mike introduced Jerry and I to TJ (as we called him), most likely at Larry’s or at Ron’s House. I knew Siltbreeze as the label that put out a V-3, Gibson Brothers and Sebadoh singles; Jerry and I were a bit in awe of Tom and Mac Sutherland’s ability to put out quality music from around the world, all hinged on music that was unsurprisingly artistic but full of attitude.

Even though, as a glance over the weighted shoulders of time, Tom, Ron, Mike and Bob Pollard were only a few years older than us, that space between someone who is 19, 20 or 21 to someone who is in their early thirties can appear vast, which turns the space horizontal, making an invisible pedestal in our minds. Siltbreeze mined Franklin County as if the sewers below High Street flowed with music instead of shit, and the avalanche of damaged esoteric music that Tom and Mac championed out of Columbus should have made them both honorary citizens of the city. The list is as long as a some of the tales that would bellow from Mike Rep’s drunken dialogues: Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, Creeper: Ohio, Times New Viking, Sam Esh (whose warbling most resembled a washing machine playing a one stringed guitar), the Yips, the Gibson Brothers, Psychedelic Horseshit, V-3 and of course, Mike Rep and the Quotas. Tom, understood the musical acumen of Mike, whose taste in music has been unapologetic as well as trendsetting (see Guided By Voices, Times New Viking, Gaunt, New Bomb Turks, Strapping Field Hands…).

 

Mike walked through the main side of Used Kids one late afternoon to fetch a Black Label beer from the small and overworked dormitory refrigerator that kept us all sane during our salad days and he stopped at the side of the counter and sang along with me as I sang in my off-key quaver to Spirit’s “Animal Zoo.” It was shortly thereafter, that Siltbreeze put together a compilation of Mike’s hard to find and unreleased records stretching back into the 70’s. “Stuper Hiatus Vol. 2”. It’s a retrospective that runs the gamut of the punk-fueled deadism of  “Rocket to Nowhere” to the b-movie-whipit inspired “War of the Worlds” with a great dollop of Mike’s love of Roky Erickson smothering the homemade 4-track recordings. It also showcased Mike’s unusual taste in album cover art, utilizing the cover of a French-easy-listening record with Mike’s name on the cover.

Meanwhile, Mike was working hard on several projects, many of which he (kinda) cloaked in secrecy, per his intentional shrouded self-made persona, “I’m working on something that is pretty interesting, when you close up shop come over and give it as listen” he would tell us through his wide grin as he took a couple beers next door to the Used Kids Annex. After work, Jerry and I would stop in the Annex, with all the lights out except the dangling white Christmas lights that hung from the low ceiling, Mike would be blaring whatever he was working on. It could have been Guided by Voices “Propellor”, Prisonshake’s “Roaring Third” or the Strapping Field Hands “In the Piney’s”  or even a four-track recording of Donovan that Johan Kugelberg had asked him to remix (this is another story) but whatever it was it was always ear-splittingly loud. The smell of marijuana drenched the air like a green wave of humidity, a palpable smell that stuck in your nostrils like cat hair on a sweater. This night Mike was mixing something different, a bouncing effect laden song, it sounded as if the vocals were being channeled through a wading pool of water and ectoplasm, shimmering over fuzzy guitars and a small choir singing, “there’s aliens in our midst.” I stopped dead in my tracks, I had assumed it was a V-3 song although the lighthearted nature of the song, with a glint in the song’s eye suppling an aspect of care-free bizarreness that Jim Shepard would have been too self-conscious to lay down on tape. “Who is this?” I asked. Smiling broadly, Mike replied with wide eyes, “it’s the Quota’s but it’s a Twinkeyz cover.” Not knowing who the Twinkeyz were but assuming I should, I mumbled something like, “this is a great cover”.

The next time I worked with Mike he handed me a Maxell cassette  with his chicken-scratch pointy scrawl, “this is everything we’ve been recording.” The tape might as well have been stuck in the Pioneer tape deck in my 82 Ford Mustang for as much as I listened to it over the next month, the songs covered a gamut of sounds that spanned Mike’s fondness of music. From Roky Erickson to the Phil Ochs-cum-ragtime “America’s Newest Hero” and experimental Flying Saucer Attack inspired “One Thirty-Five.” Speaking with Mike over beers one night at Larry’s, “maybe I can put the tape out?” Soon enough, Gary Held from Revolver listened to it and loved it, he and Mike had spent some time together when Gary visited, perhaps they had even visited Serpent Mound together? After a few months of putting the cover, itself another in a long-line of bizarre record cover art from Mike, “A Tree Stump Named Desire” came out on CD. Mike wanted the record to come out on LP but due to the length of the record, a proper single LP pressing did not work, although it was cut to lacquer twice, Mike was never happy with how it sounded so there are only a handful of test pressings of the record.

Some people live on an island, not to the extent that it is a conscious choice but in the end the pursuit of art and creation tosses the irons of mainstream life that can fetter and clog the desire some have to pout what is inside their minds and lives onto paper, canvas and at times, into small recording devices, these are the people many of us are attracted to in our lives. Some may create to achieve adulation, to live forever in a moment of song while many do for the moment of the moment, the ones who can capture a singular feeling that transcends all the seconds, hours and days that follow it. The repercussions of the creation are just a bi-product of what needed to be produced. Most likely these are people who may tend to their gardens in self-imposed isolation, write silently in coffee shops or paint alone in their garages or tiny studios. For many they are tethered to small machines that capture sounds to be digested later, fueled by experience, alcohol, drugs and yes even whip-its. Mike Rep Hummel is one of these people, a man who holds no pretenses and who has managed to help discover and guide an unlikely assortment of talent that has helped inspired and influence the lives of many people who find their greatest solace in music. Guided by Voices, Times New Viking, V-3 and the New Bomb Turks all are indebted to Mike, who continues to do what he has always done, which is to cram what is inside of his shaggy head and cut it into tape without a fear of what the outcome will be. Fearless.

 

Home

http://www.siltbreezerecords.com/

https://midheaven.com/search/?search=mike+rep

https://www.prairieghosts.com/moth.html

 

Jerry and Jenny: Holding

Desperation filled the room like a bomb, overhead lights flickered on, stuttering for a moment as if they were rubbing their florescent eyes and then illuminating the quiet loneliness with a shimmering pale glow. Women eyed nervous men, whose boldness was powered by Pabst Blue Ribbon, Jack Daniels and Rolling Rock, the upper hand danced upon arched eye-brows and the hesitation of whatever the next moments would unfurl, the anticipation danced as if on the tips of floating curtains through the window of minor death that comes from walking home alone. For many in the bar, home was filled with roommates who crowded spaces with loud voices, broken cigarettes they balanced on moist lips as words hurried out of manic-y mouths, all competing for a chance to share their bed, to keep the emptiness away, in this context the bar was more home than the cramped and messy student housing was. Dating was difficult when trying to be heard over a room-mate’s stereo, television or the constant interruptions of political or personal discourse. The bar was easier, with a wiggle into the wooden booth two people could wall off the world around them, the invisible barriers that shot up from the dark stained brown of the back of the booth shot to the ceiling, with the wooden table making the perfect meeting point for early forming crushes. Beneath the table, legs and feet could get intertwined sending an immediate message that one may not muster the courage to voice out loud.

The floor was ruddy, with cigarette butts flicked away in detached mannerisms, as if the calm they just supplied for an anxious fellow had never existed. The black and brown bits of tobacco soaked up spilled beer and dashed late night dreams like a sponge of rejection. The music blared from the speakers as bartenders, tired from a night of mixing cocktails, pouring doubles and opening endless bottles of beer shouted above the panicked din, “Last call!! This is your last fucking call! Turn them in, it’s time to get the hell out of here!!!” Just twenty minutes ago these bartenders were the masters of wisdom, able to parse small bricks of knowledge as they slid a drink across the counter or keeping fainter hopes alive with a wink and the sashaying of hips. The exposed brick walls wore a fine film of cigarette phlegm that grew in insignificant degrees as ladies and men stuffed inward anxiety by deeply inhaling from thousands, if not millions of these thin paper-y tubes of mental health supplicants, exhaling with a passion, the smoke leaving their bodies after digging deep inside their nervous souls it would settle on the walls, ceiling and light fixtures. Turning everything a bit yellow, as if the innards of the bar were in fact an alcoholic slowly beating his liver to death, one icy beverage at a time.

Outside, the autumn wind flew down from the black sky, making the leaves dance their dances of death before being torn from chilly almost naked branches, the wind gathered its strength to bring in rushes of cold air near the top of the sky and although we were huddled inside, amidst the noise of guitars and rickety cymbals, the clanking of bottles and deep sighs of anticipation we could just feel the cold outside, it was understood that when we exited the building, pulling ourselves in, cuddling ourselves or grabbing a hold of another nervous hand the chill would remind each one of us of how the fragility of our lives were.

Her bedroom was cluttered, small piles of clothes dotted the floor like musty landmines, an unmade mattress stacked upon a pitiful box-spring mattress was shoved against the wall. The walls were covered in art, placed in uneven rows as if a bird had decided to decorate the room, here was a painting of a nude woman and ten inches to the left, and five inches lower hung a poster of a shirtless Iggy Pop, his pubic hair tempting the viewer as if someone could mount Iggy right there on the wall. On another wall were a line of post-it notes, each one marked by day-glow ink that listed a person and date, no other explanation. The far window was covered with a wooly blanket, thinned in the middle by one to many bodies digging in deep with the passion that only the mid-twenties could bring, the splotch of meager fabric was almost as see-through as a bowl of broth. Books were stacked against the make-shift bed, Anis Nin, Kafka, Betty Friedman, Ken Kesey and hardcover copy of Susan Faludi’s “Backlash” informed any visitor that the woman who slept here was smart, concise, funny and suffered no fools. Inviting a person to her bed was not something that was given lightly.

We were drunk, leaning against one another as we entered the room, she grabbed my elbow with one hand, the other in the small of my back, pulling my shirt up. Skin on skin and the ceiling twirled as if it were made up of helicopter blades. The night started early, at least for me with the 75-mile drive from Columbus to Athens fueled by a six pack of Natural Light before arriving at the Union Bar and Grill at nine p.m. There was no plan that evening, stopping at my brother’s and finding his house empty except for a pack of dogs that climbed over one another while trying in vain to run out the front door. No lock was needed and I barked at them louder than they barked at me, “Get back! Get Back, it’s just me”, squirming some of them were so large my knees almost buckled, “God-damnit, get the fuck back!” Putting a brown shopping bag with a change of clothes and one of Robert Caro’s books on Lynden Johnson (as if I would get any reading accomplished), in my brother’s room and I drove back uptown.

That night as former art students plugged in black amplifiers, sat behind a drum kit whose kick drum had a painting of a laughing clownish man whose crooked eyes followed the audience as the thump-ba-thump pulsated across the floor, we smiled at one another while melodic feedback brought us closer than any word could ever do. The music extinguished the anxiety the bubbled up between us, the past or future didn’t matter while heads bobbed back and forth, nobody had to speak and if they did nobody could hear anyway, in fact nothing could be said while the music blasted all internal fears like a coal mining company blowing the top off a mountain. Her black hair rolled down past her eyes, small languid curls the bent and bounced while light glinted from the various wisps that fell under her quilted hat, she smiled broadly, displaying perfect white teeth that fell into order almost in a regimented fashion. During the course of the next fifty minutes we stood closer and closer, and by the end of the last three songs our legs were in unison, and as the last notes rang in humming ears she grabbed my hand.

One of the last things Jenny had said to me as I walked out the two story house on Norwich was “go ahead and leave, your life is going to be miserable and you’ll never get laid again besides you suck in bed.” She continued yelling through the screen door and the large black walnut tree casted even darker shadows that then cloud filled night was already doing, as I trudged across the lawn, these small pockets of inky blackness would swallow me whole for an instant, a reverse strob-light as I bounded away from the insults. A part of me yearned to turn around, as the words nicked the insides of me like a small pen-knife, that section of my being wholeheartedly believed her, that in the end being defective was what I was in essence while another part did not believe her and continuing the way we existed was a life that was doomed to eventual death by my own hand. Alcohol had risen around our ankles and although I was only twenty-two, life had become quicksand, the vomit looking quicksand found in nineteen-sixties B-Movies and there wasn’t much left to do except exist with no hope for happiness. It was October just a few years prior to the experience described at the beginning of this entry, the ground was muddy, there was very little that would grow on the slight slope of the front lawn. Wet leaves had already started rotting into the soil, a slight breeze swept from the west with a tablet of cold attached just to make sure that a person felt small against Mother Nature. Against the backdrop of the stone church that bordered the yard, I glanced up, a few small tears trickled down my face, feeling nothing except for the hope for a God that I wasn’t really sure about I said a prayer and climbed into the car. I would spend that first night in Athens, the hour and a half drive providing thoughtful calmness and solidifying, what was perhaps, up to that point in my 22 years, the most terrifying decision I had ever made. It felt as if my entire life was one melodramatic scene from a shitty movie when all that was wanted was a slap-stick comedy.

A small, damp and disorganized apartment in the basement of the James’s house, they were lifelong family friends, the eldest child, Lisa was my sister’s best friend in high school. While the middle son Ian was a tall blond haired, intellectual rabble-rouser bonded with Zoltan, both of them made well-worn paths in plenty of the townie bars. The apartment had a side entrance, from a brick constructed alley that climbed up from State Street to the toppermost street in the county. In the winter one could easily slip near the top of the hill and slide straight into State street in a whoosh. The apartment was small, hardly an apartment at all, a bedroom, a hallway and the stairs led up into the kitchen, itself cramped with dishes, grocery bags and a coffee pot that had almost fossilized bits of burned coffee grounds molded into its base. Arriving in the middle of the evening, sitting on the edge of the bed holding a Rolling Rock, it had seemed that the future was but a panic attack away.

I stayed in Athens for the weekend, keeping to myself as I nursed the broken bits of ego and raw self-esteem, and drove back to work at Used Kids early Monday morning. The start of a pin-ball styled existence that would ricochet my life from bed to bed, bar to bar and of course, record to record had, unbeknownst to me, commenced and would continue for the next decade. As my Monday evening shift ended at Used Kids ended, the thought of driving to Athens and sleeping in the musty, sad apartment, itself a veritable crumpled brown paper bag of a room, almost staggered me. I called my friend Joe Moore, whom I had met while living in the Ohio State dorms, Joe and his friend Frank Peters had won my friendship by plastering their dorm room walls with posters of the Rolling Stones, Husker Du and the Replacements. “Joe, what are you up to?” Without flinching, “you need a place to stay tonight? I heard about you and Jenny.” That night after a few drinks, and listening to records, lying next to a woman with long red hair in the back bedroom, telling her stories of a broken heart and how it had been laid-way by the jabs of Jenny.

Her bed was cramped, almost glued to the wall as the room pressed in upon us, it could have been a large closet instead of a bedroom. Joe had mentioned to me earlier in the year that he had been sleeping with her for a while, but now, the hallway between their rooms might as well been the Atlantic. Her hair lay around her head in bunches, we were like eighth graders, talking to the ceiling as we talked to each other, unloading the worst experiences of our lives while never looking at one another. After a while, the words lost all fuel and the room was filled with separate breaths trying to play catch up with the other. A soft nervous panic rose from the middle of my bones, cut through soft skin and hovered just centimeters from my body, it was soon punctured as she placed her left hand on my thigh. And soon, we rolled to each other, sharing soft kisses while the hands roamed and fumbled and finally I pulled away. The thought of Joe sleeping in the other room, the pain of Jenny and finally, and most loudly the doubt that this was a real thing. “I can’t do this, can we just sleep?” “yes, if that’s what you want,” she murmured, gripping my uncertain hand.

Larry’s was emptying out, as wounded egos shuffled out with a six-pack in hand, the lights flickered on and some of us, with the hope that glistens like a bronze bell during the noonday sun inside of us giggled into the street. Bouncing with drunken giddiness I held her elbow as she cupped her hand into mine, my other hand holding fast to the cardboard handle that held the beer that would take us deeper into the night like a beacon sitting in a far off hill. She laughed freely, and smiled against my shoulder, we had not yet kissed but at this point it was a formality. Sauntering up High Street as a fistful of cars passed slowly by, on the lookout for the police we soon headed to Pearl Alley as it provided more privacy amongst its bits of broken glass, crumpled up fast food bags and the smell of alcohol and piss. Roughly was block down, we stopped as she backed me into the cold brick of a building long torn down, and kissed me full on the lips, flitting herself into my mouth she held me with eyes wide open and felt me against her. Cheeks flushed, kissing while street light hummed above us we walked some more, cutting up to another, more residential street, the large maple and oak trees swayed above us, mimicking my drunken gait, the soft shadows of the leaves making small splashes of darkness against our bodies as if nature had constructed an organic strobe light to frame our slow dance of loneliness deferred. In her bed, we kissed and giggled some more, as we lay naked in her bed, candles stacked like small wax trees around her windowsill, her dresser and her floor. “I need to tell you something before we do this, ok?” lifting her head as she looked me in the eye. Her smile disappeared in that moment, “what? Is something wrong?” I whispered, waiting for the other shoe not to just drop but splinter like a raindrop on hot cement. “I’ve been sleeping with Jerry on and off for about six months.” Bubble thought burst in my head. “I don’t care; I won’t tell him if you won’t.” leaning back into the her bed. “I won’t” she smiled as we grew closer. That night, it wasn’t guilt that closed the evening as if it were made of soft doors shutting it was too much beer and whisky as after some struggles we decided to sleep as birds yawned their early morning songs.

Saskia takes her time dressing every morning, and after we go to the gym together she says,

“dad, wait for me I will be out in 20 minutes. I have to get ready.”

“Honey, no you don’t we just worked out for an hour and your mother is waiting. Hurry up” I sigh annoyingly.

“I just have to put on my makeup.”

“Nobody puts on make up after leaving the gym, not even Taylor Swift” looking for someone she can relate to.

“Ok, give me five minutes” she shouts from across the lobby of the gym.

She is eleven, experimenting with her looks, her discovery of fashion and now, with sparkling whispers she tells her mother of boys and happenings at middle school that her father, no doubt could ever relate to. Offsetting everything with humor, I make her laugh, she tosses the sarcasm back at me, and shakes her head. “Dad, you are not cool, you have no idea.” She wears her mother’s clothes, and balances her growing tall body on skinny shoes, as I stand in the kitchen nursing another cup of black coffee, hoping that while she walks into adolescence and young adulthood she is spared the self-doubt and ache of solitude that has hung around her father as an invisible cape since the third grade. “Dad, seriously you don’t understand what I’m even talking about as she dances clumsily on high heel shoes while holding her phone to her ear. I suppose not.

Jerry and Jenny: Protection

School was a drag, from the earliest years of kindergarten to last frayed edges of my psyche as my high school years petered to a shambling halt, all the while my innards groaned every morning I drove the 1978 Corolla to the school. It was as if I had to nail myself upon a cross made of bricks, racism and corn every morning, my stomach swaying as I bounded over the soft rolling hills, past epic farms of corn and soybeans. Just like a John Cougar Mellencamp record. The first awakening to the unfairness of childhood, stabbed my brain as if I were shrouded in an invisible cloak that covered all the innocence of a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy of five. Standing outside Ms. K’s doorway as children ran to waiting yellow school buses, metal tubes of laughter, nausea and the sweet pungent scent of childhood who would roll through the nearby neighborhoods, dropping children off as if they were bits of fleshy, noisy mail, I turned slowly when Ralph Scarmack called my name. I knew him, sort of anyway, as much as a kindergartener could know another little kid, his father worked with my father, this much I knew. “Maybe we can be friends?” I thought, as I smiled at him. As my brother stayed in school all day, he was a first grader, I spent the afternoons waiting for him to walk down Sunnyside Drive. I’d sit on the porch, or set up various bulky green Army men under the porch and pretend the Daddy-Long Legs would attack them, perhaps I’d ride my Big-Wheel down to the corner and spy out for him. Big black plastic wheels flicking bits of gravel behind me, I was a blur tearing up the sidewalk.

“Hi Ralph” I looked at him with the hope that I had a new friend. Eyeing me up and down, he snarled, “I’m going to kick you in the shins!” Looking down, I noticed he wore brown socks underneath brown leather shoes, complete with brown stiff laces. Looking back up, I tilted my head, much like a puppy and wondered what he just said. Biting his bottom lip, he raised his foot backwards and with all his little-boy force struck my right shin as hard as he could. Collapsing on the sidewalk, he stood over me, “don’t tell anybody or I’ll do it again tomorrow!” Water filled my eyes, while a lump the size of a loaf of bread rose in my throat, choking on shame and confusion, I was not going to cry. I turned heel and limped away, trying hard not to but he had managed to peel away a small layer skin on the bottom of my leg, small creases of blood dripped down my leg. Maplewood Avenue had never appeared so long, the cut hurt to the touch and I soon made it home. Crawling under the porch, I stacked the Army men in rows, they would wage battle against the ants and other insects. The feeling of being an outsider was literally hammered into me that fall day.

Every year, autumn would slump from childhood summers like a slow moving fog, rising around skinny ankles, winding its promise of long hot school days, sweating while August afternoons mocked us through thick glass windows, and chalk-scented air soon it would choke the fun out of our lives. From the dreamland of summer afternoons, staying up watching Double-Chiller theater, to the drudgery of turning yellowed paper, with artwork from the 1950’s still in our textbooks, it all seemed desperate. Even to an elementary school child. School was like a carousal, attending over six schools by the time fourth grade arrived, I would stand in line while waiting for another multi-colored wooden horse to arrive. Picking me up and taking me on the same old trip. By the time fourth grade arrived, I was in a state of motion sickness when it came to school.

Shy at a young age, but warming up when feeling comfortable, the husk that had accumulated from bracing new schools, new friends and the awkwardness of saying my name, and having to repeat it over and over to disbelieving little kids was burnished by these successive years of change. But when the trust came, I would open from the inside, folding out in a tumble of words that could cause other to be startled into dizziness. Bruno, is the same, and I can see in him the trepidation of my past. Bruno, makes things, big things, out of discarded wood, string, and found objects in our garage. His favorite store is Lowe’s and he bounds up and down the aisles as if he were in an amusement park. June would seduce slowly, with the promise of unending days filled with imagination brought to life, fort-making, back-yard cookouts and late night episodes of kick-the-can and then July would clutch and hold onto childhood like a metal vise, everything was frozen, days spilling into nights the summer would never end, and finally August thumped into consciousness with humid footprints reminding us that school was ticking ever closer. As the sweat dripped like melting ice-popsicles down our backs, August brought along dread that soon, so very soon, afternoons would be spent in steamy classrooms while swaying trees and bleating insects mocked the children through open windows.

A sense of distrust for school manifested itself in me from an early age, from Mrs. Amamuil in first grade who admonished me in front of my new classroom for wetting the floor, I went home in tears, never trusting this older hardened woman who was there to bring out the splendor of discovery in children, but instead struck with an invisible shaming stick to the little ones in her charge. And next, just two years later, a brunette teacher, with her hair pulled tight in a careful bun, long skirts and red-lollipop lipstick who stated to the only black kid in our class (in Newport News, Virginia), “Why can’t you just read Otis, what are you? Stupid?” This was my first experience in racism, as she spoke a portion of my gut tightened, as a child knows inherently when something is amiss and while I could not put my finger on it, I realized what she did was so very, very wrong. Later, in fifth grade, with an already strong sense of right and wrong, the spring sunshine was blanketing the baseball field of East Elementary school. The gym teacher, Mr. Swartz was a stereotypical gym teacher, tight thigh length athletic shorts worn at all times, black baseball cap, whistle dangling from a black cord that reached his tight polo shirt and spotless tennis shoes. He coulda been cast for a Hollywood movie, an intense man, prone to barking out instructions as if all the children were standing 40 yards away and not the five feet from him as we were, and at times he could splice in small insults to players that were not doing well, “Jimbo, you are kind of wussying out there now, you’re going to let Eric run right by you? Eric’s a little on the chunky side.” I didn’t like him, I had the sense he was a bully, plus he played his favorites, Mike Quacktri, a toothy kid who seemed to have a different baseball hat for every day of the week, was prone to bragging, was a kid who you could tell held his favor. Being a small boy, I was often overlooked but also had a competitive spirit and was fast and agile, who played backyard football with a glee that felt as if I were on a ride at an amusement park. We were playing tee-ball, and as I stood on third base, the score tied and Mr. Swartz bellowing that this was the final play and that it looked like it would be a tie game, when the ball was struck I ran home, determined to prove him wrong and I slide into home plate, striking my knee into the tee-ball stand. The base shattered and my knee bled, my classmates huddled around me as I fought off tears and I heard the teacher tell them, “let him be, he’s being a little pussy.” From the ground, my cheeks covered in the fine powered dirt of the batter’s box and fingers bloodied by my knee, I yelled out, “Shut up!!”Suddenly, my small body was flung against the chain linked fence, my head cracking on the steel railing, bouncing off, Mr. Swartz grabbed me by my collar, “you little punk, you broke my tee ball plate, who taught you to talk like that?!”He tossed my to the ground, scooped me back up and pushed me towards the office, tears strained to poured off my face and I fought hard to keep them at bay. I limped to the edge of the playground, “pick it up!” he barked, grasping my left arm tightly, he lifted me a few inches off the ground, the tips of my tennis shoes dragging in the dirt. Certain to get paddled, knee bleeding and the shame of being tossed about in front of my classmates, I swallowed hard, making certain I would not cry in front of this man. As we walked into the office, Mr. Swartz yammered for the principal, “this kid needs a paddling and his mouth washed out!”

Sitting in the principal’s chair, knowing soon he would pull the thick wooden paddle complete with three large holes in the middle for maximum pain, I almost choked on the lump in my throat which had started formed after being tossed against the metal fence as if I were constructed of burlap bags and straw. Sitting in a hard plastic chair as the Principal furrowed his brow and looked across his grey metal desk, his back bathed in the bright spring sunshine, outside birds hopped along the power-lines. “What happened?” he asked his face a mask of concern. “I was running to home plate and I slid, hitting the tee-ball stand with my knee and Mr. Schwartz was telling kids not to help me, I told him to shut up. I was bleeding….then he threw me against the fence.” I had started rubbing the red rings from the rigid grip of the teacher, his hand had enveloped my thin biceps and left his imprint soon bruises would form. The principal called my father and asked him to come pick me up, hot tears were now dripping from my eyes, as if they had become swollen candles, embarrassment crawled up my neck and into my ears. A few minutes passed and I looked up, hands still trying in a pathetic futile attempt to wipe away the red scars of the gym teacher’s hands, “are you going to paddle me now?” A voice as small as a reed bending in the wind, the fear was almost alive. Standing up, the principal folded open in front of me, he was a tall man, nearly six foot three inches. With a dollop of black mussed hair that sat like a woven crown up his head, he walked around the desk in what appeared to be like a giant step. I still remember his hands, they were large, thick like fleshy boards of wood, almost planks and they reached for me, wanting to recoil but holding fast and I looked up at him. He placed his hands on both my shoulders, bent down and looked me in the eye, “no, I’m not going to paddle you, you’ve had a bad enough day.” He gave me a small hug, “don’t tell anybody that I didn’t paddle you though. I have a reputation to think of” he said with a wink. Relief, escaped from my quivering mouth. He asked the secretary to fetch me a glass of water. Time slunk by as I waited for my father, it was as if it were beaten about by the shoulders with its back broken in half, the clock ticked in a booming fashion, I was slumbering towards punishment. I waited in another hard plastic chair in the waiting area of the office, staring straight ahead as children walked past, my brother slid by the door waving his hand in a gesture of solidarity and I wanted him to save me once again. My father picked me up soon after, he held me tight as sobs escaped from my chest as if they were pigeons being freed from rooftop pen, he stroked my hair. We drove to his office, stopping at McDonalds along the way.

A few years later, sitting in the carnivorous school auditorium as countless seventh and eighth graders polished up the last few detention hours of the year, ordered to sit every other seat apart as if this would dissuade 12 and 13-year-old boys and girls from communicating, Mr. Davis a bearded bear of a man bellowed from the stage. “You are all here because you have misbehaved during the course of the year, as-such you have had ample time to fulfill your requirements of after-school detention which you have been too lazy to do. Hence you are here with me, there will be no talking, no looking around and if you didn’t bring anything to keep busy, then tough. If you communicate with your neighbor you will not get credit for being here and will have to redo detention this week, or finish it in summer school.” He was large man, who had a reputation among the children as being a mean-spirited, cruel and violent. The year prior he had snapped up a youngster, by his shoulders, twirled him in the air and slammed the child against a locker rendering his wrist inoperable for the next month. He was a man to be feared, a veritable Javert whose presence at the end of the long lacquered hallways would send children scurrying like rats into the nearest sewers, on top of that, he was a lousy teacher.

Zoltan was getting ready to graduate the 8^th grade, he towered above me on so many levels, popular with the boys, girls and teachers, his charming ways had made his transition to various schools and neighborhoods as easy as warm butter on toast. He sat in the row in front of my, grinning as the last minutes of middle school ticked away, he eyed our friend Eric Zudak who meandered his way down the same aisle as Zoltan and listening to Mr. Davis scream from the stage, “Mr. Zudak, why are you late?! And if you have a good excuse you can sit five seats away from Mr. Koe-Krompecher!” Replying with a wide grin, Eric explained, “I was helping Ms. Houska pack up her car, she said you could check with her.” He plopped in the thin folding wooden seat, his backside feeling the crackling wood starting to splinter after so many bottoms had sat through innumerable hours of choirs, plays and graduations over the years. Sitting between the both of them, one row back, I noticed Zoltan making eye contact with Eric, nod his head and mouth, “hey man.” No sounds emitted from his mouth. A bomb went off from the stage, a giant sound that filled the high spacious room, Mr. Davis croaked from his perch, “Mr. Koe-Krompecher, get up here right NOW!!” The anger of his voice eating the air out of theater, it resonated long after the spittle had left his hairy mouth. Zoltan moved towards the front, slipping by Eric, everybody’s eyes moved from him to the authoritative teacher. Zoltan was still smiling as he approached Mr. Davis, in his mind he had nothing to worry about, it was the conclusion of a long three years of middle school, his time in Athens had been rewarding, this young brave man had worked extremely hard and disciplined himself to shake off the dire predictions of professionals who had painted him as a troubled kid, a boy whose frustrations just a few years prior would erupt in volcanic episodes of violence had been tempered by incisive intelligent, slicing humor and the ability to form friendships out of the smoky passage of seconds. He had found his home. Standing in front of Mr. Davis, “yes sir?” Lunging at the boy, Mr. Davis plucked my 13-year-old brother up, and proceeded to shake him as if he were a chicken leg, secured in a zip-lock baggie, a human Shake-n-Bake on the stage. Through gritted teeth Mr. Davis, snarled, “I told you to not make any contact with anybody.” With that he pushed Zoltan away like a king to a servant who had just dropped his golden chalice. “Now go sit down and shut your mouth.” Gathering himself, Zoltan walked proudly back to his seat, with bated breath, the collective gasps of the children were focused on the inevitable tears that would flow from his cheeks. Alas they never came, Zoltan sat down, his eyes reddened, but no water escaped from his eyes. His face sweltering beat red from fear, shame and astonishment at what transpired he nodded towards me; he was ok. Anger filled me, it was like the room had been filled with water, submerged in anger at the unjust treatment of a child, my brother and trembled inside but could do nothing. Weighing maybe seventy-five pounds, arms as thin as red and white stripped straws, I struggled to keep my ass in my seat, wanting to flee but realizing I had to stand fast. “Mr. Zudak, what is your problem? Did you not bring anything to detention?!” Mr. Davis obviously wasn’t satisfied with assaulting one child today, “Get your butt up here!” Eric moved slowly towards the front, taking the side steps up to the stage he stopped well short of the big man, “Well, it’s the last day of school so I turned all my books in so I don’t have anything…sir.” Mr. Davis stepped towards Eric, his boat-like leather shoes echoing across the stage, the wooden floorboards wheezing under his weight, even these planks of dead trees were fearful of this man. Eric took as step back with every step Mr. Davis took towards him, an odd, almost graceful dance of mimicry. Eric was a bright boy. Finally, the bearded giant stopped, “well get a piece of paper from one of your classmates who actually came prepared for detention and write about what got you here.” With that, Mr. Davis turned in disgust and returned to his afternoon newspaper. Eric, hopped off the stage, waited as a classmate handed him a single page of notebook, the left side riddled with the tiny flaps of paper that had once held it fast to the small metal rings. The last day of school indeed.

Summer came and went, soft sounds of adolescent burbled through our veins, things were changing fast, the nineteen seventies were over and the eighties were now unfolding in our lives fueled by teenage hormones that would dictate our collective lives for the remainder of the decade. The sounds coming from the uptown record shops were changing, chugging and whirling sounds of electrical guitars popped through the air of Haffa’s and the newly opened School Kids Records, punk rock had settled in firmly in the small college town, and mixed with the early sounds of hip-hop, the cold disco beats of a disintegrating club scene in NYC and England, the air was electric and from a thirteen-year old’s perspective as wide open as the universe. Reagan had not yet launched his assault on defunding every government program to help the poor and middle class, AIDS had not been named, therefore it was mostly a hidden scourge the was quickly burying homosexual men on the coasts—it had not yet torched the gay community in the Midwest. The school year of 81-82, was a step towards adulthood, albeit in the clumsiest manner a boy of thirteen could muck his way into. Sex was a mystery, one that was witnessed through the eyes of R rated movies like Porky’s, Animal House and The Rocky Horror Picture show, funny and confusing situations that played out on giant canvas screens in our tiny town. Snickering in the back row, the boys were brave, puffing out meager chests, pretending we weren’t virgins while wondering what a vagina actually felt like let alone an orgasm. Acne popped out of faces like dandelions overnight and the fear of being discovered was played out every morning in choosing out the most looking casual outfit that was planned with early-morning anxiety that produced buckets of tears in many households. Eighth grade. A big step and at the time, there were kids in Athens County, whose parents never finished the eighth grade, as the importance of a college education was not yet baked into the national consciousness.

Pro-Ked sneakers grew smooth as I slummed all over the town, bouncing from record store to record store, arcade to arcade and people in town started to know my name, stepping from beneath my older brother’s shadow, finally gaining confidence as the year went by. Classwork wasn’t too difficult with the exception of math, where an undiagnosed learning disability started trickling in fear and self-doubt about my academic abilities, and many of the teachers were receptive to my dark and sarcastic humor with the exception of the curly haired science teacher, who hung a large smooth wooden paddle on the wall behind the aquarium. A silent statement about who was in charge. And Mr. Davis, who taught math, a double-whammy for a kid who played Dungeons and Dragons, couldn’t sit still and had trouble keeping his mouth shut. Sitting in the middle of the class for most of the year, staring out the window as cars rolled by, birds sang songs that mocked the children sweltering in the broiling classroom, there was no air conditioner in the building, until finally the last day of school arrived. I had made it, not one issue in Mr. Davis’s class, the plan for the entire year was not to talk. Ever. And on that last day of school, I thought that this girthy foul man did not even know my name, I was proud and excited, the eighth grade dance would be that night and I had a date.

I sat in my chair, it was the first class after lunch, mid-May and the sun baked the grass outside, cicadas were escaping from their fifteen-year slumber, their chirping sounds of lust filled the air. An insect choir singing for all the children, a cacophony of sexual urges by bugs stuck to the sides of trees, trembling against the rough bark for all of adolescences on the final day of school. The hallways were polished, set for a summer of sleep where no small feat could rub the sheen away, rubber soles upon the floor would instead be traded for thin flip-flops and bikinis at the local pool, where small gestures of kindness could propel a teenager into roiling states of awkwardness. Crumpled bits of paper, lined the corners of the hallway as lockers were cleaned out in hurried rushes, as if the process of tossing old assignments out as quickly as possible would rid our lives of all the anxiety they once inspired. “Fuck ya’all”, went the thought as notebooks were emptied out into circular metal trash bins. Going years without a diagnosis, living with ADHD is at once thrilling and at other times a jumbled mess of panicked moments and feelings of inadequacy, at times the shame and self-loathing are as heavy as trying to pull a tireless semi-truck. Filled with boulders. As big as the trucks hauling them. Massive. Big. Large. Thick.

Mr. Davis was my math teacher in 8^th grade, leaning nothing in the class except to realize that I sucked at math (again, the learning disorder that wasn’t diagnosed until I was in my mid-thirties). But it was the final day of school, it had passed without once being a target for his brutal teaching methods, his classroom was built upon fear with him pulling out that wooden paddle and tapping it on his large cracked leather feet. His personal life must have been one of misery. Mr. Davis did very little to educate the children under his responsibility and his lack of concern for the education of the children in his classroom was palatable even to the young eyes of early teenagers. If we were flies, he would have pulled off our wings.  As the students would enter his classroom, the large man would peer at each one, dark eyes half shut would scan every child up and down—needing no practice for intimidation as the small folds of skin above his eyes would strike fear in every child who entered his classroom. It was a talent he no doubt relished. But on this, the final step of a long journey of middle school had reached its apex with nary an issue, somehow despite a proclivity to draw attention to myself I had made myself small the entire year in this behemoth’s classroom. This trait of staring down young children, I have learned, is quite common among intimidating teachers. A trait that some regard as a talent while others feel it no room in a place of learning.

The desks were small, with a small plank of wood used for the top, it was connected by a green metal arm to the chair, itself another hardened piece of wood that had caused great unrest to little narrow butts over the past forty years. Underneath the chair was a small cubby where a student could stash books, notebooks or a miniature backpack, but on this day, the final day of school there were no books, papers or backpacks to stash. It was the second to last class of the day, a trembling sigh of relief hung over the hallways and classrooms from the 400 students. Usually, I sat towards the back of the classroom, it was more ubiquitous and for a small kid like myself it was easy to huddle behind all of the bigger boys in the class and at this point in my life all the boys were bigger than me. Alas, all the chairs were taken when I danced into the room, just under two hours to go and we had the 8^th grade dance that evening. Perhaps the burgeoning awaking within my body played even a larger role in the giddy anxiety I felt, as I had a date with a very pretty brunette girl who no doubt was as nervous as I was. Even in the days, it was hard to believe that any female would be nervous around a boy, working hard to maintain whatever sliver of cool I had and usually plugged my hands into my pocket and cracked wise. As I skidded towards the lone remaining seat I apologized to Mr. Davis as I was a few minutes late after helping to set up the cafeteria for the dance.

“You’re still late BKK, and if it wasn’t the last day of school, that would earn you a detention. Now just sit there and shut up until the end of the period.”

“But Mr. Davis, I was with Ms. Anderson helping  to set up the dance.”

“I said SHUT UP and put your head down!”

Placing my head down and looking sideways, I saw my friend Danny Abdella sitting next to me, he made a wide eyed face, his eyebrows arched high, staring at me as if to tell me that this was no time to act up. Smiling, I pointed my finger at Danny, making like a gun with my fist, I pulled the trigger. Suddenly I was lifted out my chair, in one fell swoop Mr. Davis flipped me into the air, all 80 pounds of me, hitting the floor he kicked me over the smooth wood towards the far corner, “I told you not to move, not to talk, not to do anything! Now get up and stand in the corner!” his voice lurched above my fear. A pitch black shadow covering my emotions. Hunkering in the corner, fat tears crawling down my soft boyish face, I eyed the window. It was half-way open, “it’s what maybe six feet to the ground, I can jump out and run to mom’s office, he would never catch me.” The soft green grass beckoned, a six-foot jump was safer than being in the room with the bearded brute. Bees flew from soft white flowers while the wind made tempting waves upon the green carpet. Cars drove by, and college students walked the sidewalk, feeling a kinship with them I suddenly yearned to be old, to be strong and to be big enough to fight back. In the end, I wept softly in the back of the classroom, all the children’s eyes upon me and after the bell rang, I hurried out of class away from the hesitations of my friends, as if approaching me would put themselves in harm’s way.

Making my way to the cafeteria was a blur, wanting to run as far as away from the school, exiting the wide glass doors, up the concrete steps towards the gymnasium I felt sick. Nausea had replaced the fear that had choked the breath from my throat, confusion bounced around my head as feet didn’t need a command to take me towards safety. Behind me I heard my name, “Bela, Bela, wait up!” Turning my brother stood in front of me, “we gotta call mom, if you leave then nothing will get done and she can meet you out here.” If anything, he was usually right, “O.K., but I’m not going back in there unless mom is with me.” Zoltan called our mother from the payphone in the cafeteria doorway, I slinking his head between the door and the corner of the black and silver metal phone, it was fastened into the wall as if someone may try to steal it and every teenage secret it no doubt stored amongst it green, red and white wires. The spiral metal cord wrapped around his finger, the phone call took a least two weeks to finish. A few moments later, he hung up, taking me by the elbow he guided me outside. “She’s on her way, she is going to meet up by the gym. I told her you were too scared to go back into the school.”

There is nothing like seeing a mother come to the rescue, her short red hair and confident walk comforted me but in the end I was ashamed, and it wasn’t until she pulled me in tight to her waist and kissed the top of my mussed hair did I let myself feel again. More droplets of water escaped my eyes as I described what happened, “We are going to talk to Mr. Smith about this.” Mr. Smith, was the principal, a short stocky man with a full Grizzly Adams gray beard, his daughter was in my grade and they went to the same church as us. Entering the office my mother asked to see him and he ushered us in, closing the door his first words were, “why didn’t you come straight to me?” “I was scared. I wanted to go home.” I meekly replied. Looking down the barrel of the past 35 years, it makes sense, as the school did nothing when Mr. John Davis manhandled my brother the year before and broke the arm of another kid. “Well, I want an investigation Donald!” my mother was angry, “and I’m taking Bela home now, we can talk next week.” The short fat man, held his hands together, parsing his words he was careful, “Susan, if Bela leaves now he will only be counted a half day and he can’t attend the dance tonight.” He stared across the desk from me, “that is the rule of the school and I can’t override it but if you want to stay you don’t have to go to your last class you can stay in my office until the end of the school. There is only about 45 minutes’ left.” With a small voice I pleaded with my mother, “that’s not fair, he beat me up, and now I have to stay. I already have my ticket to the dance and I’m taking Coleen.” “Sorry, rules are rules” Mr. Smith replied. “This does not seem to be fair, he is upset and there is no reason he shouldn’t be able to return for the dance.” “If he leaves school now, he can’t return tonight.” In the end, full of weary fear, and stress I stayed, I returned to school that night for the final dance of the year. Less than two weeks later we moved from Athens to Catawba, Ohio. There was no investigation.

Northeastern High School basically consisted of five hallways, one story, a cafeteria, and gymnasium. It was a small school, surrounded by cornfields and a pockmarked gravel lot for the handful of beat up cars and pick-up trucks. The majority of teachers in the school had been there for years, and many had been born in the area, attended nearby colleges and returned. Besides a handful of excellent teachers such as my freshman and sophomore English teacher, Jon Barber it was safe to say that many of them did not encourage intellectual curiosity. The guidance counselors were lacking in skills having told both Zoltan and I were not “college material” and we should think about trade schools. Walking through the doors for the first time felt like a prison sentence, as I overheard hushed voices whispering “did you see that new kid, with the funny name, is he even old enough to be in high school?” or “I bet that kids a fag with a name like that.” Climbing into books helped, fantasy stories, history books and Kurt Vonnegut provided the relief that was a life outside the gold and red cinder block walls of Northeastern High School. Retreating into the shyness of my younger adulthood, I kept my head down but being an adolescence with Attention Deficit Disorder was an obstacle as it one-liners fell forth out of my mouth without nary a thought to hold it back, a quick quip is worth every ounce of punishment. The freshman science teacher, Mr. Stevens was a younger man, he looked a bit like a boyish Mr. Keaton from “Family Ties” with parted wispy hair and sometimes he caught hold of one my jokes and half smiled, giving me the impression that he actually liked me. Other times, he asked me to sit in the front or to wait outside of the classroom to gather myself if I was too excited and bouncy. One day we were working with some sort of acid, using thin eyedroppers we were to put dab of the acid on various organic and inorganic items such as a hardboiled egg, the skin of a dried lizard, and wood. We worked in teams, two or three of us, each placing the acid on the item and the others recording the results. Very pedestrian stuff unless the student has a difficult time following directions because he can’t focus. Jeff Entler had the luxury of testing the frog skin, a small billow of smoke rose out of the dried reptile, he handed me the small glass container, carefully I put the eyedropper in, mindful of the oversized plastic gloves and how they made a clumsy boy more clumsy and squeezed the small black rubber top on the white springy egg. I had misjudged as I placed the end of the eyedropper directly onto the egg, a small amount of acid shot out from the sides, like a cherry tomato popping in an open mouth. It squirted into my face, and my eyes, luckily the protective goggles protected my forehead and black curly hair as I had forgotten to pull them over my eyes. Importunely for my eyes, a small amount landed right on my below my eyes, “shit!” I yelled, as Jeff called for the teacher, who rushed over and with astute thinking lead me to a small sink and rinsed out my eyes and face. Remarkably, it did not hurt too much and it all happened in a matter of seconds. “Thank you” I said, being a little nervous, grabbing me by my wrist he hustled me into the hallway. “What that hell are you doing to my classroom?! You could go blind fooling around with that stuff!” Clutching my collar, he threw me against the lockers, “If I could kick your ass right now, I would you little shit! I didn’t like you the minute you walked in my classroom and if I could get you out of my class I would!” Mr. Stevens then shoved me against the locker a second time. “Not again” I thought. Being a little older, I defended myself, “Mr. Stevens I was not fooling around, you can ask everybody at the table, I was doing what you said to do.” Wrestling the goggles off my forehead, yanking my hair in the process, “Bullshit, because if you did you would have these on your face! Listen, I want you to stay out in the hallway for the rest of the class and to shut your little mouth for the rest of the year.” “yes, sir.” Learning from my previous encounters from angry aggressive teachers, I never said a thing. Why would I?

Tucked in the corner, beneath a hand-drawn map of the world, and next to a wooden shelf that was exclusively built for LP records, with the top shelf constructed to hold roughly 100 7” singles, cover’s facing out for easy flipping but now holding one shelf devoted to Star Wars, Pokémon and the original dog-eared Charlie Brown paperbacks that Zoltan and I learned to read with sits two small guitars. One is an acoustic purchased with love by an adoring grandfather and the other, a small red Fender Stratocaster, which is housed in a stainless steel stand, and when the light hits just right, both the guitar and red guitar twinkle like specks of glitter on a girl’s face. There are actually three of those shelves lined together, all stuffed with tiny cubbies, books, baseball cards, guitar picks, stuffed animals that provide comfort when the maple tree branches thump against the green colored garage, reminding the neighborhood throughout a stormy blackened night that, yes, nature is still in charge and is something to rile the fear out of a small boy tucked under a mountain of blankets. On the other wall, a framed Spider-Man puzzle given away by a musician friend and tacked up around the room are a bevy of silk-screened rock posters, all hand made with the names of the everyman musicians that dot my record collection: Karl Hendricks Trio, The Whiles and Dinosaur Jr. At first impression the room looks just like a youngster’s room, the Pokémon shelf, the Charlie Brown, the hand-drawn pictures of mom and dad, sister too, even the lines drawn against the far wall marking age with lead pencil lines as the children in the house climb higher and higher over the years, an inch here and another inch there. Then the other items, the rock posters, the guitar, the line of Christmas lights, hung carefully along the walls, and some tools scattered on the floor. These are not little kid tools, but the adult flavor, heavy made of metal and heavy plastic and Bruno knows how to use them. He can spend hours outside making ladders, stages for his drums and guitars, a fort that never quite makes it past floor level, for his seventh birthday he wanted a toolshed. Every day when our friend Mike came out and built it, Bruno was outside helping, watching, carrying wood, holding the sides up and in the end helping to paint it. The kid has more tools than his father.

Children bring the world into a perspective that is never imagined, it’s as if a person lived their entire life living underwater. In the dark. And suddenly they are thrust of above the waves, into the shimmering sun, pulled from a cold and blurry life into one of brilliant colors and yes, choppy waves. One may not know one has ever been drowning until they can suck in the air, that is what life can be like for an alcoholic who discovers sobriety, and children. Some of the elements we look for as adults are the ones that we felt we had to find as teenagers, sex, intimacy, and the feeling of not being alone, and for a while, they come easy and at other times they come desperately, a three am desperation with trembling fingers and awkward pauses that break through the brittle darkness like darts aimed at the moon. Usually falling short, but at times, charming in their feeble attempt. My children did this for me, and slow process of time management, sacrifices, with the mundane being the gravity that holds they family together. Such as the yearning for a crying child to finally fall asleep, transforming from a screaming, shrieking animal caught in the bear-trap of its mind, into the soft salve for a violent universe. Bruno, cracks wise, he has a sense of humor that stands wise and cutting that makes one think he is a very old soul, like his sister who reads books that aren’t always age-appropriate and listens to the Mountain Goats alongside Taylor Swift. When he runs across the soccer field a determined look across his face, his blond curls dangling past his shoulders, it’s as if I was there with him, living a childhood I never had. The joy that dances from his cheeks is as infectious as lighting dotting the dark summer sky, brilliant flickers of white energy that booms across the landscape. Bruno has arrived.

One never thinks that a child’s life can be broken by the inner violence of an adult, unless you are the child that is licked by the adult or at times a parent that feels the hidden experience of abuse sideways, when it erupts in small earthquakes. What I understand as a parent is that it is my job allow that child to be a child for as long as he can be, no matter what and by doing so, he will always be a child on the inside.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcCXUzZWWpY&list=PLFBEA5C8D8536B1F0&index=13

he can play this on his guitar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsadA1n-V9Q

Above photo: Randy Newman signing autographs for my children at The Nelsonville Music Festival.