She died 11 miles from her house, the week before she said she wanted to stay home as her children visited, her husband tending to her every need. Exhausted, Steve wasn’t sleeping much as he watched his wife slowly sink into her bed, her body twisting into itself as if were parchment paper tossed into a fire. Just a month before her death, Steve was diagnosed with liver cancer something he had somewhat expected due to a long-term IV drug habit that he kicked over 35 years ago with the help of my mother. They met in treatment; she was an administrator who chipped in running groups and he was a patient. They fell in love quickly, something that was not supposed to happen and married a few years later. She had helped him recover from a life of alcohol, drugs and being as wayward as a person could be without going prison, jail—yes, but nothing more. He told us, his somewhat adopted adult children through tears shortly before her death—“your mother gave me a family I thought I would never have, a family I never thought I deserved.” His devotion to my mother was immense, a true bodhisattva whose purpose was to provide comfort for his wife. Unlike her children, Steve was hopeful until that last week when his exhaustion caught up with him, when the Hospice worker told him that there was really nothing more to do, and like the exhaustion Steve felt within his body, his emotional and spiritual self, they had exhausted everything that was possible to extend her life. Her life had been a slow drip into oblivion, at times due to the lack of oxygen her brain was getting. She was childlike, pointing at things outside her window, on her walls, remembering memories that one would have thought had long dissipated with the rolling of the years. Then when the internal bleeding she had been suffering from got under control and her oxygen level returned she would be a woman in pain, in sporadic moments able to ask her grandchildren questions in a weakened voice and then yelling at Steve to give her some pain medication, water or any sort of comfort.
Her body grew more limp, she was accumulating bed sores and rashes, it took two of us to roll her over, to change her into comfortable clothing, the mother who was morphing into an infant before her children’s eyes. When hospice came with their transport, she realized she was leaving, “don’t let them take me, Steve.” We reassured her, told her we would try to bring her home soon and she nodded, gently trying to hold onto her hands. I sang her “Go Tell Aunt Rhoady” and she smiled and squeezed my hand, “you were always her favorite” my sister joked while my mom smiled a mischievous grin. “Not true” she breathed, a wisp of voice escaping her oh-so-dry mouth. She could no longer swallow, so Steve and my sister would insert water with a small thin dropper or put a little crushed ice below her tongue. She has sores in her mouth and her teeth were hurting, the body that had carried her for so many years was shutting off the lights.
Steve had taught himself to use a lift and pully to put her in a wheelchair, rolling her out into the living room or the patio so she could watch the birds they both loved so much. “They are better than TV” Steve joked to me, he had become more enamored with nature as he grew older, at times watching the small cameras various research groups had attached to Bald Eagles, Hawks and Owls nests in the wild, he would show these to my son who would call me and tell me about his grandfather’s fascination with watching these winged animals tend to their young. He taught my sister who was spending hours at the house to help roll her over, wash her and administer her oxygen. When I was there, I helped with these things, and just talking with my mother who was resisting death every step of the way, including a refusal to discuss what was happening with her. “I don’t want to talk about bad things” she would murmur. All the while Steve was struggling with his own health, at first, the prognosis for his cancer was good. The tumor was (thought to be) small and operable. And if not, he would be eligible for a liver transplant by summer if the tumor would shrink. He was hopeful as we all were, and after my mother passed away, he turned back into some of the things that she would get upset about. Mostly playing music incredibly loud, he listened to the music of his younger years, The Rolling Stones, the Velvet Underground—especially the noisy “White Light White Heat” album, Bob Dylan, Patti Smith as well as the raggedy blues of Blind Willie McTell, Lighting Hopkins. The dissonant sounds of Alfred Schnittke and Dimitri Shostakovich shook the house, no doubt there were days when he was playing these classical composers louder than anybody else in the United States at that moment.
Steve died in March, all of the treatment we had been holding onto were either not possible or failed, it was not unexpected but the gravity of his death has been—while he was my stepfather he was a centering force in the lives of our family. More than my mother I struggle with expecting him to pick up the phone, or to send me a link to a new favorite piece of music he discovered or knowing if I needed anything I could just reach out. I miss his wisdom, I miss his smile and even the way he ordered pizza, always going overboard to make sure everybody was satisfied.
Since the fall of 2021 I have been living In between the gears of a watch that is scrapping and tracking time in the increments of moments, with a worry that I thought only happened to some but would not fling itself at my door and into the mechanisms of my mind. There are days when I feel as if I am living life behind a screen door, fingers gently touching the small metal windows that form both an opening and a barrier to the world. If I lean in close, I can see through one, breath in the outside world and feel I can be a part of it. When I got sober, I wondered if I would ever laugh again, that one of the benefits of alcohol was the ability to laugh outrageously, the idea of sobriety meant that the world would turn from Techni-color to grays, blacks and whites. Of course, I was mistaken and soon I was laughing more than ever, never having to force a laugh—I became more comfortable with myself. When I met my partner, we laugh and we continue to do so, she is one of the funniest people I know, a wit that comedy writers would be envious of—I have counted on her to lift be through the screen but I have a guilt that my wit has been subdued, dulled by the fact that I have continued to feel so much loss and the continual worry that has settled in. I do the things I have always done, the things that have worked, meditate, exercise, walk, music and of course, write although the writing is darker—trying to make that screen made up of hundreds of wired windows into something else, of cutting the screen out. My mother has been dead over a year, on this day, my second birthday without my mother and the first Father’s Day without Steve I am thinking of them. Thinking how my mother would write me a $50 check every birthday, and the last one she wrote for me she giggled and said, “sorry I write like an old woman now. I guess I am one.” Imma going to make sure I laugh today.
When the sunshine brings itself into the house, dust floats both up and down, circling the room as if air were water and each particle was a miniature fish swimming through the living room, the dining room and everywhere—it is teeming with dust. There is little anything to do about it, the old apartment had a furnace at least forty years old, parts of it incased in asbestos and one reason the rent is so cheap is because of the effort it would take replace it. We all die every moment, some die just faster than others. Have at it asbestos spewing machine. The flowers add color to the shelves and stacks of books, the walnut furniture and, of course, the giant wall of records and compact discs that line the walls of the dining room. They demand attention, and why not-they most likely have saved my life on many occasions. Lifting my mood or matching it, tiny grooves brought to life by a needle and electricity. I have heard that the majority of dust is human skin, my house would seem to have the skin of every inhabitant that has ever walked the scuffed wooden floors the past hundred years, long after people die parts of then literally continue to swim around us.
There are days that tug at me from the inside, pulling around the ankles of whatever it is that rests and propels me forward. A soul? A conscious? A sub-conscious? A river of tiny electrical outlets connected by cells and nerves inside my body? A tug this severe can be an ache, and over the years, it started around the age of nineteen, hit several peaks when I was twenty-one, thirty-three and fifty—these peaks towered above me, but they were the edge of annihilation, like wind slicing through the branches—the ache can be violent or soft, almost undetectable except for the small wisps of the leaves. It is those moments I crave, when it is silent, more of a whisper than an insurrection in my mind—repeating itself like a 100-person choir coming to the chorus now. I have resisted joining the choir for most of my life, and at other periods the metaphorical church doors were closed and my hope was that it was demolished, wiping out the sounds. The Depression (it deserves a capital D) was planted in me before I was born, like cicadas already burrowed deep in the ground before my parents even met, it has existed in our family genes much longer than I can even guess—and for some in our family it has sprouted inside of us as if it were a doomsday vine, roots growing inside, and as we have aged so has the vine, its arms reaching deep into our psyche and some of our experiences sprout new buds. At various times in my life, I have been able to prune it, through love, through mediation, music, writing, running and through the past two years walking several miles every day. But the roots are there, entangled at my core, one person I know compared it to a giant pool of black water that feels I am drowning in.
The asphalt basketball court at East Elementary was baking from the spring time heat, balls were bouncing in an out of the baskets, in the far corner of the court, a small courtyard held a particularly vicious game of dodge-ball, the thick plastic red ball with its red bumpy exterior, zinging unlucky victims—red welts a testament to their lack of mobility, being slow on an elementary school playground can be a deadly trait. The hill at the other end of the court dipped down into the swings, the monkey bars and a giant half buried tractor-trailer tire that smelled of urine and the fidgety moments of first kisses traded after lunch. I had been a quiet child, moving every year had taught me to be silent, wary of friendships and I was always the smallest kid in my class—shy—I tended to stay to myself, keeping myself fortified with Marvel comic books and my early interest in the records I started collecting in third grade. The baseball field was dotted with fourth and fifth grade boys, swinging wooden bats—trying to impress girls and the other boys by knocking a leather ball out of the infield. I stayed back, if it were football season, I would have partaken in the boys’ games but, being small, uncoordinated with limited hand-eye coordination left me quite happily on the sidelines. There, on the side of the black sheet of play I found a voice that I would come to rely on for most days of my life. Several teachers, including Ms. Houska who would vacillate between calm and empathetic to being witchy and loud was there along with one of the student teachers, a blonde woman whose name is long gone and may well be a granny at this point, and of course, there were the other kids who didn’t play dodgeball, basketball, baseball or want to hang on monkey bars and had outgrown the metal swings the past few years. These were, for the most part- girls. In this moment, I developed an instant character, a sort of hippie who spoke in a high-pitched voice and while I didn’t really know what marijuana was, I pretended I was high-my voice a high-pitched sing-song voice—they all cackled. The student teacher doubled over in laughter, and as we sauntered back into class, I felt charged, a bit tired but excited. Several of the girls, one of whom I had a fourth-grade crush on remarked how funny I was, and I felt her eyes on me. From that day forward, I used humor to help placate the sense of isolation, an outsider in my own world that would later take the already seeds of depression into those blossoming vines that would later wrap and choke my life.
The clatter of the plates, knives, forks, a vase full of flowers surprised my first wife—“what the fuck is wrong with you?!” she screamed, our entire relationship was one long scream, her screaming, my screaming back at her, the broken bits of our house and squealing of tires. “You are fucking with me! Get off my fucking back!” I yelled back, shards of glass and ceramic on the floor— “Watch your step! You broke my plates! What the fuck?” tears streaming down her face, hands against the table-holding herself up. “Our plates, they are our plates!” I yelled back at her as I scrambled for keys and slammed the door shut. Soon, she would move out, the failed experiment of our short lived (more like deathbed) marriage abandoned in that small two-bedroom house on East Patterson Street. “You ruined my life” she said as her friends from work hauled out furniture, she got the keys to my small white Metro, and I was relieved that it was all I lost, the failure of the relationship sat on a throne in the back of my skull.
The months that followed were a period of shrill fear that I skidded through, nights at various bars, my bedroom floor littered with clothes and records, there were bottles of beer on every piece of furniture in my room, cigarette butts that had burned the corner of my dresser, the table next to my bed—somehow I was never alone—the feeling of being alone brought a desperation that motivated me out of my house. I was a wanderer in a five-block radius. I soon fell in love, and that relationship lasted over twenty years—with chaos, another dip into the deep black water that almost drank me up—a night in a motel contemplating the metal of a gun in my mouth that turned into sobriety that I still live today. There were trips all over country, to Europe which felt like a home I never really had, a house and of course, two children. That marriage ended in 2018, a period where the blackness came oozing to the top and although I was sober, I felt bereft of myself. At times, I would wake up in my bed, my small dog snuggled next to me turn my head and weep into my pillow—I forced myself to work, to exercise and to show up. She and I talk frequently, we have too—the children we created are the center of our lives, and when we part—sometimes we hug and the love the built the children is there, different of course-but there—and it stretches outward into the kids lives, dreams morph, like clouds and I am ok with this. When I see my children, I see all the love I ever feel walking, talking, making me laugh and of course, causing me worry.
Depression is something that is like a fog, but a fog filled with monsters, it pours outward like a gushing waterfall that heads for the ocean. At times it has felt like there is a snake trying to get out of my throat, but it slithers inside of me, choking me and it finally decides to stay, coiling inside of my guts waiting to spring out when the opportunity arises. Suicide is something that some people live with on an everyday basis, a taste that will not leave– like the bitterness of a lemon, but it never leaves. Add some sugar it makes it easier, but it only dilutes the acid. I get jealous of the branches on the trees that I stare outside my window, I imagine their bravery as the wind whips and rattles them year after year, and when the sun is out they drink it is as if they had never tasted shine before. Their roots hold them solidly, growing up into the sky and deep into the earth and then I walk in the woods and I notice the ones the collapsed under the weight of living too long, the wind catching it just right or a crack of lightening choosing to crawl up its spine and it lays on the soft floor of the forest, for the rest of the trees to see, it’s carcass now a home to insects, moss and critters. Of course they are just trees, with no mind to think of these thoughts that I transfer onto them. They have no eyes to see but they do feel in some ways, their roots communicating in what is called mycorrhizal networks, a language of survival they chatter to one another through fibers intertwining with one another, finding nutrients, water and the ability to let other roots where stones may be a barrier. The complexities of this provides hope, an opportunity to feel small for it is when I am small that I can experience the world, when feeling too full a person can’t learn any more. There is no room.
A friendly nod, followed by a cold bottle of beer being pushed my way, the cool condensation streaming down its sides was a comfort. An easy way to feel differently, to slip into something else from what I wanted, and predictable. For certain I knew what would happen when I tilted the bottle to my mouth, first the small smell of the alcohol seeping into my nose and quickly followed by the beer. I always took a long drink, letting the beer go directly to the back of my throat, my ability to drink almost half of the beer in one long drag off the bottle was a practice, my mouth craved the cold bath of five p.m. I learned without ever thinking of it. Most of my regular bartenders usually had another one set up by time I could even position myself on the bar stool. Putting the bottle down in front of me, the taste still in my mouth, fermented with a touch of sting, I could already feel the change in my body—it was as if my brain was telling my body to have a head start, the buzz started almost immediately. Twenty years later and I can still taste the beer on my lips, the scent still buried in my mind. Sometimes it feels like I was drinking yesterday. The club was always open in my mind, living near a college campus in the middle of a large city provided shortcuts that gave myself permission to duck away, to squeeze a few minutes of change that was needed, or so I thought at any given moment but usually I only allowed this to happen in the late afternoon. In my perception, I was a disciplined drinker. Eventually if I didn’t treat it, I grew grumpy, agitated and morose—these were the danger zones, an internal DMZ that could prove dangerous for my partner and myself. Drinking was a slow courting, eventually we were married, the bottle(s) and I, although for me it was a private matter that I tended to announce publicly. The Anyway Records tee-shirts during this time had an unofficial slogan on the back, “Buy Me a Beer” which was our joyous secret handshake to one another and for those who didn’t get it, well that was the point. But like all relationships, they must change, or they become dry, brittle and bitter by the time I was in my early thirties, with a gathering pile of dead friends and brokenness gathering around my path and with my own love story headed towards an oily ditch I had to make a choice.
At the edge of the slim hospital bed at the Shands detox center in Gainesville Florida, I grappled with the fact that it might be time to break-up with alcohol, which was terrifying as most break-ups are, and I was a person who avoided confrontation, plus I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. Who would take my place of the various barstools in Columbus, Athens and to a lesser extent, Gainesville? What would those bartenders do when they pushed a Black Label towards and empty seat, I was creating ghosts. There were the conversations I was having with myself, in retrospect it was both silly and tragic, this is where my behavior had taken me—constructing make-believe scenarios around liquid. But it was scary and coupled with depression and the burgeoning sense that a big part of my identity (I had tee-shirts made for Christ’s sake!), was being discarded, I was not only petrified but also on very shaky ground. Although later that night in the large cafeteria a sea of alcoholics, sitting on hard plastic chairs, sipping coffee from small Styrofoam cups, mixed with powder cream and packets of sugar that always seemed to spill half of their contents on the fake wooden fold up tables, I was offered and accepted hope. Although these small saplings of optimism were like virga, precipitation that evaporates before it hits the ground. So, the trick was to make sure that I had to feed the clouds so to speak, every day before the entire clouds of promise vanished. My years of going to bars, nightclubs and pubs had oddly equipped me with some of the behaviors I would use to stay sober, mostly that while a depressed introverted sort, I really liked being with other people, albeit at a distance, sometimes that unspoken space was a bottle of beer or two inches of Maker’s Mark. I used this learned behavior, the one that allowed me to feel invisible to do something different, to show up—to become a vessel that could water the cloud. Even though I very seldom trusted myself, my inability to fully understand my motivations was naked, raw and I borrowed other peoples, or should I say I copied it. After a year or so of sobriety, I investigated Buddhist practices, mostly meditation but did a great deal of reading and journaling—-and they worked, for many years afterwards, the depression left, evaporated into nothing. There would be moments of lucidity where I noticed the emptiness of where the depression had been like noticing a scar that has dissolved over time, and the relief I felt was an akin to a giant metaphysical sigh.
The rate of suicide attempts for children of parents who have completed suicide is 400% higher than those whose parents don’t complete suicide, and for people who experience a suicide in their lives, with friends and other family members there is a spike and it isn’t uncommon to see small mushroom clouds of despair that surround a completed suicide, the waves reach out and tap everybody within its orbit and then they too ripple around. If the person is a public figure the ripples continue far into the future, and for most these people it is the first remembrance of that person’s life, more so than even their greatest achievements whether it be music, acting or politics. The act provides a quiet permission that taking one’s own life is an option, it operates like a virus—thus the shame people feel when it is an ever-running option in their minds, as well as the shame for the people surrounding them. There is judgement, self and by others that presents itself as a solid stone mountain for dealing with those thoughts and especially the emotions that they come dressed in. Welcome to the Ball. For many substance users, for people that experience trauma and abandonment at an early age—we feel the actual physical environment differently than others, and this stems from an early age—we seek comfort from even the rooms we walk through and for me the primary one has been music, and it is the safest one. Even to this day, there is nothing more than I enjoy than driving my car listening to music and at times I want to sit in my partners drive way and hold her hand while I listen to Neil Young, Waxahatchee or any piece of music that comforts and inspires me, meanwhile she wants to get in the house, feed the kids, let the dog out, do things and I just want that little hand in mine and to listen. Or when I go to the gym, sit on the elliptical dance/running five or six miles to a soundtrack that I have created. I couldn’t not imagine living in the world pre-Walkman or phonographs. All those poor motherfuckers who lived before the mid-twentieth century, having to wait for wandering minstrels, or being able to afford orchestras—Jesus Christ how they must have suffered not knowing about the future of being able to listen to something whenever you wanted. But of course, it wasn’t just music I fell into to relieve my internal pain, it was alcohol, sex, the internet, buying things—even food—but all of them brought a different heat and different number of consequences, mostly feeding the black pool that has resided inside of me.
“Hurry up Bela, Jesus you are so slow,” Jenny was yapping at me while I looked for my car keys, summer was coming to a fast close, we were driving from Columbus to her hometown of South Vienna, I didn’t want to go—really had no intention of returning to anything that was near my high school. In my mind I had left the trappings of that building behind when I walked out the door just a few months earlier, and besides Jenny’s family and me soon to be divorced stepfather there was very little I wanted to see in that area save for a few friends. “I have your keys Nerdla!” she was already outside, yelling from the sidewalk—“C’mon!” While the fall brought the end of summer it also welcomed school, new friendships, football, and a change of clothing. She wore a short summer dress and sunglasses, her hair was still long—almost big but more scattered than most of the hairstyles that were so common in the mid to late eighties, mine was long and curly, I had not cut it for nearly seven months—since my senior pictures which was also the last time I have ever combed it. We drove the 40 minutes, listening to R.E.M. on the wheezing tape deck in my car, the fields of soy and corn waved and danced at us as we passed a forty-ounce Milwaukee’s Best between us, “should we stop and get another one?” she asked as she drank the last swig near London, Ohio. We sill had fifteen miles to go. “We can get some at Shoemaker’s” I said, referring to the now long closed supermarket in South Vienna. Jenny’s older sister worked there as her husband’s family owned it, years later after the giant Wal-Mart opened up six miles down the road the store came to a slow, sad and shuttering halt as if it were a slow-motion tumbleweed turning over in the wind. It was the annual South Vienna Corn Festival, something I had never attended while I was in high school, and while most of the other kids in school flocked to both the Corn Festival and the Clark County Fair, these were events that were a bit much too busy for me, if there is anything that makes an outsider feel more outside its an event that is filled with people. The more people there were, doing things I had no interest in the more I wanted to flee—-I’d rather be somewhere, anywhere else. But I was 18, in-love and so we went. Moving to rural Ohio from Athens, Ohio—yes, a small town but also a college town was difficult and in hindsight, almost traumatic for me—going from being able to walk everywhere, hang out in record stores, be privy to college students blaring music on their lawns while suntanning, drinking and laughing instilled the idea of a wider bigger and exciting world. I left Athens at the age of 14, in the early 80’s—and by that time I had discovered R rated movies—I had seen An American Werewolf in London, Apocalypse Now, and The Rocky Horror Picture Show, heard Bob Marley, The Clash, The Ramones and Devo. Suddenly I was transplanted into cornfields, and I felt like a scarecrow. At the Corn Festival I ran into my friend Chris Biester who was home for the long weekend from Ohio University, he had his guitar and played a few songs on the sidewalk—most notably “Sugar Mountain” which he explained was meaningful for him as he just turned twenty. At the time, on that hot September day—for those five minutes everything was alright, Chris’s voice and guitar held the air around me and while some of the passerby’s were no doubt looking askance at him, I never noticed. Twenty seemed far away from me even though I was 18, I would soon be stepping out of adolescence and Chris was already in adulthood. It was exciting, nerve wracking. I drank more beer.
The trips back to Western Ohio got less and less, in a few years Jenny and I had broken up—-she would return often as she struggled with homelessness and her mental health she would come back and stay with her mother—these were always short lived, maybe a week or two at best. One time, when she returned from an ill-fate trip to Miami where she had convinced an old bar-fly friend to fly her down to escape the streets of Columbus, a trip the ended with her being forced into Jackson County Memorial Hospital after being found wandering around delusional and drunk, I picked her up at the Columbus airport. “Well. I don’t think I can go back to Miami—there is nothing there for me. Not sure what I’ll do but I can stay with mom for a while.” Shortly though, she was back in Columbus—ducking in and out of Bernie’s and North Campus bars and taking up refuge in the ravines of Clintonville. “I can’t stay in South Vienna” she said one day as we walked towards the Tim Horton’s that sat between my house and her tent, “I’d rather be on the street than feel cooped up there.” “Maybe just staying with your mom would be good for you? You can quit drinking and there are less temptations?” “What if I don’t want to quit? Besides, there is nothing to do, just Mom’s boyfriend and the dog—what am I gonna do, work at Shoemaker’s?” Oddly, I saw her point. She had travelled all over the world, been to Europe countless times, lived in Spain for a few months, not as a student but she had run out of money and a kind Spanish woman welcomed her in until she finally got wrung out by Jenny being Jenny and bought her a ticket home. This was in the early nineties, another adventure Jenny had that peeled under the wheels of her life. Jenny had lived a million lives by the time she arrived at her mothers in 2005, broken and bent—she knew she was becoming a shell of her former self, the bits and cracks of her were dropping off of her everywhere, every night she went. “I love mom, but I’d rather take my chances in Columbus.”
There were times when we would talk, especially when she was really suffering—her skin bruised from the kind of living she did, she fell a lot—especially the last ten years of her life, not just from the alcohol but she was slowly using the use of her legs, she body thin from anemia and the inability of her to keep food in her body, it would erupt out of her when she tried to eat—it seemed she lived on vodka and Gatorade for most of her forties, “I can’t eat Bela, it doesn’t matter because I’m never very hungry.” Her hair was thinning, falling out in handfuls at times, the only part of her that seemed to be unchanged were her blue eyes, that still glowed while everything around them went dark, her body a leisurely collapse into nothingness, hers was like an abandoned village near Chernobyl, with only the trees still growing. She would look at me, disparage my depression as if I had some control over it, “I can’t understand why you want to die sometimes Bela, I just want to live soo much—-I wish I could still do the things I used to do.” She wore herself out trying to live, later—when she was near death, she told me just a few weeks before she died, the final almost continuous run of hospitalization was like a grotesque version of a baseball player’s hitting streak, “I can’t do this anymore, I just hurt so much. I don’t have it in me .” I could say nothing, just nod in silent agreement, she was battered—the thinness of her living had become too parched, the booze she had tried to quinch it with had only withered her insides.
Other times I would feel guilty when she said these things to me, as if I was robbing from her by being depressed, that one’s enthusiasm for living could be traded like a commodity. Later, I realized that moods are something I must learn to manage, that every day I drew away from my last drink was not always going to be better—I would have to encounter and persist through some dark times—but I knew if I had a drink it would allow the possibility of my inner doomsday machine to be activated. So, I haven’t. And I fill my days with laughter, regardless of how I might be feeling inside, I am always laughing, even alone—in the shower, on my walks, everywhere—I think if you know me, you know this much about me. I remarked to my partner recently that some people are like cut flowers, they sacrifice themselves to bring their beauty to others, cut at the stem, placed on a mantle, a coffee table, by the window for people to see-to smile, a courageous act. “There’s nothing courageous about it, they don’t have a choice to be cut—somebody just cuts them and sticks them in a vase.” Considering this, I thought about it, and just realized there is an acceptance then, it’s not aways a choice but there is beauty in existing and even in the slow melt of being in a vase, cut at the stem, brightly shining petals until they fall off. On March 8th, I will celebrate 20 years since my last drink.
“My father was a sonofabitch, I would dream that he would die.” Nick told me this while he held a cup of coffee in his hands, the smoke rising from it into his face, he blew the smoke away, look up and smiled. He had the beard of a homeless man, unkempt, looking like brambles or an evergreen shrub whose owner had quit venturing outside for years. Except with Nick he had done the opposite living on the streets and in a tent for the past fifteen years. “This is good coffee; how much was it?” I bought him the same coffee I drank, somewhat of a coffee snob I wanted Nick to experience something that offered a little bit more dignity that the instant coffee he was used to. “Three dollars but don’t worry about it.” Eyebrows raised, “Three dollars? Wow, I can buy an entire jar of Nescafe for that.” He blew on the coffee again and took a sip. “Yeah, my dad was a mean one…he’d take his frustration out on my mom and if she wasn’t around, he’d go after me—never my sisters. One time he broke my arm and I couldn’t go to school for a month. My aunt finally took me from him one day, this was the sixties—they didn’t do anything to help kids back then. It turns out my uncle was worse than my dad—at least my dad only hit me.” He lets the words hang in the air. He has deep blue eyes, that sparkle under his wiry eyebrows that look almost maniacal, sticking out in every direction. I suddenly feel the urge to trim them. Those eyes though, so sensitive and deep, the light glints off them and in flashes they are almost golden. He feels deeply. Nick talks freely with me, pausing at times to let me know he hasn’t told anybody about what happened—only his mother once when he was visiting her when he was in his late teens, “I pissed the bed until I was twelve and wouldn’t talk to my teachers, they thought I was retarded and put me in those small classes, but I read every day. Comics and then I discovered the Tarzan books—Edger Rice Burroughs, Jules Verne, Victor Hugo…I wasn’t dumb—I was just scared.”
For many years I worked with the homeless, mentally ill and tortured substance abusers—people whose childhood were filled with abuse more frightening than most movies, because the abuse came from not unknown monsters but the monsters of their families, the ones who were supposed to care for them, press their tears against the chest and drive the fright from their heads with kind words, a glass of milk and gentle kisses on the crown of their head. Instead, they planted the seeds of despair and fear in those young gentle minds, made of innocence and clarity—forever to be muddied and fearful—they grew up almost destined to a life of pain and confusion. “I didn’t have a girlfriend until I was twenty-eight and she went away, eventually she told me to choose between her and my drinking—you can see how that turned out.” His smile curves under the mass of hair the shrouds his face. He takes another sip of coffee.
Most evenings I walk my dog, she is a Jack Russell mix, over five years old but lives every moment as if she were just hatched; let out of a shell. She pulls so hard on the leash her body twists sideways, my girlfriend calls it the comma walk, I find her energy exhausting. Some nights I walk for almost two hours, leaving around 10 pm and sometimes not getting home until after midnight—I sleep better after the walks. Never a person of nature, I don’t hike I’d much rather be ten or fifteen minutes from home just in case I have the urge listen to a favorite record or crawl in the bathtub, and I am fearful of bugs and poison ivy, so I prefer the streets over dirt paths covered in tamped down growth. At one end of my street there is a small thatch of woods that border one of the two rivers that run through Columbus, and at the other end, the north of my street there is a long ravine that stretches for nearly a mile. A hidden gem in the heart of Columbus, sort of my own Central Park without the whole New York City part. And the hot dog stands. About halfway through the ravine if I plan it right, I encounter three owls, it is almost nightly—they screech and coo at one another sometimes they ride one of the long branches of the thin powerful trees that stretch towards the moon. The trees look like wiry basketball players soaring and stately in their muscly exteriors. The owls do a little line dance together, shuffling along the branch and leaning into one another, at times they look like they are whispering little jokes in their partner’s ears. I screech at them, while trying to keep the dog calm, I like to think they screech back to me but I realize they are talking amongst themselves and most likely mocking me in the unknown manner that animals must do all the time. We have our own thing going on. Other times on the walk I usually run across deer, who stand tight in small packs, nibling on bushes and trees and the front yards of people who make way more money than I ever will. Sometimes they look like yard ornaments they are so frozen, looking side eyed as I try to shush the dog and other times, they dance nimbly away, their massive bodies balancing on narrow hooves, they are the ballet dancers of the trees.
Never a walker, I found out in my twenties I was a runner both physically and metaphorically although staying in one city for most of my adult life provided me the illusion that there was something in me that stuck things out. Even being in a marriage for 18 years had convinced me I was not a quitter, but I was a runner, although the methods in which I learned to protect myself provided dangerous. The Buddhist Zen Priest Claude AnShin Thomas writes about the violence in all of us in his book, “At Hell’s Gate: A Soldier’s Journey from War to Peace”, a Vietnam veteran Claude AnShin came home broken, angry and eventually turned to drinking and found himself homeless until he went on a retreat with Tich Nach Hahn, eventually transforming his life—once an living instrument of violence to an instrument of peace. Being the way I am and being true to my DIY aesthetic as I was reading the book, shortly after it was released I got a hold of his publishing company and soon Claude AnShin and his aide were giving a workshop in Columbus and he advised me on not only Zen practice but on working with the own violence I grew up with, part of which was intoxicants I had ingested for years—a search of connectivity that left me barren as I limped and raged into my thirties. “You have to confront that within you” he told me as he ate unsalted popcorn from a large bowl. Sobriety was something still new to me as I look back, but I still had found and believed I had conquered it, I was two years sober—my mind clicking a fresh machine-reborn while I started reading books again, meditating, going back to college. “Oh, it goes much deeper than the alcohol” he chuckled, swirling his sun-burnt hands along the sides of the bowl, scooping up the last vestiges of tattered corn. I wasn’t sure what he meant.
“Dad you basically give us anything you want because you feel guilty” my daughter remarked to me a few weeks ago, she was setting the table, trying to space the plates out around the small round table so we call all squeeze in around it as we could only use 2/3 of the table. The other third was pushed against the wall, we could see the neighbor’s curtains perfectly, they could see into our dining room easily as I never bothered to hang curtains downstairs. And if they are unlucky they can catch a glimpse of me munching away on Cap’n Crunch naked at 3 am, as I blink and chew away the oblivion I feel in the middle of the night. “Well, maybe” I say, my girlfriend gives me a slight smile and raises her eyebrows, “she’s got a point” her eyebrows are telling me. We are eating carryout tonight, every week when I have my kids, I remind them I don’t have money to eat out and yet, most nights that is what we do—I not only cave to make them happy but I’m usually too tired to cook (which I enjoy). I try to explain to them, “When I was a kid we were poor, we never ate out and maybe got pizza once a month—if that. When your uncle Z and I lived with my dad we ate fifty cent pot pies, hot dogs or cereal for dinner most nights. My dad wasn’t around and when he was…he, well, wasn’t around. I want to give you guys what I didn’t have.” Which is true, mostly though I want my children to be supported and loved. Sometimes it is hard to do this.
Standing on my friend Tom Shannon’s porch in October of 2001 I was swaying a little bit to the music coming from the living room, maybe it was Love or Lee Hazelwood, Tom always preferred something older at home and the day drinking that led to early evening, then late evening allowed me to feel alive. There had been a show at Bernie’s, maybe Tom’s band The Cheater Slicks had played but we were gathered there on his porch and into the living room, and farther back -were people gathered into his small kitchen, crammed next to each other—moving sideways to get to the refrigerator to pull out a beer or to put a six pack in. The autumn wind felt like a perfect shadow on my drunken self. I had been living with Tom for a few months, my (now ex) wife had moved to Gainesville where she had started teaching fine arts at the University and I had stayed in Columbus feeling my life was glued to working in a record store which was all I had ever known as an adult. I was a thirty-three-year-old college drop-out. Perhaps more scared I’d get found out than wanting to get out of what I was stuck in. There was a woman I was chatting with, humor has always rolled out of me like concrete pouring out of the back of a concrete truck, she was laughing and touched my arm as she said she would be back but needed to fetch a beer. Suddenly from across the street a couple of large fraternity looking fellows were running down the sidewalk, bulldozing their way over the large plastic trash containers that lined the street. They were laughing as each tub of trash fell into the street, beer cans, tin cans and white kitchen garbage bags tumbled into the street and yards. Without thinking I leapt off the porch and scampered across the street when I tackled one of the men from the side, he crumpled to the sidewalk. All those years of wrestling practice usually paid off when I was fighting, some of the other folks from Tom’s house crossed the street and when I bent the lunkhead’s arm back he yowled and after a few minutes he agreed to pick up the trash he had knocked over. I think his friend was long gone. On the porch my friend Gene marveled at my ability to take on the bigger guy but while it may make for a funny-ish story in terms of my own small attempt at environment justice the underbelly of this encounter is that I’ve had a temper that I have not always been able to control but for many years felt justified in flexing it as I felt it was needed.
Waiting around for love felt like a flower waiting for a bee, knowing I would get stung, but the payoff was always worth it—although like the flower I realized that the bee would fly somewhere else, leaving a scar that, in some instances have remained but always have provided me the opportunity for retrospective. That mini brawl on Summit Street happened years ago, the person who flew across the street in drunken righteous anger metamorphosed into somebody else but inside there are kernels, rivulets of inner disturbance that move within me. Worry and anxiety can flood the rivulets, and like a ship captain that my know the waters around him but can’t control the water only navigate around the rocks, I try—sometimes successfully, other times it feels like I intentionally ramming my vessel into the craggy barnacle encrusted rocks. There are thumbprints inside of me, made from my father’s course words, from the anger that rode in waves inside of him until he would strike me—a hand across the face, his language brutal at times, the speeding of the car, dangerously accelerating through traffic—a whistle through his teeth as he seethed. I was scared of him, petrified but I tried for years to express the gentleness he was capable of showing, The clumsy, and oafish man who took us fishing, the immigrant who loved to sing along with Willie Nelson in his American made car, a father who would chuckle to himself at the buffoonery of Peter Sellers. I strived, in my own way to exercise that kind man out of him but at some point I realized that was like wanting to hold the sun. Eventually there was nothing left except the jingle of memories rattling around in my mind and the scars.
Last week I lost my temper, which as a parent happens, but there is a difference with me now from the man who cruised through my life, filled with alcohol and a moral high ground, not a healthy combination and I am a father who at the age 52 who feels deeply when I lash out. When I let my anger consume me. I am frightened and ashamed, although it doesn’t happen often it tend to fall into a deep depression when it happens—sometimes for weeks—the ache of myself cripples me emotionally. While I have grown to be more forgiving of others, it is still difficult to know better and forgive myself. No, better. Recently, my daughter and I, she of only knowing the world for 15 years squared off in the living room. In the end of it we were both in tears, and I was placing a call to the furniture repairman after flipping over my coffee table—and then, every step she took towards her mother’s that morning was more distance she put between her and her father. I last put my hands on someone in anger nearly twenty years ago, on Summit Street when I made that frat kid go pick up the garbage, he spilled all over the street, but I know what words can do to a child.
My father turned eighty this week and I haven’t seen him in over fourteen years, have only spoken to him once during all that time, but spoken is an understatement as my words to him were curt and to the point—and in the moment I wasn’t the ten year old boy who craved his approval but the protective father who was establishing boundaries and in the time since that brief phone conversation I am both the loving father and a man who had thought he had extinguished most of his inner anger. And even though I felt the power in me when I spoke to him this past year, that I was able to push back on what I had felt for so long—I still feel the hurt of my words—that I was intentionally unkind, even in establishing my boundaries.
When I was twenty-one years old, in the fallout of a break-up, feeling angry, lost and on fire I tried to take my life a moment of absurdity and failure that ended up with me in the emergency room at times both joking and then bursting into tears with the nurses and the doctor while they saved my life, I drove alone the next morning and waited for time to wash away the agony I felt morph into ache and finally a discomfort that has continuously stuck with me. Some years ago, in my mid-twenties my brother wanted to give me a gun—he had thought it was a needed necessity in Columbus. I declined, knowing the only purpose of having a gun was to count the bullets with my teeth. Sobriety taught me something new, as did the teachers and mentors that followed from the first days of wanting to learn how not to drink—whether it was Claude AnShin, Lama Kathy Wesley or the many books I read by eastern teachers—one of the most important things I can do is to be attentive. To be present, the screen saver on my phone is the simple word “available” that is one of the lessons I learned through my divorce. We were in counseling, trying to save something we carried deeply about but had lost our way and in the room of our therapist in a curtain of tears streaming down her face she bellowed “he is never here, he is always somewhere else.” She was right, and in my desire to protect myself-to defend who I was I stammered, shifting the blame to my ADHD, “it’s impossible for me to always be present.” Which was not true because there was (is) plenty of evidence that I can be focused, to allow myself to be with others. “Do you hear her?” he asked me, “she wants you to be available, not physically but emotionally.” It was then that I changed my screen saver, so when I pick it up I have a cue to remind me that I don’t have to be lost in diversion.
My anger has left me barren at times, and I realize that isn’t just my father’s anger but also the anger of generations past, of his parents losing the life they had in Hungary—becoming immigrants in not just one land but two during their adult lives, and for my father twice before he turned twenty years old. And it goes past father, frustration handed down from mother to daughter, from father to son. A person can not be aware when filled with anger, with shame and righteousness. In those moments I am a balled-up fist, melting from the inside. What my daughter wants is a parent who listens, and if I am yelling I can’t hear anything—not even myself. And I want her to experience memories later in laugh that are filled with kindness with the attention, like a well-crafted painting or piece of ceramic that touches and moves. When I fell in love last year, I went to my psychologist, wanting to not make the same mistakes that I have so many times in my life and while we talked—mostly me, parsing out memories coupled with fears and hope he pulled me back and gave me a warning, “do not make yourself unlovable, you have done this to yourself forever.” I have done this, in subtle ways—pulling back emotionally, hiding, not being present—not, as he phrases it, leaning into love and being uncomfortable. “It’s ok” the lean tells me, meanwhile something inside of me throws a tantrum.
When I do my work, my professional work, I try to create the space for men and women to be their authentic selves—to allow them to be angry with their parents and their life but also to listen—to use this space to help them grow—to shed themselves of the scars of their fathers, their mothers and those who were supposed to nurture them. As a father, a partner and as I view myself it is easy for me to concentrate on my failures, that I am the worst parts of me—which is true but this perspective does not allow me to see the other parts—the funny parts, the goofiness I have, and the courage—there is no space to grow when our lives are filled with shame. In a weird way, I don’t bring it to my work but I seem to allow it to flourish, at times in my own life. I am always learning, from my partner who teaches me to look up into the clouds and hold hands again, like I did when I was a child, from the clients I serve and of course, from my children who teach me lessons I should have learned years ago.
Today my daughter had her end-of-the-year presentation with her mother and I, along with her advisors from school. She is fifteen, compassionate, funny and beautiful—and because of her hard work she will start taking college classes next year. There was never a doubt from her advisors that she could do this and when they asked if we, her parents, had anything to say I started speaking but I could not finish. I choked back tears and could only give a thumbs up because of my blubbering. As I looked at her and her mother through the screen because in COVID the entire world has separated, even from the ones we love the most, I saw two beautiful women who laughed and supported each other. I felt proud of them both, and while her parents are no longer married, I think she knows we love her deeply in spite of those kernels inside of me that sometimes pop like hot popcorn. I am, a proud papa.
The owls sit swaying high above me as I pull Pearl in close on her leash, It is dark and they look like construction paper shadow figures, like something out of a children’s book and then suddenly one stretches out, wings expanding until the fill the space between the tree branches and the moon and fly above me- I can hear the fluttering of their wings and the creaking of the tree limb as it jumps into space and it is majestic. It brands itself into my mind, I will not forget it, this quiet bird flexing itself into the universe.
As I made my way through the crowd of people, squirming, dipping my shoulders and ducking my head I went in one way into the crowd that hung over and around me like vines in a jungle and soon I appeared at the other end, like a rabbit running through a tunnel. I rose from the mass under a light but not in the shine of the sun but a beer light. I nodded towards the bartender who slid a bottle of beer towards me, raised on finger and pushed a shot of Jim Beam in my direction. He held up two fingers, for two dollars and I put a five on the bar another showed my palm to let him know to keep it, turned around towards the stage and quickly downed the shot. Grabbed the beer and made my way towards the restroom. As I stood at the urinal and drained the beer in two gulps while I peed, the beer fell deep in me and I felt good. Sparkling. Soon I went back towards the front of the crowd, doing the same bent dance through all the sweaty bodies and sidled next to my girlfriend who eyed me suspiciously, “you were gone a while” she yelled in my ear, “did you get another drink?” She handed me the half empty bottle of Black Label she had been holding. I was not supposed to be drinking more than what I had agreed on before we arrived, two or three beers tops. I promised. “No, I didn’t get another drink” I felt like rolling my eyes. “O.K.” she answered, but her eyes said she did not believe me. I thought to myself, “no, I had two drinks.” In my mind I was not really lying, I was just omitting.
“Please call me when you get home, from the show” she was calling from Gainesville and I was in the small bedroom apartment I was renting with my friend Kent in Columbus. I had arrived back in Columbus after fourteen months in Gainesville, with just over a year of sobriety, and the apartment that Kent lived in was on the corner of 5th Avenue and Hunter anarea that was quickly being gentrified but we were both in early sobriety—he was working at the residential treatment program he had completed the year before, I was back working at a record store—the apartment had not yet been upgraded to the rest of the neighborhood. It was dusty with musty carpets and a faucet that was always dripping. “I will, I’m coming right back to the apartment after the show.” The plan was to see the show, and head home. My routine was to get up early, hit the gym, then go to work, hit a 12-Step meeting at noon, back to work and then another 12-Step group and then home where I would read before bed. It was working for me, the temptation to drink was dissipating by degrees as was the years-long depression that hung around me like a stench. I had actually started attending a gay AA meeting that was just down the street from our apartment, because there were no women there, I would not be tempted to engage in the other secretive behavior I had been involved in besides sneaking drinks. “I’ll call you when I get home, it shouldn’t be late—maybe twelve or so.” She instructed me not to call if it was too late, “I have to teach in the morning, but if you get in before midnight go ahead and call.” We told each other our love for one another and hung up.
The show ended fairly early, somewhere between eleven and twelve—people were milling about, the band was loading out-with the exception of the primary singer who was standing at the bar receiving congratulations and getting a beer. I had not been back in Columbus long, and friends I hadn’t seen in almost a year were coming up and chatting—at this point, I had realized that I was a bit uncomfortable and had not yet made the connection that one aspect of my drinking had to do with the underlying social anxiety I experienced for most of my life—this revelation took some years to discover. We laughed, told stories and a few offered to buy me drinks, one person brought me a beer that I politely declined and shared that I didn’t drink any longer-a brave step for me. “That’s a good one, here you go.” Smiling, “no, I really don’t drink anymore. I quit over a year ago.” The beer sat between us, he hesitated, “I guess I’ll have to drink both!” he backed away as if he walked in on someone using the rest room. There was a woman who I was talking with, we had flirted over the years and as we laughed, she inched closer to me, our hands nearly touching as we stood in a small circle of friends. “What are you doing after this?” she grinned, her smile a little off, her words a slushy slur. She had perfect teeth. Suddenly it hit me, my intention to stay at that point had drifted past seeing the music, of enjoying what I had loved so much and slide into the part of me that yearned for female companionship. Realizing that I could have gone home with her, I stammered, “I need to go home. It’s so great to see you but I need to get up early.” “Are you sure?” her eyes beamed into me. “Yeah, I do need to leave. It’s late.” I said my goodbyes. Everybody except me was wasted. As I got ready for bed that night, opening a book that helped me with self-reflection and hopefully pour some wisdom into my brain I had the realization that I was more tempted by the companionship than by the alcohol.
There is a vail that we carry, an inherited invisible garment that is constructed from generation to generation—some by words and some by actions that never appeared, only stuck in the shadows of familial relationships. I learned secrets early, some I did not fully know the meanings behind, when a parent closed their door and there was a stranger with them on the other side. A fist fight in the front yard between my father and my uncle, both men spilling the others blood in the snow while my father hustled my brother into his car in the middle of the Christmas party. “What happened dad?” we didn’t want to leave, the latin and disco music carrying over the heads and into our famished ears, this was an experience we looked forward to every year. “Your uncle Pablo is an asshole” my father’s voice was gruff and stabbed through the car which seemed colder than the freezing December chill outside. He held a handkerchief to his nose as the blood dripped around his mouth onto his lap. His glasses crooked on his face. “We want to stay” my brother was cross with him, “we have all our stuff in the bedroom.” “O.k., then stay but I’m not.” Hustling into the house, the party hadn’t let up. Everything was a shimmying normal. My father picked us up the next day, in a bustled hurry he grabbed our things and barked at us to get in the car.
This past year my partner asked me if I thought my daughter read this blog, “I don’t think so.” She asked me why and I explained that I don’t think she interested in what her father has done, and besides she is fifteen—she is discovering her own interests. “If I could read about my parents when I was fifteen you better believe I would” she smiled at me. “Do you think your kids will read your writing, your poetry?” I asked. “Yes, at some point.” Recently I received copies of my first book, a large heavy box appeared on the front porch while I was in the middle of a meeting. Bruno opened it up and held a book up, “wow dad, it looks pretty cool.” He yelled upstairs, “Hey Saskia, dad’s book is here!” She came downstairs and opened one of the hardcover copies, “this looks neat dad” her hand pressing against the dust jacket. Dusk jacket. “Are you going to read it?” I went into the kitchen, pulling a can of Diet Coke from my decrepit fridge. “Yes, of course!” she had moved to the heat vent in the dining room, her body wrapped in a blanket, she was turning the pages. “I’m happy you dedicated it to us, my name is in a book!” “Of course, it is” I turned the record over, the needle from the turntable was hic-cupping in the run-out groove. “Bruno are you going to read my book?” He was headed outside, skateboard carrying him across the wooden floors. “Nope! I don’t read dad. Let me know where we are going tonight” and the door shut behind him. Later, after taking Bruno skating while I went to the gym we came back to the house. Saskia was still on the vent as I walked through to fetch some water. “Still reading?” I asked. She was staring straight ahead and it had looked like she had been crying. “Dad?” I set the water down, chose another record and put it on the record player. “Yeah?” my back turned to her. “This was a weird book to read.” I turned around; she had a slight smile. “Why is that?” “It’s really sad but also funny at times. Plus, it’s strange to read about your dad getting blowjobs” she laughed. “Well, there aren’t any real descriptions of blowjobs” I replied in a matter-of-fact voice, I didn’t want her to be frightened of sex or talking about it—I had enough sex shaming when I was a child that I did not want to pass this along to my kids, “but yes, there are some sad parts, Jenny lived a sad life—one of desperation but she was also funny as was Jerry. Plus, hopefully there is some redemption in there.” There was a pause from the vent, “I suppose, but I liked it. I don’t think I’ll tell my friends to read it.” There are a lot of secrets revealed in those pages, it is easier to write the secrets than to say them.
The dance of lies that we learn takes us through truth and out the other end, sometimes like a bullet and other times like a soft cloth, but it’s always a dance that gets more complicated with more steps every passing year. I am a magician at times holding out one truth that acts as an inverse mirror, so strong that I believe it myself—but on the other side the truth dims under the layers of avoidance I learned to bury and fold into myself. There is a saying in Buddhism that that present is a shadow of the past, the future is a shadow of the present, the cause and effect of my drinking taught me subtle ways to avoid the truth although I tried to live my life honestly—to follow up on my word, the complexities of learning to live honestly was difficult even if on to the outside world I was honest. I was raised to tell the truth, it was hammered into us as well as to be mindful of those who suffer, stick up for the little guy, be true to your convictions—give of yourself. These stuck with me and my siblings, as we grew up these are things we did, challenged bullies, befriended the kids who were picked up, don’t follow the pack—live truthfully in your heart. I’ve challenged authority most of my life, and in high school it got me tossed out of class (for instance, when I told the biology teacher in the middle of class that using the n-word was offensive) or slammed against lockers by bullying teachers. I didn’t give a shit as I knew I was right, my daughter is the same way although she is wiser than me, she reads feminist literature, communist theory, Angela Davis and others. I gleaned my philosophy from Woody Guthrie, Kurt Vonnegut, the Clash and Huck Finn. When I was in my mid-forties, my marriage was disintegrating like a cardboard box left out in the rain. We were both unhappy but loved each other in such a mammoth way—it did not seem possible that two people with so much love could live in such emotional silence. I had been sober for nearly fifteen years and finally, out of dire depression went back to counseling. The edge of the bed is where I would sleep, my wife slept on the other edge and some nights I would creep downstairs and log into my computer searching for some connection or I would slip into Bruno’s bed and listen to his soft breaths next to me and stare at the ceiling. “Why do you leave our bed in the middle of the night?” Merijn would ask me in the morning, her eyes pleading and her voice taunt with anger and tension. “I don’t know, you are always mad at me” and while I would flip it back on her, a dangerous emotional game of ping-pong I truly did not know was transpiring between us.
After talking with the psychologist who was an expert in the subtitles of what I was going through he explained to me that I was not uncommon, that he had many people, mostly men who had been sober for about as long as I had whose lives had slowly unhinged emotionally. My subconscious was operating on a different level than the rest of my brain—I was being powered by a screaming voice that was telling me things that simply were not true. Mostly that I did not matter.
I imagine we are born with a massive empty space, one that is gleaming with shine, a polished universe devoid of anything but truth. The space is slowly filled, redesigned like a manic interior decorator constructing staircases to rooms with only one entrance, one room here then another until the rooms are all wedged together like slums on the side of a mountain. On top of the rooms, packed together as if they were shove-stacked into grandma’s junk room there is still the truth gasping for air as if it were the vacationers in the Poseidon Adventure, bobbing their heads above the rising water while the capsized luxury liner tries to drink in the ocean. But the truth slides between the rooms, like air and works it magic by slowly dismantling each room, acting like wind against sandstone. When the rooms are finally leveled, they leave a scar almost a ghost limb within our psyche—still there but not at all.
In addressing my alcohol problem all those years ago, there were moments when clarity struck me dumb although dumb is not the correct word here, they actually struck me lucid. There were many experiences that happened, small discoveries—innocent like a child’s eyes ingesting a flower, a turtle poking her head out of her shell—small but transformative. One afternoon I was sitting in my office when we were living in Gainesville, my ex-wife was teaching at the university and I was alone amongst my records, the vintage clothing I was selling on ebay waiting for the dial-up internet to slowly load the photos of ancient Brady-Bunch shirts to sell. I was in the midst of working on my Third Step of AA, I had to complete it for my treatment program and for my AA sponsor. This was an odd time for me in terms of my spiritual life, I had come to the realization that my theistic beliefs no longer worked for me—if they ever had-the discovery of Buddhist philosophy smacked me like cold water from a shower—I was awoken to something new. “Made a decision to turn our will and lives over to the care of God as we understood him” is the third step but I didn’t believe in God, it was a dilemma, but it wasn’t really at all. My rooms were being slowly dismantled and tiny explosions were popping up in my brain, tearing apart the walls of those secret rooms—on that humid Gainesville morning, as sweat clutched on the back of my calves, my thighs sticking to the vinyl office chair I came to the realization that most of my actions, mostly non-actions in terms of my non-drinking changed me in subtle ways—time and space changed my mood if I allowed it. Running every morning helped a great deal, putting on my headphones, sliding a mix tape into my bulky Walkman I would be transformed by one step after another, one drum beat after another while I ran around Gainesville, exercising my secrets with the help of Superchunk, Springsteen and the Wedding Present blasting into my skull.
I kept my secrets in a safe space, underneath walls constructed of guilt, bewilderment, a bit of shame tossed in along with a belief that everything was alright. Now. For years, the community that I discovered was the safety net I felt pulled onto, a joyous exercise of living that eased the rest of the hardships of life behind. An insular world was the one I was a part of, but it was outside of the world that that I was supposed to be a part of—one where personal responsibility—personal choice was dictated by how loud you played your music at night and if you could make it to your slummy job by 10 am. Nothing more. Nothlng less. Guitars were our bible, and amplifiers were the locomotive engines that powered us for far into the night that our ears and bodies still vibrated the next morning until the third cup of coffee pushed the last note out of our bodies the next afternoon. So, when it was time to get sober—to get real with what my ingesting alcohol had done for me for the past fourteen years it was frightening, a lot of rooms were constructed out of liquid and everything that came along with it, the broken relationships, the sex that left me wanting more but without the intimacy of a partnership—life had become, finally harder than what I thought it could be.
Around one pm every afternoon in Gainesville, I would get home from the noon AA meeting I attended, and I would do my push-ups, slide into my running shoes, put the headphones on my head—checking to make sure that the batteries were working and start my run. It didn’t matter how hot it was, in fact the hotter it was the better it was as the anxiety that ran up and down my body was visible, eyes furrowed, I was restless but my daily seven-mile run did wonders. I would get back exhausted. At times when I was running the undisclosed parts of my marriage would burble up, twin spikes of betrayal would leave me shouting during these runs although the music was so loud, I could not hear myself. I would come back exhausted. Spent but always. Always. Always feeling better. Changed. There are times now when I look for a change in how I feel, there is never a longing for alcohol but there is a wanting to change the way I feel, to connect the feeling of disconnect to something the feels better, and the simple curiosity I felt on finding something new—besides alcohol, in those searing Florida days in those days that now stretch behind me like bridal train forgotten in the chapel, and I forget what that period was like. It is simple to view the past as something that was something it wasn’t, remember the good times is a phrase that is uttered but my bones and cartilage only seem to recall the mutterings of anxiety, of the stark fear of aloneness.
My father would pack us into his scarlet-colored Malibu, and we would drive into the hills of Southeastern, Ohio. The state route and back roads, zigzagging over the lumpy miniature mountains and fledgling woods that yearned to be forests but fell short because, well, this is Ohio where even the woods aren’t forests and the cities are still small towns. In the trunk were paints, watercolors, thick paper, jugs of water, empty jars, and if we were lucky a few bottles of warm pop. The two-lane roads would blister in the summer heat, newly laid asphalt would cover the potholes and short stretches of the road, at times it looked like chunks of black rocky caramel corn and would stick to the bottom of my father’s $500 car. “Shit” he would whisper to himself as he drove through a patch, the asphalt clicking under the tires only to get stuck on the bottom of the car like industrial freckles made by God. It was an escape for him, and for my brother and I. Although the twisty roads always made me car sick as my stomach dropped and jumped until he found a place to park and we would park at the side of the road on into a small dirt road so we could paint a barn, or field. He would turn the car off and pull everything out along with a few folding chairs. In my mind, this memory that has been boxing out so many other experiences that crowd the sky of my brain this experience happened a lot. The drives that we made to go painting but when I do the memory math, it didn’t happen very often. I only lived with my father from the 4th grade to 6th grade, two years and while I visited him every summer before fourth grade, I seldom spent time with him after moving out. And certainly, never painted with him after the 6th grade. But although these excursions only happened 5 or 10 times, they were joyous for me—the made a mark, an impression just like my comic books and my favorite records. Remember the good times. But the other side of this lies the violence of my father, not just the physical violence but his words—which could be hateful and cruel towards my siblings, my mother, myself and to so many others whom he felt threatened by. It was there, in those words he spit and yelled that I began to construct the rooms made for my secrets, that I had no idea that they even existed. There were trapdoors being created that I didn’t even know would be there until I fell through them nearly thirty years later. “I’m not falling” I would tell myself and the chill of ancient scars tugged at my ankles, trying to yank me to the bottom of the river. Kicking up, I leave the mottled green and brown slimy bottom, upwards towards the sunlight—bursting through the thin line of water into the air. Open.
There are usually three parts to my secrets, me, the other and then the secret formed between us—an invisible wall that now pushes out in its flexible partitions in my brain—it breaths as if it had just run a race, hands on hips, cheeks blowing in and out—this secret reminds me that there were times when, I felt not only frightened but excited. When there were two of us birthing this yet unknown experience, we may have laughed into each other mouths. I climbed on top of you and you climbed onto me, leaving us gasping. A giggling, furtive act and as we laid staring at the ceiling afterwards you held my hand, finalizing the walls of that concealed room we had just created. “I feel evil.” I did not know if that was spoken in giddiness or remorse. Probably both.
My marriage had fallen apart, a slow sinking that took years, the foundation built upon quicksand, so much of my life felt like quicksand but at the beginning we were sure we were different. She was different, European, two parents still married, finishing her Masters degrees, more beautiful than any person I had ever seen—in real life or a movie, she spoke gently to me her voice a soft touch on my busy mind. A quieting gesture every time she spoke to me. And although the years before our marriage were filled with hidden lies I got sober within a year of our civil agreement—a commitment to transparency. But over time, after the children, after my own graduate degree, our voices turned sharp towards one another, we grew wary, I slept on the far side of the bed. I looked for other connections to feel alive—no longer the bottle but searching again—I was suffocating under a soft pillow of searching that had begun from the moment I fell into the world. Anyway, afterwards, both time and distance uncovered much of the rooms in my head, in my tiny two-bedroom apartment that I stuff with cut flowers whenever they are on sale (because I can), with stacks of records next to the blue turntable that spins from love, a gift, I unpack the rooms I created. Opening the light.
Last night I walked with my partner, her small hands folded into mine, her blue eyes stealing small peeks at me as the April wind blew into us –we talked about our children. My daughter is fifteen, straight A’s, funny, creative—she loves to bake for her friends, she has good friends who also get straight A’s, they walk together and talk politics—feminist theory, a good kid. “Dad, if you want to sleep at Maggie’s this week when Bruno is at grandma’s you can” she volunteered the other day. I bring this up to Maggie who smiles, “well I know what I did when I was fifteen when my parents went out of town.” Me too, in fact my daughter is aware of it through my writing, “do you think she would do the things we would.” Concerned that my fifteen-year-old might be constructing her own scrumptious secrets while her father is across town, “you think she would do what we did?” Am I this naïve? “I’ll talk to her mother about being careful” I say, satisfied with my own answer. We cross the busy street and I pull her hand close to me, keeping out the worry of things I will not longer be able to control as if I could at all. Saskia asks me often about my friends, many who are no longer of this world, and mostly what I remember is the laughter, how funny they were, and sweet—everyone I remember was sweet. A hearty chuckle as Jerry Wick once sang. His was more of a hearty cackle that made the rest of the room feel both welcome and small. An incredible talent in and of itself. Jenny left a void but in that empty space she is still there, a ghost of broken dreams and shattered laughter. Edo with his warm smile, his soft eyes searching outwards. My grandmother, her eccentric beliefs and mischievous laughter. They all felt the world more than anybody should, they were the small hairs on the roots of trees searching for nutrients. “We laughed a lot” I tell Saskia, this is my explanation. I tell her that she needs to laugh a lot during life. It breaks down the things we unknowingly create. As we turn the corner into the neighborhood, my partner leans close to me—whispers a joke that only we will get as we riff on something absurd down the sidewalk for several blocks these secrets are ours and they are filled with our truth.
I have spent a great deal of my life being angry, an unsettled anger and perhaps, “angry” is too strong of a word—perhaps a feeling of displacement is more appropriate. Which means I have never really felt settled, which is in fact, a truth about me. When I was younger, during my teenage years and twenties my brother would remark to me “why are you such an angry young man” (he was prone to cliches at that point of his life) and Jenny Mae would accuse me of being an angry young man as well but this usually was spoken when she was disappointed in me—which was often. My response was usually defensive or incredulous, as the horror of the world was felt distinctly in my very being—the selfishness of Reagan, Bush(es) and capitalism. At times, these feelings would be dismissed as me being sensitive but there was another dimension to my anger and this was one of a propensity to violence which was just a half beer away in some situations. My trigger was always clicking although I kept it in check most of the times, but my past is filled with balls of fists that have struck my face, the back of my head as well as being stomped on a few times, and it is also pocketed with my own fists connecting with other people’s faces, heads, walls, dashboards, tree trunks, floors….the list of things my hands have been bruised on is almost as long as my life. When my ex-wife told me she was pregnant we cried together, it was something she was hopeful for and for myself it was something that petrified me—we were both crying for different reasons—hers was for love and mine was for fear, that the violence of my childhood would be doomed to this soon to be child and although I had become a practicing Buddhist and had been sober for nearly four years, I did not know if I had rid myself of anger.
I drank for a feeling of intimacy, I am convinced that this was the main reason, alcohol helped with my feelings of unease of the “displacement” I felt, it centered me and in it’s charms I found love and intimacy. Or so I thought, I found smiles, acceptance, laughter and sex and what was so very important to me, that I found women who said they loved me as we laughed and fucked across bedrooms and bars, in the end I felt doubtful, unsettled by any words of affection. I would retreat to music, to the bottle and eventually towards other women and finally into total isolation. A quest for intimate rejection.
Jenny was loud, she crowded out the rest of the room with her manic energy, transforming calm into combustion until she would fold into herself and grow quiet. She would call these moments, “The Stare” when her face would grow blank, her eyes looking forward but vacant—she would be lost in something that she could not describe. Mostly, these were brief, maybe only seconds long but at other times they would last for up to half an hour, years later as she lay in a hospital bed experiencing visual hallucinations she turned her head and confessed she had been experiencing them for years, “since I went off to college, I believed there were men in the walls out to get me. I would joke about it but I was scared to death.” The nurses and doctors felt that her hallucinations had to do with her alcohol and drug use but it wasn’t until she prescribed a psychotropic medication did she experience a decrease in the hallucinations, by this time she had been slowly choked out by her alcoholism, her last breath just a few years away. I felt safe in her instability, she would prop me up (“you are the smartest person I know”) and then tear me down, (“you have no friends, only me and I hate you.”) This was the relationship we had, up until her death but I had quit believing her insults and judgements years before, like a tree letting go of its leaves I had moved on into another season.
Biologically women tend to have more sensitive hands and wrists, there are several reasons for this, they tend to have a type of cell (Merkel) that are more packed closely together that creates a more nuanced sense of touch, there are also biological reasons dating back to when we were hunter-gatherers and even earlier when we were primates, when females held onto the young so they wouldn’t get eaten, drown, fall off a cliff or some other wilderness mishap. This is a key component of intimacy, one that I did not learn until many years later where emotional touch was difficult, as if I were built from magnets and when I was drawn to somebody I would suddenly turn away as I got closer—instead of clamping on I kept a hovering distance, an invisible field. Darting through my twenties and for much of my adult life I fell into patterns of escape: drinking, music, sex, internet, art—all taken too far and making me feel bereft, and here it comes again: displaced. If someone grows up not feeling settled it is only normal that when it happens it may not be recognized for what it is or it is treated with skepticism. For myself, intimacy was equitable to sex and to getting approval. There was nothing deeper, because deeper can drown a person, annihilation.
On my daily walk, through the small thatch of woods at the end of my street, just off a bike path, I enter through a small doorway made of leaves and small branches that have learned to grow sideways to let in those who need to step out of one world into another. The dog is let off her leash, and she bounds over small branches, darts into one side of a bush only to appear forty feet later out of another bush, like some kinds of natural subway system—she is covered in joy and everything in her wake is filled a hint of freedom, that is, until she is put back on her leash. At this point she gets frustrated with the red rope that has “End Puppy Mills” written up its spine, grasps it in her jaws and shakes it in anger until she gives up and starts the walk of sniffs and ghost pees towards home. The leash provides both the key to and from freedom. On these walks, that are as familiar as the smell of my morning coffee, the steps I take are the same as the day before, the same leaves crunching under my feet. The wood is large enough for me to lose my thoughts in but small enough for me to exit in a matter of minutes, and I suppose a real naturalist would scoff at my referring to this clump of trees and bushes as woods but I would say anything larger than ten trees and needs a path are woods in my book. Under the canopy of the arching branches that fold up around me, like spider web hands made of wood they cover the sky in the spring and summer, and in the fall they hover like swaying dark shadows until they shed themselves naked for winter, as barren as I tend to feel during that season. We have an understanding those trees and I. When I was a child my father would take us for hikes in the Hocking Hills, an area in Southeastern Ohio that is filled with caves and trails nestled in the foothills of Appalachia. It is all we have in Ohio; our version of mountains is but the beginning steps to the mountains of West Virginia that lay just fifty miles away on the other side of the Ohio River. But these are our hills, our over-reaching foothills, they dreamed of being giants but instead are like us, average but also remarkable in our ordinary essence. We would walk the trails of Old Man’s Cave, Cedar Falls and Conkle’s Hollow whose very name inspires the imagination. I would, and still do feel somewhat awkward on these walks, in the same manner that I would when I was trying, so hard at times, to be a Catholic. A part that was searching in what I thought was all the right places, in the words of Christ, in the smelling of the incense and the rituals that still harken me back to some semblance of peace but mostly I was just a waiting for an epiphany that, alas, never arrived. I was left wondering why I didn’t “get it.” I still feel this way about much of my interaction with nature, there is satisfaction, but I enjoy my walks more when I have my headphones on and I’m listening to music. Every evening I fasten the leash to Pearl, my small Jack Russell mix whose energy is astounding and tiresome to watch, she is untethered to her passion for running which causes eruptions of joy as she literally bounces and hops through the woods and the surrounding field, every walk for her is a new adventure. I can only wish I had this simplicity. We walk with only the sky, the wind, and the stars around us. For the most part, the park is empty save for some of the homeless that may find some suitable places to camp under the hutches constructed by the close growing trees. It is during this time, alone with the dog, feeling the wind swift in my face and needling my mostly naked legs (I usually wear shorts at all times, even in the winter), that I feel something akin to feeling aligned with the unknown. There are several ways of feeling small, when dwarfed by depression sometimes it is a relief to have the outside, the sky and the silent existence of the trees to transform that smallness into something greater, larger—to dream and contemplate.
On the other side of the river where the woods and bike path have grown side by side, there is a small graveyard that appears almost as old as Columbus. Sometimes we walk among this field of headstones, where somebody dug deep into the granite of these markers, carving in the names of people who someone loved enough to tie their memories to rock. Many have been washed away by the seasons the memories of their loved ones have long been extinguished but we look at the names, the dates of birth and death. Bruno will skate through the winding little asphalt roads that resemble driveways more than the streets of graves. I only walk here with others.
Saskia was around two when my grandmother died, and I would sometimes take her with me when I would visit the old woman in the nursing home where she spent the last few years of her life. The room was sterile, but she tried to add as much of her overstuffed house as she could without replicating the hoarding clutter, she lived in. Against the large flat-screen television that sat on the small dresser in her room that resembled more of an affordable hotel room, sat a row of stuffed animals, above them on the wall paintings of flowers my grandfather had painted for her over the years and black and white photos of her parents, frozen in place from a world that will always be colorless and proper. Where men wore fedoras, walker, and derby hats. Women wore dresses with belted waists, wide pants and the day dresses my grandmother would wear for the rest of her life. Saskia would hold me tight, apprehensive about my heavyset grandmother whose deep Hungarian accent no-doubt frightened her and stare at her shriveling body in the bed. She was a large woman but the longer she was confined to her bed the more it gnawed at her, made she small—not only did it eat away at her life but it also shrunk her entire being. She would reach out to Saskia, whom she thought was a boy and coo, “He is so beautiful, let me touch his hands.” Her skin had turned to parchment and at times it would tear just as easily, the back of her hands were dotted with bruises and small band-aids where age would give in to the normal use of her limbs. When she reached for a fork, the skin would gently tug apart, and she would softly bleed. Saskia’s hands were new, fresh and full of the pinkish peach color that toddlers have, round and fat like dough she would allow my grandmother to hold her tiny balls of fingers until she grew to frightened and fold herself back into my arms. The touch was the gift. And when my grandmother died, I held those paper-thin hands, as she left her body. They grew cold quickly, within a matter of minutes, my Uncle Pablo held her and wept until her hands grew cold and left in a rush while I waited for the paramedics to haul her body away.
I bought almost all of my clothes from thrift stores in during my twenties, except for the ones the were gifted to me by visiting bands and the shoes I grabbed from my dead grandfather’s closet everything else was from second hand stores. Everything was cheap, most shirts were a dollar or two and since the sixties and seventies were not that far away and a great many of my grandmother’s generation were starting to die off the clothes were a mirror into those decades. Stripped shirts, shiny button ups, evening gowns, dress pants and button-up sweaters. In the fall and winter, I would wear sweaters, never a fan of coats or even pants, I was poor and learned to wear sweaters in the house. I would visit my grandmother who would remark about the holes in my clothing, “Bela, your sweater is broken” pointing to a small hole in around the collar or on the shoulder, “get a new one please next time you come over.” She felt personally hurt that I would wear something in such disrepair to her house, “Grandma, I usually wait until they have five holes in them before I get a new one.” A philosophy I pretty much had and still do, I will wear anything until it is literally falling off of my body, half my wardrobe is in tatters and when I wear something for work people are genuinely surprised, “Wow, you are wearing pants and a shirt with buttons” my girlfriend has remarked to me. Buying clothes is a step into intimacy, an unspoken gesture of love and care, “I want your body to be comfortable, I want you to be warm, to look nice. I care about you.” A favorite scarf, robe or shirt are usually given from another-a reminder of love and goodwill. I care about you.
I reach for my lover’s hand when I am driving, she sits next to me in the car-telling me about her day, her hopes, or singing along to the music that is always playing around us, it is unconscious but provides reassurance. I care about you. You make me feel good, safe. Hers are tiny hands and my hands swallows them, she squeezes my fingers while I stare ahead, another reassurance. There are other moments where I feel compelled to hold her close, bury my head into her neck, whispering until we giggle and again hold hands. My apartment always has flowers in them, I realized that while I have no interest in knowing the names of the flowers that brighten my mood—I like them, and it is ok not to know their names. I buy what I like, what looks comforting to me. It’s that simple. One day she sat on my couch and remarked that she liked that I bought flowers for myself, it was beautiful that it wasn’t just the flowers that she noticed it was my pleasure in having them, I laughed and explained that I don’t even know what I am buying, other than lilies which I do know and love but that I like to have them in my house. They are a comfort. They offer closeness by just being.
As I get older death arrives like a postman, dropping off letters in the box and with the uneasy anticipation of opening a bill, “what’s next?” that slowly turns into a quiet acceptance that people die. Things change. Contrasted with a summer that started in March but has felt like a cold winter as the summer tumbles into autumn, and then a new year—this summer may not end for some time. Bruno explores every day in his own twelve-year old self, still a child but taking chances—staying out later, riding his skateboard and his imagination down High Street onto campus, into the ravines that carve up our neighborhood and poking holes in his father’s ego, as he should. He has only got the whiff of death through my stories and my job where dying is as much a part of the work I do as scheduling a lunch meeting, the poor tend to die quicker and more painfully than the wealthy, it starts to clutch at their bodies almost from birth, living in rented apartments that are lacquered in lead paint, insects and noise. These are men and women where desperation is the norm and a reprieve may come from the joys of unpacking groceries and sharing a soft drink on the stoop, or better yet, a communal beer. Something I have learned in my chosen profession as a social worker and that is it is very difficult to die with dignity if one was never provided that dignity throughout their life.
This week was the third anniversary of Jenny Mae’s death, she who was strapped to a hospital bed by the invisible cords of addiction that had ravaged her body until, finally, it whispered “enough.” We had known she was dying as did she, but those of us in the know knew this, felt this for years—from the waiting deep into the night in my late teens for her to come home, wondering if she was in the arms of another man or worse, only to hear her come home, cackling through the front door. Her legs stumbling, catching herself on the doorframe, bellowing “I’m home, you should have been there.” But knowing full well she hadn’t wanted me there, where ever there was. That was the first warnings, an impending doom that lasted nearly thirty years. When I visited her the night before she died with Saskia who was all of eleven, barely into her double digits, Jenny glanced at us and we held her hand. She was tired. I had to tell her who we were, we were with her and she squeezed my fingers. There was no turning back but we left thinking she would hang on, the night nurse had said she was in good spirits earlier in the day, making weak jokes with her cracked voice, a husky shell of what it used to be. Her voice sounded like cracked pavement that had been smoking five packs of Camel cigarettes. “She should be off a ventilator tomorrow.” The nurse, sadly, was right. If I had known she was to die, I would have slipped a coin under her tongue and told her I loved her in a braver, less self-conscious manner than I had when Saskia and I slipped away.
The month started with the death of beloved client, a man who had traveled from South Africa to remake himself as a young man in his early twenties. He discovered art in his forties and made wood-burned etchings in his 12X12 room unknown to everybody until one day a few years ago one of my colleagues told me she was worried about him and asked me to check on him. He opened the door in a foul drunken mood and after some coaxing let me into his room where I discovered a world he created alone, full of his memories of Africa in the form of lions, masks and huts, all burned into small planks of wood—many he had constructed out of gluing together tongue dispensers. A few days before he died, another staff member and I stopped at his room and he complained of a pain in his stomach and allowed us to call an ambulance. The day before he died, I met with him in the ICU and he was very matter-of-fact as was his nature, “Bela, all of at the Y are all I got. Can you please make sure my mum gets my remains?” “Of course, but I think you are going to pull out of this” I replied. “That’s nice of you to think that,” he smiled in a way a mother smiles at her child who is planning on a visit from Santa Claus. He wrestled with depression and alcohol but in the last few years he had opened up, tried in spurts to quit his drinking and sought help for his depression, he would tell us at times, that this was the best his life had been in years, that he was happy. Last year he traveled back to Capetown and visited with his elderly mother and sister after being away for nearly 30 years.
A few weeks ago Ron Heathman, former guitar player for the Supersuckers died. The Supersuckers played Columbus a lot in the 90’s, and I booked most of their shows at Stache’s and one at the Alrosa Villa with the Hellacopters and New Bomb Turks. The shows were always a spectacle, they had a strong connection with Columbus, partly due to their friendship with the Turks and partly due to the fact that we all liked to drink a lot. Ron was always quiet, a bit in the background but in 2002, when I was roughly thirty days sober and living in Gainesville my wife and I went to Jacksonville to meet up with them. Ron, myself, and a few others of their touring party went to a 12-Step meeting, we talked about the struggle of alcoholism and addiction and he asked me what I got out of attending meetings—a sense of calm in the midst of the daily torment I felt. We didn’t really keep in touch, an email once or twice but that was it. I was relieved to find out later that he had found a home roasting coffee and becoming a barista, a perfect profession for someone who has discovered sobriety, I thought to myself. His death hit me hard. I felt scared and sad for Ron, his daughter and for everybody who knew him. We all change but sometimes we don’t always believe it.
Last week when I discovered Justin Townes Earle had died, I thought of two things, the first of a dear friend of mine who had toured with him while she was trying to wrest herself from her own issues with alcohol, she had thought it was a good fit because he was supposed to be sober. She called me after the first night and confessed that she was struggling, “nobody is sober here, I feel alone.” Sobriety feels alone, especially at the beginning—we are faced with the fact we have no assistance from the bottle or the syringe and we lose our social group—our community, our people. It is a scary feeling, as every other thought is screaming to return to our village, to our use and our body is craving relief. My second thought was one of empathy, being sober and suffering from depression is a combo platter of fear and dread at times, sometimes it feels like a race to the end of life without taking a drink or walking into the ocean. It can be a daily feeling for some, usually fleeting like a bird passing overhead but at other times it can settle in as if were the stench of burnt wood, an old friend who is no longer a friend that won’t get the point and leave your house. A slow existential tug towards darkness.
This morning I listened to Van Morrison and Lou Reed, not their records from the 70’s the ones shot through with grime and yearning—the ones that so many of us have relied on, but the ones from the 80’s—the records that sometimes get maligned for being too straight, to compliant, smooth and void of danger. My first exposure to Lou Reed was “New Sensations” the third in his trilogy of sobriety and marital bliss after “The Blue Mask” and the rolling comfort of “Legendary Hearts”, although one could argue that “Waves of Fear” on “The Blue Mask”, with its squalling Robert Quine guitar-which sounds like an animal being choked to death, is one of the most brutal songs Lou ever performed, the rest is reflective and calm. After uncovering Lou’s other records that summer of my fifteenth year, most notably “Street Hassle” and “Live: Take No Prisoners”, “New Sensations” may seem quaint but to my rural Ohio ears, I had heard nothing that sounded so adult, so New York and so descriptive. It was dangerous to my young years. When I was discovering my own love affair with beer and whiskey in the late eighties and into the early nineties, some of these records were the solace I relied on. I would put on Van Morrison’s “Avalon Sunset” or “No Guru No Method No Teacher” in the mornings at the record store while I sipped a black coffee from Buckeye Donuts to nudge my hangover out the door, there was a solace in these records, especially in the morning when the fogginess of the previous evening had continued far into the early afternoon. A sense of serenity fills these records in their search for normalcy, it was a search that I was always on, not in a manner of fitting in with “normal” society but wanting to feel normal.
A settled calm was present in the record store when I would open it on Saturday mornings, the clanging of the door, the metal cage over the door window jangling against my weight, spilling my coffee because I didn’t want to set it on the pee-covered steps, the stairwell was a common pitstop for the drunken college kids staggering their way home, “hold up! I gotta piss real quick.” I’d punch the code to turn off the alarm, put on one of these records, or maybe Townes Van Zandt, Gene Clark or Dylan’s “John Wesley Harding” all sounding like they were made for headaches and the early morning pangs of lonely. The nights before were filled with eardrums pushing forward towards the stages that we felt drawn to, eyes wide open not just to the musicians, usually all friends but also to the women who in the spotty darkness of Stache’s and Bernie’s looked like images of Patti Smith spitting black ink, they would make my heart curl up in desire while I let the music travel through my body as if I were the mine and the music was the dynamite blasting welcoming holes in my soul. Like anything that is done repeatedly, it would take me years to figure out and undo what I had so eagerly taught myself, I did a swan dive into drinking in my late teens and didn’t feel the need to swim to shore until my early thirties, and nearly drowned in the process. It takes years to learn a bad habit and even longer to unlearn it. Some of us have figured it out but the darkness that looms underneath is always there, like an underwater river that slithers underneath all the cracks that we carefully walk across.
Recently I have discovered the joy of holding hands, of leaning into love and into what is uncomfortable, even going for a walk—something I never felt the need to do—I would rather run or lay in bed, no middle ground. That was how I lived, but the middle is just find, or maybe just off the middle a bit. Just enough. I take the hand of my daughter, or my partner, or Bruno sometimes one of them on each side as we walk the dog, watch her marvel at yet another joyful run at the park and everything is ok for the moment.
Bruno is twelve, Saskia is fourteen—as perfect ages as there could be—and they fill their time with everything that a child should be doing as everything starts to open to them in spite of the world that we have known collapsing in silent shattering shards around us. They have lived in the same house since they were born, their world first confined to their bedroom, filled with plush and softness-stuffed animals, smiling cartoon bunnies and a moon night-light. A living room overflowing with blocks, a miniature play-stove, balls, and baskets filled to the brim with things that would be given to charity in just a few years. Then daycare, school and eventually their neighborhood. The kids have gone to the Netherlands every summer since they were born except this year; The COVID Summer where in some ways the world they have always known has shrunk into our little slice of the universe but it has also folded open at their feet.
I live just five blocks from that house they have always lived in, my ex-wife stayed in the house while I boxed up my belongings, the records, the books, the family heirlooms that still sit in the dusty boxes that they have sat in since my grandmother died, and moved into the small two-bedroom apartment that sits just up the street from a small park and a long bike trail. The kids go back and forth between their houses on an almost daily basis, there is extraordinarily little animosity between their mother and I as we are always tethered through our children and experiences. The good far outweighed the bad, which, at times was terribly bad but the good was exponentially better than the worst we ever experienced. And underneath the bad was a lot of sadness, a subterranean pool that flowed under our lives that had been there long before we had ever met. The failure of the marriage wasn’t a failure at all, it was a logical end to something that needed to change, the path started, turned into a sidewalk, then into a street and then into highway until it transformed, by matter of degrees and unconscious decisions and behaviors into a trail again. The paths split but still run parallel, we are both middle-aged, balancing our lives while trying to keep ourselves stable and sane.
When I was twelve, in sixth grade, my family was living in Athens, Ohio. I had just moved back into my mother’s house; one might use the word fled instead of moved as my father’s behavior had grown progressively aggressive and at times violent. My brother Zoltan had moved out a few months prior to me after he and my dad had gotten into one too many physical altercations, Z being all of 13—he was already a bit wise to the world and got out before it got too dangerous. My mother was working a graduate student job at Ohio University and I would leave school and walk around up-town Athens, pinging between record, pizza, and sub shops scanning the floor for quarters to stick into the Pac-Man games. My brother and friends would roam the University, busting into The Convocation Center where the Bobcats played basketball and have epic games of tag and tackle football that we played in the completely padded wrestling room. I knew every alley and cut through in town, it was, quite simply my imaginary but very real kingdom.
Every morning after his bowl of cereal, cuddling with his dog and watching every YouTube video that will make him laugh the hardest, Bruno dons his pink beanie with his favorite spray paint store blazoned across the top and grabs his skateboard to make sure that everything in his kingdom which runs roughly a half-mile in each direction from my house, is running smoothly. It stretches from Hudson Avenue north to North Broadway and, at times, he makes forays up all the way up to the Graceland Mall and south to campus. These trips take commitment. He skates with his friend Genevieve, a neighbor girl who skates the streets as if she were born on a board. They load their backpacks up with water, skate wax, snacks, their phones, and a few folded dollar bills and off they go. Bruno phones me throughout the day to provide updates, like he is the Ernestine the Phone Operator doing play-by-play of the neighborhood. “Dad, guess what?” he breathes into the phone.
“What? Tell me.”
“We were skating by Lucky’s and that place where Sam the homeless guy lives, behind Tim Horton’s—you know where I mean? Where Jenny used to live, near the Blood Bowl” he breathes heavily into the phone.
“Yes, don’t go to the Blood Bowel, by-the-way.” The Blood Bowel is a large water drainage tunnel that skateboards, teenagers and the homeless tend to utilize, it runs at the end of a ravine by his house, right under High Street and can be littered with the sort of things that a child shouldn’t be near.
“Dad, I know—I wasn’t talking about the freakin’ Blood Bowel, let me tell you what happened.” He pauses, “So, we were skating, and some guy got out of his truck and he was not wearing a mask and I told Genevieve he was not going to get into Lucky’s without a mask. So, guess what?”
“um, they didn’t let him in?” I query.
“Yup and he went to his truck screaming and saying he was going to kick their ass. Ha-ha, I asked Genevieve was it everybody’s ass in Lucky’s or did the store have an ass. He saw us laughing and started yelling at us. I bet he likes Trump. We just skated away.” I remind him to be careful. At night he fills me in on his adventures, the stores he stopped in, how he got a free slice of pizza from Lucky’s, how he bought one of the homeless guys a $5 pizza from Little Caesar’s, how he knows everybody’s name at the local convenience store, and the stories go on. He knows everybody on this long stretch of High Street. I get text messages and photos from friends who tell me they saw him skating, how happy he looks, they all say, “he looks like you.”
It’s raining out, the drops pelting the sidewalk in wind-blown waves as if they were invading the beaches of Normandy instead of the sidewalks of West Weber Road, “dad, I’m bored. Take me somewhere.” “Yeah dad, we are bored. Take us somewhere,” Saskia chimes in. I tense up, but it is a tired tenseness more of a resignation to the fact that I am tied to my computer, to my couch—a place that I used to read and write at but is now, in just a few months my new desk. “I know it doesn’t look like it but I am actually working right now” I scroll through the dark bolded line of unopened email, some of which will exact a certain amount of future energy from me that at this moment I don’t have. “Dad you have been sitting there all day.” It is only 2:30 p.m., and he is right, since 8:30 a.m. I have been sitting on this small couch that Merijn and I purchased, along with it is twin, at a very short-lived antique store in Columbus in 1998. The couch must have been made in the sixties, it’s splitting at the top and one of the dogs—mostly one of the dead dogs I owned, chewed holes in some of the cushions, most likely out of boredom. Hopefully, Bruno will not chew the rest of the cushions. “I know I have but before I can do anything, I have to send a few more emails out, then we can go for a walk.” I’m irritated and it is hinting through my words, while I am conscious of this fact, I still don’t want the kids to know how irritated I am, but it’s there like the smell coming off spoiling milk. “Dad don’t yell. And it is raining, we can’t walk.” Bruno is now riding his skateboard across the living room. Skatebored. “Don’t skate in the house.” “Dad, your floors suck, they can’t get any worse.” He zips in front of the coffee table. “Can you just go upstairs for a bit?” “Nope, it’s boring up there.” He glides by the coffee table again; he does not even look at me while he is talking. An email blips on the screen and I read the subject line, “Fuck. Just go upstairs, I cannot take you guys anywhere right now. Go make me some coffee”, I plead. Saskia looks up from the opposite couch, “Dad, you won’t be able to sleep.” Bruno, still skateboarding but now in the other room chimes in, “yeah, and then you will be up eating cereal at three a.m. and getting fat.” “He’s right dad” says the teenager across from me. He is right. “I don’t care. Listen, give me 40 minutes and then we will go somewhere.”
When we walk, Saskia will want to hold hands and she says it as a demand, “C’mon, hold my hand, tell me what’s going on.” The grass touches our ankles, small tinkles of itchiness and little beads of sweat grow on our necks. Bruno does not mind when I slip my hand, the hand of his father full of lines and tiny burgeoning dark spots, into his. He is as passive as water being poured into a cup. He squeezes my hand back, his own hands longer than his mother’s at this point and he walks crookedly when he talks—his steps getting lost in his words which tell and do not tell a story. Both kids have an imagination, and a sense of humor while Bruno’s tends to be more absurdist—almost like an adult already. Saskia wants me to tell her stories, but it takes brain strength to tell a story, even a true story—it is something I do not have much fuel for. “I can’t Saskia, I don’t have it in me.” We walk further, watching for bees, looking at the dog hop through the bushes, stopping to smell every smell that had been planted that morning. Birds sing to each other in the bunches of trees that circle the field. “Please dad, tell me something else about our family.”
When my ex-wife my pregnant with Saskia, her belly growing this future insightful and charming young woman, I felt panicked. Being five years sober did not feel like a long enough time to become a father, something I had never really thought about. When I met Merijn and she told me her dreams, of being an artist, a teacher, and a mother—the envisioned life of being a creator, I felt small. My own dreams, of being a writer, or owning my own record store were things I kept close and they seemed undoable. There was no map, no guide for me. Of course, the DIY aesthetic provided and explained a way to create my own way, encouraged it even but in the “real” world where one needed to support and perhaps, subconsciously, to expose myself—well, this was not something achievable. A part of me thought she would leave me before that last part of her goals, I should clarify, she had goals and I had dreams. I did not expect to become a father but here we were sitting on our couch, she with her moleskin notebook and choosing names she had been writing down. I blurted out, “can she have your last name?” Merijn paused, “why? What do you mean?” I hesitated, a bubble of sadness in my throat, “I don’t want her to inherit all the craziness and fucked-upness of my family.” “Oh.” She had to think about this. After a few minutes she looked at me, “I think you need to talk to your sponsor, and I want her to have your name.” She held me for a moment, kissed my tear soaked cheek and told me it would be fine. Just because I felt fucked-up and broken did not actually mean I was, I later learned not to trust my emotions or my beliefs—that these two things can operate on their own, regardless of reality. I spoke with my sponsor, my therapist and myself and realized that not every part of fear is, in fact, true and while it may contain some truth it does not mean that it actually is all true.
“O.k., Saskia I’ll tell you a story about my dad.” I tell her about how my father visited The Ohio State University in the late 50’s as a seventeen-year-old high school student from Caracas. How my grandmother, no fan of Venezuela, wanted her children to have an education and the opportunity to live in the United States. Upon landing at the airport in Columbus, he asked the taxi driver to take him to a restaurant near campus and was dropped off at the Blue Danube which at that time was not only a diner but also had a full menu of Hungarian dishes as well as a mural of Budapest and the flowing Blue Danube painted on the outside of the building. With that, my father was sold on attending Ohio State and in his phone call with my grandmother that night this appeared like a miracle, I can hear her saying to him, “Dis is fantassss-tic, a Hungarian restaurant?! You must go der.” Three years later he was called into the registrar’s office, “Laszlo, there seems to be a small problem, we do not have a copy of your high school diploma. I don’t know how it was overlooked but it isn’t here.” My father sat quietly, then started to cry, The reality of the situation was hitting him hard. He had never graduated high school; he had assumed since he was accepted to Ohio State, he would just start college as soon as he could. So, he dropped out of high school before the school year ended and moved to Columbus to start college. And now, here he was finishing up his college degree and he was now faced with being expelled. He explained this to the registrar who felt compassion and said she would just note that his diploma was lost and that being a Venezuelan citizen made it hard to procure another one.
“Sooooo, your dad never graduated high school but he’s still an architect?” She wriggles her hand out of mine, both of us are sweating, our hands need to breath. “I guess not. But that’s the story I was told, sometimes the stories we are told are not always true” and I feel the need to add “that the stories we tell ourselves are not always true as well” but I refrain and we keep walking. We talk about my grandmother, the larger than life one who even in death casts a shadow over the family, her presence hangs over everything, on her grandchildren’s walls, in the food they cook, in the stories we tell our own children. She lived longer than most of us thought, at one point in her life she was tremendously overweight, had suffered a heart attack in her fifties, had survived breast cancer in her late 60’s and died, with her translucent blue-eyes still shiny as she welcomed death. “Bela, I am not scared. I will see my mommy and daddy soon.” She smiled at me just hours before her hand went limp in her son’s hand. Most of us get to meet death with our bodies already run-down and broken, spent so much that the skin over our eyes hang low, our wrinkles telling the world how much we laughed or how we shut out the world. We limp into oblivion with broken teeth, parched mouths and failing plumbing—it is a relief. For others, the young, they go into death full of brawn, of bodies and minds exploring every touch and new thought, their minds unprepared while their bodies shoot fire out of their lives. “Hey, when we get back, I will need to work some more but tonight we can drive somewhere?” I, the father, speak this as a question as I don’t want to disappoint her, that while I will need to work I want her to know that I will make it up—not tomorrow or next week but tonight. “Sure dad, I understand. I had fun talking with you.”
I had dinner the other night with my old friends Michael and Suki, they live in North Carolina and my girlfriend and I drove down in the shortest eight hours in the history of eight-hour drives. I had not seen Michael since at least the late nineties, and I probably only saw Suki earlier than that. They have two teenage daughters. Their house is nestled in a small forest, a large meadow in their backyard. Mike says this is the house he grew up in, it is filled with love and the sort of creativity many of us are accustomed to living in. Stacks of books, magazines, scribbled drawings on the refrigerator and art on the walls. Not the store bought, gallery type of art but the art made from friends and from ourselves, it is there not just to inspire but to remember inspiration. Remember love, of shared experience. They made us and another old friend dinner, homemade burritos, the smell life came from their kitchen, but also soaked us through their walls. It was beautiful and meaningful, it felt like we had been neighbors for all this time, having coffee several times a week for the past twenty-three years.
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 4th 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.
There were four dogs that lived in the house, every inch of carpet and furniture bled hair as the dogs had free reign, they were almost as spoiled as dogs could be, with multiple walks by the multiple owners who lived in the three story house just north of The Ohio State University. My dogs, Richard and Istvan arrived late to the party, and they were pretty much asshole dogs, at least Istvan was. Richard was a sweetheart, a wiry stray that Jenny Mae had adopted following a hot tub party on campus, she named her Grandpa Richard although on close inspection Richard was a female and still a puppy, more like Granddaughter Richard but Jenny didn’t let anything like facts to impact her world view. Soon, I adopted her to try to settle down the complete assholish-ness of Istvan who was such a bad sort of a dog that when he died long-time friends of mine sent their condolences on my social media pages followed by, “but he really was a BAD dog.” We arrived at the house on Blake following my recent divorce, a marriage crammed between rounds of drinks and the deaths of friends—the haze of drinking and the clutch of loneliness held both of us fast, and while there was love between us the pain of being alone was greater than any ties that bind. In any scenario, alcoholism or not, there is not a good chance for the relationship to survive when the foundation is made of bricks of self-doubt. I moved in during a January ice storm, renting a large U-Haul to move my house on Patterson just a few blocks north into the attic of Ted Hattemer’s house, the only stipulation was my bad dogs had to stay in the attic as the other dogs in the house would not tolerate the intrusion. So up the stairs we went, several flights up to the third floor where Ted had built a small two-room flat for me, he also had a small bathroom installed. I lived with Ted for a couple of years until I moved out to live with Merijn for the next twenty-two years.
The house was the defacto landing pad for Moviola although main songwriter, Jake Housh had built a studio on top of his garage just a stone’s throw from Ted’s house on Dodridge Street. Moviola was working on their second album “The Year You Were Born”, after the 10” “Frantic” came out a few years prior it was the third record put out through my P&D relationship with Revolver USA. “Frantic” had sold well, and the band had toured some including some well attended shows in NYC, one at CBGB’s with the Siltbreeze bands Temple of Bon Matin and The Strapping Field Hands. Ted was also playing drums for The Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments which had signed to American imprint Onion Records, and the band had gotten glowing press from various outlets such as the College Music Journal, Alternative Press and Your Flesh. None of this was really important for the way we lived our lives though, the days and nights were mostly filled with music, combined with the hope of being connected, and of course, alcohol. Creativity was the most important aspect of our lives, whether it was music, writing, filmmaking or painting, everything held an idea. Although, now at fifty-one, it is easy to think of these as our salad days, for me I lived in such an emotional panic, akin hearing last call while taking piss but living that feeling every day of your life. I don’t miss that rabid anxiety that was only tempered by drinking and fucking. Both of which seemed to somehow increase it.
Out of all the bands I had worked with, Moviola were easily the most organic, both in how they lived their lives, friendship over ambition, operating as a collective versus a musical dictatorship, and blending sound on top of sound. Their music has layers but is simple in the best sense of the word—they use sounds, hum from guitar amps, feedback and clunky echo to feed the songs like compost. I used to attend their Wednesday night practices, mostly to get a musical fix and they were my friends, they would let me sit on the floor, drink my six pack, offer my suggestions and leave to hit High Street by 10 pm with a head buzzing and full of ideas. Wednesday nights were a highlight for me. The recorded almost everything in their home studios, with the exception of “Frantic” which they recorded them selves at a larger studio and a handful of songs they recorded while being courted by several major labels, an experiment that almost broke up the band and most importantly their friendships.
The Blake house was comfortable, and not just for the pack of dogs that lived there, there was music constantly playing, both downstairs and in my attic room. There were ashtrays filled with cigarette butts, the bong next to the couch was in constant use and there was always beer in the fridge. Whoever was cooking would share their food and the conversation was always a constant. We all worked full-time jobs, and it wasn’t any sort of campus living situation, we were all in our mid-twenties and looking for something to ground us. Music was the one thing we all swarmed to. The was constant motion, nothing was staid, I had been booking shows for a while both at Bernie’s and Stache’s, and Moviola were also bringing bands in—Built to Spill, Jennyanykind and The Flaming Lips were all bands they helped bring to town, both with their music and their affability. If there was any band that best exemplified what I enjoyed about music it would most likely be Moviola whose songs have always had a strong sense of melody, with layers of guitars and noises either propping or slowly tearing the song down depending on one’s perspective. There music certainly owed a debt to Neil Young, or more distinctly the creaky guitar solo’s from “Cowgirl in the Sand” and “Down by the River” as well as the shambling sounds of the Grateful Dead and the Band but because four-track recording and the liberation it offers the “keepthemistakesin” philosophies of the Velvet Underground, Sonic Youth and Moviola’s contemporaries Pavement and Guided by Voices allowed for a much more organic (de)construction of their music. They were most often compared to Pavement and GBV (whom they played with a lot) but in hindsight these were lazy comparisons, we were all operating on the same playing field, ones that were made from our collective record collections culled from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s, we were all inspired by the Velvet Underground, Stones, Ramones as well as the DIY ethics of Half Japanese, and our own local bands such as Scrawl, Great Plains and the Gibson Brothers, we could all do what ever the fuck we wanted. Something they always touched on was relationships, whether about straying strands of friendships or the tug of wandering that lovers have, how the mundane can both drag a couple down or put the shine of love by sharing a coffee, hanging clothes on the line or the magnetizing way a drive out of town can strengthen bonds.
As I walked this morning, with headphones purposely both drowning the world out in sound but also in their own way, pulling the outside world into my inner world, I listened to music—a singer rocking herself gentle, describing her love and her shortcomings. We are made of shortcomings; we stack them upon each other until we try to make them a whole. On the walk a mother in green windbreaker, gathered and tugged two small girls around her, a dog yanking a leash in front of them—she stopped and smiled at me. Caught in her life while I coaxed my own dog to settle-the-fuck-down, her smile crooked, I had been there—but it was a different time for me. When the horrors of the world didn’t play out in some fucked-up, awful science-fiction way, when getting the kids home and fed before the clouds spit rain down upon us was a concern, not the fear of a stranger breathing in your child’s direction. I felt for her and how the present can swipe the hope for the future in the simplest ways. Going for a morning walk, running to the store, hugging your mother. The ugliness of the world begs me to dip my foot in, beckons me to scoop my hands in, wipe it over my face and breath it in deep so my breath exhales gasoline, my muscles clinch and flex to turn my insides out. That is an urge, and somewhere inside of me, perhaps I was constructed that way, a blueprint of pain but of course this is a choice as is taking the other route. One of seeing the humanness of that mother’s struggle, of being able to identify with the vast innocence of a child pausing, then stopping, then picking up, then examining a bottle cap on the sidewalk all while the dog pulls, the clouds sputter and exhale droplets of rain in tired heaves, and waiting as she hands this metal gift to her mother who sticks it in her windbreaker, cooing her child on. “Come, let’s go. It’s going to rain.” I find that discovering the secrets of the everyday is a choice, a quiet careful deliberation best done with a soundtrack.
Moviola’s new record “Scrape and Cuss” and all of their back catalog are now available for streaming.
photo of Richard and Istvan by Michael Galinsky. Thanks, Mike-B
“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 9th.
Jerry Wick & Bela Koe-Krompecher (Jay Brown photo)
Jenny Mae & Jeff Regensburger (jeff was also in Gaunt, photo Jay Brown)
Belakoekrompecher's Blog 