“I think I lost my job today, I think” yelps Jerry Wick on the Gaunt song “Hope You’re Happy Now”, I remember the circumstances surrounding the line from this song. Jerry was working at Used Kids and even though he lived only five hundred feet from the record store, in his sparse one room apartment above Larry’s he had a difficult time making it to work on time. We were lax with time, me more so than Ron or Dan, both who arrived early and took great pride in this fact, a marker to show that no matter how much a person drank, arriving at work on time meant that there was not a problem with alcohol. I had only missed one day of work due to a hangover, and this was only after calling off as I was dry heaving in the back alleys as I groaned towards the shop. But Jerry was late, constantly and he did not have a phone. “Why would I get a phone, I can just use the store’s” he would reply without irony. He was in the midst of breaking up and breaking in with a woman whom he wrote the two best Gaunt records about, she worked a professional job of which she would tell Jerry, “I have a real job Jerry when are you going to grow up?” Working at a record store allowed Jerry to pursue his art and live the lifestyle that was better suited to his philosophy of living on the edge and being non-committed. He was able to tour with Gaunt, record his songs during the night and afternoons he had off and still make enough money to pay his meager rent. He mostly ate at the record store where lunch and dinner was provided by opening the cash register. He didn’t eat much, hence the name of his band. At one point Dan and Ron got sick of his tardiness, I would try to stick up for him but he would basically force every one around him to question their relationship with him, it was as if getting close to him was a dare. Get to close, have any expectations and he would burn you and scorch himself. He eventually got fired.
I left my job recently, one that I loved a great deal, that provided a sense of duty and mission. The work I do, while satisfying can be exhausting, at times I am complimented for the work I do, “it’s amazing you can do that job” but the day to day work of helping the homeless, addicts and mentally ill is never very tiring, everything else that comes with it is what I find taxing-working with systems that are not geared to help the less-fortunate but actually do the opposite is what would keep me up at night. This past year I developed insomnia that has prevented me from getting more than five hours of sleep a night, I experienced chest pains, shingles and finally vertigo that has ended up costing me thousands of dollars in medical bills but that I finally have a treatment that has kept me vertigo free for over two months. COVID has only increased worry and anxiety but it has also provided something far greater than existential fear of the future and the anger that has arisen from living in the breathing callousness of the world we are living in. Sometimes some of the worst circumstances have the power to transform us into something greater and more human than we have thought possible. I have learned what is important for me, while working from home half the time has put pressure on me in a variety of ways by always being on call, always feeling the need to check email, write a report or finish a training, all from my evening couch, I have also enjoyed and relished being with my children almost all day long. Making them lunch, going for afternoon walk breaks with them, finding other ways of connecting that I didn’t notice before. I realized that I liked my smaller world and wanted to refocus, to realign myself with my family and those I care about. I was losing my ability to keep these things my priority.
There are periods where the world keeps itself too close, pressing in until it feels as if you have swallowed in all in a giant bite and the feeling of choking becomes overwhelming—like the Chinese proverb of the boy who could swallow the ocean until it burst forth from his cheeks and killed his brothers. I have eaten my world bit by bit until I have retched on my own inner greed and pain, what I drank to relieve me was killing me. In my twenties, there were periods where I lived in panicked emotional state, drunk dialing, pulling my dogs in close, never going long without someone to share my blankets—it wasn’t so much as sex but as not wanting to be alone. I had a list of late-night friends I would call, Gretchen, Chris Biester, Katy, Haynes, Michelle, Jenny S., almost all of them women and none of the lovers. Maybe the lovers knew me in ways that prevented my from reaching out at 2am, I needed tethered to something to keep me grounded until I could finally sleep-most likely the edge of sex would have tainted that simple quest.
.
If I ever own a house again I want one with as many windows that can let in the sun as possible, to invite the outside world in and to invite my inner world out—I don’t want to have anything to hide not to the neighbors, not to the wind, not to the moon or trees, all are welcome. I have been learning to watch the clouds, I have an excellent teacher—someone whose eye for detail is almost mathematical but without the numbers, who as someone in the 19th Century has the “touch”, that is, she is gifted on a higher level in the language of emotion. “There’s a good one” and I don’t even have to look at her, I only have to look up to see what she is pointing to, and there it is, an entire ocean built in the sky, every cloud a pigment of some heavenly cosmic paint. “Yeah, wow.” I find myself trying to say something but how does one say something that is unspeakable without sounding like an idiot? So, I usually, touch her back or lean in and kiss her. I am now cloud watching all the time and, in the evenings, when walking my dog, I gaze at the moon, as if it were a companion walking every step in the damp grass along with me. A few nights ago, after a day of inhaling the world in deep gulps—I was brittle and tired, and I got into an argument with the kids. Nothing of consequence, perhaps it was the dog not being walked, or one of them simply asking for specific groceries but it was the last leaf in the barrel that caused it to overflow. An eruption that was lit over generations in my family, a coarseness and sense of self-righteous fairness that left much of my own childhood with me being not only being bewildered by my father’s rage but more importantly being scared as fuck that an adult would act like this. I knew, even as a ten-year-old, that something was amiss. As much as I have tried to temper and smother that flame inside of me, it’s there—mostly a small smoldering speck but it can transform rather quickly if my mind isn’t in the right place, if I am holding the world in my cheeks. I blew up, unable to come back I raged in the car, at the kids, at the dog who is compelled to bark “FUCK YOU!” at every motorcycle we pass on the street except her “Fuck You” comes out as a high pitched bark that blasts through ears like a bark-y explosion. In the back yard, I sat in the parked car—the kids went inside, no doubt wondering and thinking the same thoughts that I had about my own father over forty years ago and I sat, I listened. I tried not to hear the sounds of depression, of wanting to be annihilated, to submerge myself under waves. To call it out while sitting in my car, breathing, each breath one more step away from that wanting to be engulfed. Bruno knocked on the car window, “Dad, Saskia is yelling at me. I cleaned the living room.” He held up a can of Pledge and a dirty sock. “Will you come in soon?” Closing my eyes, “I’m not quite ready yet, I will though. A few more minutes.” I watched him stroll back to the porch, his bare feet climbing the steps and he disappeared inside. I listened some more. I looked up and saw the moon, a haze in the city sky but a comforting haze, my blurry companion. I saw the clouds, rolling over the sky in slow moving waves, and I let myself be engulfed but by something far more powerful than the depression that has nibbled on my insides all my life. After a few more minutes I went inside, said my apologies to my kids, that I was wrong to yell. An apology was something that was not offered by my father, he only handed his children blame, a cruddy way to live life and in my own growth something I never want to do. We got in the car, we laughed, and I pointed out the moon and we drove through the drive-through where I managed to make them laugh. Not everything has to end the way we feel they might. I left whatever future scar I might leave my daughter on the front seat that night and traded it in for take-out Chinese that we ate and laughed together with.
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.
“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)
(I have been writing a series of short stories, mostly character studies for a few years from something that I’ve called “The Chair.” A few of them I have posted, the last post was culled from these short studies. This is another one, I’ve been mostly writing fiction the past year, one is a longer story for my son Bruno. Not sure if I will share that one yet.)
Sleeping.
A small creak in the wall behind him, the building was settling, it had been since he moved in nearly two years ago—it mawed, croaked and sighed at all times. “It’s a dump” he told his mother over the phone shortly after moving in, “but its cheap and close to work…anyway, what else do I need?” Was he asking her or himself? The sun had bent its light over the small shelf against the far wall, with his half-folded laundry on top of it in a giant clump of colors, he felt the ache again. It was timeless. It was bottomless. It could be terrifying at times, and the suddenness that it brought felt like an airport. Last night when he got home, he pulled the groceries out of the white denim bag after hauling them up the stairs, his hands cold, his knees wanting to crawl into a tub of water but they were already disappointed because the bathtub leaked, and he made an egg with a piece of bread he fried in the pan along with it. After reading and listening to records spin their circles of melody he went to bed and felt the ache. It was worse when he walked in his room, it froze him from inside and he managed to make it to his bed. Stripping off his clothes, he tossed them in the hamper and wriggled in, the cold blankets finding his legs colder than they were. The lonely part of the earth, the one that faced the rest of the dark universe struck him hard when he lived in it, and he would pin for sleep as he wrestled with the slumber that took it’s time, ruffling blankets over his head. Like a child. Until a few hours later he would finally fall into a restless slumber.
Leaving work earlier that night he had turned up the car stereo, music always worked but this time as he waited at stoplight after stoplight nothing within him had changed and he thought of stopping for a coffee or even going shopping although this reminded him of his money issues. Instead he decided that going home, he could make his own coffee, put a record on and lay down if he needed to. But the pang of emptiness followed him and when he put the water on for the coffee, he felt himself say “why even bother” out loud. When he was younger, he navigated the depression with alcohol, and later, pills which he would wash down with glasses of wine. The only time he drank wine was when he took painkillers, using it as an enhancer, most other times he drank beer and bourbon. Or vodka. Or gin. Anything really, he had realized that certain types of liquor were better depending on his mood or physical state. He did not like to drink whisky or any dark liquor if he had a hangover, it had too quick of an effect on him—it made his body confused. “Do you want me drunk or do you want me tired?” it would ask him as if his own body was a tired lover. Instead he would drink a gin & tonic or a vodka cranberry when the hangover had lasted past six pm, these were more subtle drinks and they didn’t last as long on the tongue. Whisky seemed to waken his taste buds and then nestle in for the night, always a presence. With vodka and gin, there was a softer taste that was also blunted by the tonic or juice, he liked to say when he was drinking these he was not really drinking. He was nursing. It had been many years since he had a drink so much so that his sobriety was an adult, 18 years but in other ways the way he felt inside was as damaged as his liver once was.
Sitting on the couch, he pulled a cat hair off his leg and dropped it on the floor and held his coffee cup in his hand. He was unsure of what to do next, there was a small television in his room but he lost interest in it rather quickly and he could turn on his computer but that too would propel him somewhere he didn’t want to go. Always searching. Next to the couch lay a small stack of books, some had been there for months, they might of well as started paying rent. So many unread words. The words as patient as a tree. Inside a gasp of anxiety, grew up and burst, flooding his bloodstream and mind. Explosions. Grabbing a notebook he started writing, his hand moving across the page as if it were a brush fire, he wrote about memories he was unsure ever existed, he wrote about love that had captured him and how he let it go, ignoring what was given freely in order to slip back into something unexplainable. Confused. He stopped after four pages, noticing the clock he had been writing almost an hour, he wrung his wrist and went into the kitchen for a water. The needle on the record player was pretending it was treading water at the end of the record he had been playing, bouncing up and back every four seconds, he poured himself the water, drinking slowly from the glass and returned to his notebook. He never re-read what he wrote, these were just maps in reverse to try to figure out how he got here, realizing it didn’t change where he was but it did change his perspective on it. He wrote some more, this time managing to corral a childhood memory of his father. They were hiking, somewhere deep in the woods, he remembered hating hiking, and was always on the lookout for poison ivy which somehow managed to latch onto him only to erupt in painful rashes that would stick with him for most of the summer. His father, marching forward, bellowing to him in his deep voice to “hurry up, Pokie—you will not get poison ivy!” This was a lie because he always got poison ivy and every July was a lost cause. “I am hurrying, I want to be careful” he answered back to his dad while scanning the floral surrounding him. Every step a deliberate move forward or sideways, surrounded by a sea of vengeful green. “You will not get poison ivy, just hurry!” He realized at that early age that his father would never understand him, nor did his father really care. The next few days he had gotten the worst case of poison ivy he had ever had, it was in his ears, his eyes, on his penis and around his mouth, his mother had to take him to the hospital and scolded him for being careless. “Why do you walk in the woods if you know you are going to get it? Your summer is basically ruined for a while, you can’t really go any where in this state.” He looked at the oozing puss from the blanket of bumps across his hands and wrists. He said nothing. “What an asshole,” he spoke to know one as he closed the notebook, closing the memory. It was then that he went to bed.
The next morning his alarm went off, he pawed at the bedside table next to his head, a book fell, then another one and next was a bottle of water, he felt the water dribble over his hand, listened as it spooled out onto the floor. “Shit.” he scrambled out of bed, grabbed a dirty tee-shirt off the floor and started mopping up the water. He damp dried some of the books, cursing to himself and thought of how he didn’t want to go to work, wanting to go back to bed he nevertheless moved to the bathroom, where he peed and then splashed water across his face and neck, then to the kitchen where he started the coffee. He moved to the chair, and he pulled out one of the daily affirmation books that he read without fail every morning, sometimes the words did what they were intended to and nudged him towards gratitude or a calmer space while other times there was nothing and he felt empty reading the words, but it was always worth the effort; something was better than nothing. He nursed the coffee, pulled his legs up on the chair, set the plastic egg timer he got from his grandmother’s house after she died and meditated for fifteen minutes. This was how his days had started since moving in, with nary a deviation unless he was late for work or slept in. Some days it worked and some days it didn’t, and he thought about if there was any correlation with the sunshine on his good days.
There was some floating he felt, his legs folded under him, more memories he tried to embrace and then, breath away. He had found her by her car, lost on the sidewalk and he held her. She shook under his shoulders, quaked and shuddered, she convulsed in his arms. Her voice caught, it paused and then it tugged at his throat and he wept as well. Both of them bawling under the early morning street like broken feral cats, putting her hands across his cheeks, pawing away his tears. “I’ve lost you, you are on a boat drifting away. Standing in the middle you aren’t coming back.” Kissing her forehead, he whispered, “I don’t know.” Her torso rattled, tears soaked the pavement, pulling her closer he thought “I’m preparing you.” She had gotten in her car shortly after, drove to work, ate her lunch alone that day in a strip-mall parking lot, listening to the same compact disc that had gotten stuck nearly five months earlier. Repeat the ending and the beginning. She called him and he didn’t pick up. She called again and he didn’t pick up again.
After his meditation he called off work, made some more coffee, and then went for a walk. With the sun making silent comments to him, whispering in his ear, trying to turn his thoughts he looked at the mud poking out from the sides of his shoes, felt a cloud making it’s presence known as it cut off the sunlight and finally he sat down. Nothing had changed, and he felt tired. The walk did little, the sun had tried her best but, in the end, sometimes a person’s darkness will swallow the sun. He showered, he put on a record, he straightened his bookshelves, he took out some paper and took his favorite pen, scribbled and put it away. Drank another coffee and a glass of water. Folding his clothes, he carefully put them away and then prepared his bed. In the other room and sat in the chair staring at the glass of water, he smiled ruefully, “time to go sailing.”
When I was a child I had a fear the struck me cold at times, choked me silent and made my skin rise on my arms. The fear was so great that I was frightened to speak of it out loud because perhaps, if I allowed the fear to take flight from my throat and into the air then it would breath the untold into life. So, I kept silent until the nightmares would grab me in my slumber and throttle me, I would awake in tears, my body trembling and run into my mother’s bed. “Mom, I dreamed the devil was after me, he is trying to possess me.” This fear stayed with me for years, from the age of ten until I was thirteen I was scared to sleep alone, and there were many times I would take my blanket and mushed up pillow and crawl down the hallway and fall asleep next to my mother’s door.
My father fed into this fear with his chilling brand of Catholicism that consisted of more dollops of hate than love; it took me some time to shake his words from my mind. To realize that sometimes, the lives of the father-the words of the father are not be given credence, that, perhaps they are just plain fucking wrong. It was an embarrassing fear, for who would believe in the devil and why would speaking of something bring it into being? It was hidden, when I told people who I trusted they would laugh at it all the while it felt true for me.
Later in life when alcohol started to steer my life in subtle ways, tiny rivers of control the bent me toward the bottle and formed watery cracks in my relationships the admittance of feeling betrayed by something that had only offered me acceptance was something that seemed impossible to do. Alcohol was as solid in my life as anything I had ever known. Meanwhile my life collapsed by degrees inside of me, the walls were breaking off by bits inside, while the people who loved me the most grew disgusted, sorrowful and most importantly disappointed in the trajectory of my life. To admit that alcohol had become a problem was to admit that I was a failure at living, the perception was that I couldn’t do life.
Couldn’t do life.
It was early spring and in Columbus that means the vestiges of winter spits out of the sky in the form of cold rain, groaning winds and a gray the clutches it’s knuckles into the sky until, finally the May sunshine pulls the gray and hurtles it deep into the ground for the next five months. The sun blinks out in a coy dance only to be replaced by the gray; it is always the gray. The news came over the phone, in a patient yet hesitant voice and the feelings of isolation that had always resided within me, came bursting out like that Ohio gray sky, the moments of relief were as brief as the sun during this time. There was an eruption of sadness that bellowed out from a past that has always existed, it seemed that while I may be moving into the future the past feelings of heartache were tethered to that future so the present was tinted with the past. Always. The drive was long, although others were in the car with me, the rolling thoughts of loss, abandonment and the filling in blanks kept me from opening my mouth, I kept silent. The wheels rolling under the car could not roll fast enough, I was ruptured. Something I was all too familiar with.
The lake was picturesque, the clouds rolling over the trees, the wind making the water dance into the shore and infrequent bursts of rain pelted the windshield. She called me, but it hurt too much, the phone was a torch in my ear. Another woman called until finally I could only speak in written words. The love they offered fell aside, because inside the feelings were torching me. I listened to music, the same song over and over, “Noble Experiment” until the tears rolled down, untouched, they danced against the shore. Sliding out of the car, leaping over the large puddle that had formed in the grass next to the parking lot, the bank of the lake was muddy. I sat on a picnic table, looking at the discarded liquor bottles in the fire pit near my feet. “Somebody had fun last night.” Candy wrappers hung in the brown arms of bushes, there was nobody around. After some careful thought, the shore was slippery, but the small embankment was easy to get down. Staring into the water, small droplets of rain dotted the surface. I slid out of my clothes and into the water, it was cold but not jarringly so, the slick mud at the bottom squeezing itself between my toes. Shaking but not from the April weather, plunging under the water. A test. Just to see. It was a subtle shock but not so very frightening. A test. Just to see. I carried the clothes to the car, darkness was floating into the everything and I found a towel in the trunk. I dried, put my clothes on and listened to the rain ping-ping itself into the world outside. I drove home.
When somebody commits suicide, it is not because they feel unloved, it is because they feel too much. They feel the world as something electric and every pleasure is more colorful and every disappointment is darker, and there is always the dark within. It may be a middling creek, a roaring river or sadly an epic ocean flowing inside of them. It is scary carrying this around and to speak of it, to speak of the fight to keep it at bay, in essence, to construct a dam against these rolling feelings grows tiresome and painful. And the pain is always acute. Some treat this with humor, at times gallows humor, its fought with laughter because laughter always works. Music usually does. Words help. Running. Alcohol, sometimes until it doesn’t. Drugs, sometimes until they don’t. Sex, but the pain of attraction can also be the wind that washes these feelings upon the inner shore of ourselves. As I’ve grown older I’ve made a commitment to speak about my own battles with my own rivers inside of me, to realize that speaking it’s name does not mean it will come true. But to drag it out into the sunshine, however fleeting I may feel that sunshine is, it is more powerful than the dark.
School was a drag, from the earliest years of kindergarten to last frayed edges of my psyche as my high school years petered to a shambling halt, all the while my innards groaned every morning I drove the 1978 Corolla to the school. It was as if I had to nail myself upon a cross made of bricks, racism and corn every morning, my stomach swaying as I bounded over the soft rolling hills, past epic farms of corn and soybeans. Just like a John Cougar Mellencamp record. The first awakening to the unfairness of childhood, stabbed my brain as if I were shrouded in an invisible cloak that covered all the innocence of a blond-haired, blue-eyed boy of five. Standing outside Ms. K’s doorway as children ran to waiting yellow school buses, metal tubes of laughter, nausea and the sweet pungent scent of childhood who would roll through the nearby neighborhoods, dropping children off as if they were bits of fleshy, noisy mail, I turned slowly when Ralph Scarmack called my name. I knew him, sort of anyway, as much as a kindergartener could know another little kid, his father worked with my father, this much I knew. “Maybe we can be friends?” I thought, as I smiled at him. As my brother stayed in school all day, he was a first grader, I spent the afternoons waiting for him to walk down Sunnyside Drive. I’d sit on the porch, or set up various bulky green Army men under the porch and pretend the Daddy-Long Legs would attack them, perhaps I’d ride my Big-Wheel down to the corner and spy out for him. Big black plastic wheels flicking bits of gravel behind me, I was a blur tearing up the sidewalk.
“Hi Ralph” I looked at him with the hope that I had a new friend. Eyeing me up and down, he snarled, “I’m going to kick you in the shins!” Looking down, I noticed he wore brown socks underneath brown leather shoes, complete with brown stiff laces. Looking back up, I tilted my head, much like a puppy and wondered what he just said. Biting his bottom lip, he raised his foot backwards and with all his little-boy force struck my right shin as hard as he could. Collapsing on the sidewalk, he stood over me, “don’t tell anybody or I’ll do it again tomorrow!” Water filled my eyes, while a lump the size of a loaf of bread rose in my throat, choking on shame and confusion, I was not going to cry. I turned heel and limped away, trying hard not to but he had managed to peel away a small layer skin on the bottom of my leg, small creases of blood dripped down my leg. Maplewood Avenue had never appeared so long, the cut hurt to the touch and I soon made it home. Crawling under the porch, I stacked the Army men in rows, they would wage battle against the ants and other insects. The feeling of being an outsider was literally hammered into me that fall day.
Every year, autumn would slump from childhood summers like a slow moving fog, rising around skinny ankles, winding its promise of long hot school days, sweating while August afternoons mocked us through thick glass windows, and chalk-scented air soon it would choke the fun out of our lives. From the dreamland of summer afternoons, staying up watching Double-Chiller theater, to the drudgery of turning yellowed paper, with artwork from the 1950’s still in our textbooks, it all seemed desperate. Even to an elementary school child. School was like a carousal, attending over six schools by the time fourth grade arrived, I would stand in line while waiting for another multi-colored wooden horse to arrive. Picking me up and taking me on the same old trip. By the time fourth grade arrived, I was in a state of motion sickness when it came to school.
Shy at a young age, but warming up when feeling comfortable, the husk that had accumulated from bracing new schools, new friends and the awkwardness of saying my name, and having to repeat it over and over to disbelieving little kids was burnished by these successive years of change. But when the trust came, I would open from the inside, folding out in a tumble of words that could cause other to be startled into dizziness. Bruno, is the same, and I can see in him the trepidation of my past. Bruno, makes things, big things, out of discarded wood, string, and found objects in our garage. His favorite store is Lowe’s and he bounds up and down the aisles as if he were in an amusement park. June would seduce slowly, with the promise of unending days filled with imagination brought to life, fort-making, back-yard cookouts and late night episodes of kick-the-can and then July would clutch and hold onto childhood like a metal vise, everything was frozen, days spilling into nights the summer would never end, and finally August thumped into consciousness with humid footprints reminding us that school was ticking ever closer. As the sweat dripped like melting ice-popsicles down our backs, August brought along dread that soon, so very soon, afternoons would be spent in steamy classrooms while swaying trees and bleating insects mocked the children through open windows.
A sense of distrust for school manifested itself in me from an early age, from Mrs. Amamuil in first grade who admonished me in front of my new classroom for wetting the floor, I went home in tears, never trusting this older hardened woman who was there to bring out the splendor of discovery in children, but instead struck with an invisible shaming stick to the little ones in her charge. And next, just two years later, a brunette teacher, with her hair pulled tight in a careful bun, long skirts and red-lollipop lipstick who stated to the only black kid in our class (in Newport News, Virginia), “Why can’t you just read Otis, what are you? Stupid?” This was my first experience in racism, as she spoke a portion of my gut tightened, as a child knows inherently when something is amiss and while I could not put my finger on it, I realized what she did was so very, very wrong. Later, in fifth grade, with an already strong sense of right and wrong, the spring sunshine was blanketing the baseball field of East Elementary school. The gym teacher, Mr. Swartz was a stereotypical gym teacher, tight thigh length athletic shorts worn at all times, black baseball cap, whistle dangling from a black cord that reached his tight polo shirt and spotless tennis shoes. He coulda been cast for a Hollywood movie, an intense man, prone to barking out instructions as if all the children were standing 40 yards away and not the five feet from him as we were, and at times he could splice in small insults to players that were not doing well, “Jimbo, you are kind of wussying out there now, you’re going to let Eric run right by you? Eric’s a little on the chunky side.” I didn’t like him, I had the sense he was a bully, plus he played his favorites, Mike Quacktri, a toothy kid who seemed to have a different baseball hat for every day of the week, was prone to bragging, was a kid who you could tell held his favor. Being a small boy, I was often overlooked but also had a competitive spirit and was fast and agile, who played backyard football with a glee that felt as if I were on a ride at an amusement park. We were playing tee-ball, and as I stood on third base, the score tied and Mr. Swartz bellowing that this was the final play and that it looked like it would be a tie game, when the ball was struck I ran home, determined to prove him wrong and I slide into home plate, striking my knee into the tee-ball stand. The base shattered and my knee bled, my classmates huddled around me as I fought off tears and I heard the teacher tell them, “let him be, he’s being a little pussy.” From the ground, my cheeks covered in the fine powered dirt of the batter’s box and fingers bloodied by my knee, I yelled out, “Shut up!!”Suddenly, my small body was flung against the chain linked fence, my head cracking on the steel railing, bouncing off, Mr. Swartz grabbed me by my collar, “you little punk, you broke my tee ball plate, who taught you to talk like that?!”He tossed my to the ground, scooped me back up and pushed me towards the office, tears strained to poured off my face and I fought hard to keep them at bay. I limped to the edge of the playground, “pick it up!” he barked, grasping my left arm tightly, he lifted me a few inches off the ground, the tips of my tennis shoes dragging in the dirt. Certain to get paddled, knee bleeding and the shame of being tossed about in front of my classmates, I swallowed hard, making certain I would not cry in front of this man. As we walked into the office, Mr. Swartz yammered for the principal, “this kid needs a paddling and his mouth washed out!”
Sitting in the principal’s chair, knowing soon he would pull the thick wooden paddle complete with three large holes in the middle for maximum pain, I almost choked on the lump in my throat which had started formed after being tossed against the metal fence as if I were constructed of burlap bags and straw. Sitting in a hard plastic chair as the Principal furrowed his brow and looked across his grey metal desk, his back bathed in the bright spring sunshine, outside birds hopped along the power-lines. “What happened?” he asked his face a mask of concern. “I was running to home plate and I slid, hitting the tee-ball stand with my knee and Mr. Schwartz was telling kids not to help me, I told him to shut up. I was bleeding….then he threw me against the fence.” I had started rubbing the red rings from the rigid grip of the teacher, his hand had enveloped my thin biceps and left his imprint soon bruises would form. The principal called my father and asked him to come pick me up, hot tears were now dripping from my eyes, as if they had become swollen candles, embarrassment crawled up my neck and into my ears. A few minutes passed and I looked up, hands still trying in a pathetic futile attempt to wipe away the red scars of the gym teacher’s hands, “are you going to paddle me now?” A voice as small as a reed bending in the wind, the fear was almost alive. Standing up, the principal folded open in front of me, he was a tall man, nearly six foot three inches. With a dollop of black mussed hair that sat like a woven crown up his head, he walked around the desk in what appeared to be like a giant step. I still remember his hands, they were large, thick like fleshy boards of wood, almost planks and they reached for me, wanting to recoil but holding fast and I looked up at him. He placed his hands on both my shoulders, bent down and looked me in the eye, “no, I’m not going to paddle you, you’ve had a bad enough day.” He gave me a small hug, “don’t tell anybody that I didn’t paddle you though. I have a reputation to think of” he said with a wink. Relief, escaped from my quivering mouth. He asked the secretary to fetch me a glass of water. Time slunk by as I waited for my father, it was as if it were beaten about by the shoulders with its back broken in half, the clock ticked in a booming fashion, I was slumbering towards punishment. I waited in another hard plastic chair in the waiting area of the office, staring straight ahead as children walked past, my brother slid by the door waving his hand in a gesture of solidarity and I wanted him to save me once again. My father picked me up soon after, he held me tight as sobs escaped from my chest as if they were pigeons being freed from rooftop pen, he stroked my hair. We drove to his office, stopping at McDonalds along the way.
A few years later, sitting in the carnivorous school auditorium as countless seventh and eighth graders polished up the last few detention hours of the year, ordered to sit every other seat apart as if this would dissuade 12 and 13-year-old boys and girls from communicating, Mr. Davis a bearded bear of a man bellowed from the stage. “You are all here because you have misbehaved during the course of the year, as-such you have had ample time to fulfill your requirements of after-school detention which you have been too lazy to do. Hence you are here with me, there will be no talking, no looking around and if you didn’t bring anything to keep busy, then tough. If you communicate with your neighbor you will not get credit for being here and will have to redo detention this week, or finish it in summer school.” He was large man, who had a reputation among the children as being a mean-spirited, cruel and violent. The year prior he had snapped up a youngster, by his shoulders, twirled him in the air and slammed the child against a locker rendering his wrist inoperable for the next month. He was a man to be feared, a veritable Javert whose presence at the end of the long lacquered hallways would send children scurrying like rats into the nearest sewers, on top of that, he was a lousy teacher.
Zoltan was getting ready to graduate the 8th grade, he towered above me on so many levels, popular with the boys, girls and teachers, his charming ways had made his transition to various schools and neighborhoods as easy as warm butter on toast. He sat in the row in front of my, grinning as the last minutes of middle school ticked away, he eyed our friend Eric Zudak who meandered his way down the same aisle as Zoltan and listening to Mr. Davis scream from the stage, “Mr. Zudak, why are you late?! And if you have a good excuse you can sit five seats away from Mr. Koe-Krompecher!” Replying with a wide grin, Eric explained, “I was helping Ms. Houska pack up her car, she said you could check with her.” He plopped in the thin folding wooden seat, his backside feeling the crackling wood starting to splinter after so many bottoms had sat through innumerable hours of choirs, plays and graduations over the years. Sitting between the both of them, one row back, I noticed Zoltan making eye contact with Eric, nod his head and mouth, “hey man.” No sounds emitted from his mouth. A bomb went off from the stage, a giant sound that filled the high spacious room, Mr. Davis croaked from his perch, “Mr. Koe-Krompecher, get up here right NOW!!” The anger of his voice eating the air out of theater, it resonated long after the spittle had left his hairy mouth. Zoltan moved towards the front, slipping by Eric, everybody’s eyes moved from him to the authoritative teacher. Zoltan was still smiling as he approached Mr. Davis, in his mind he had nothing to worry about, it was the conclusion of a long three years of middle school, his time in Athens had been rewarding, this young brave man had worked extremely hard and disciplined himself to shake off the dire predictions of professionals who had painted him as a troubled kid, a boy whose frustrations just a few years prior would erupt in volcanic episodes of violence had been tempered by incisive intelligent, slicing humor and the ability to form friendships out of the smoky passage of seconds. He had found his home. Standing in front of Mr. Davis, “yes sir?” Lunging at the boy, Mr. Davis plucked my 13-year-old brother up, and proceeded to shake him as if he were a chicken leg, secured in a zip-lock baggie, a human Shake-n-Bake on the stage. Through gritted teeth Mr. Davis, snarled, “I told you to not make any contact with anybody.” With that he pushed Zoltan away like a king to a servant who had just dropped his golden chalice. “Now go sit down and shut your mouth.” Gathering himself, Zoltan walked proudly back to his seat, with bated breath, the collective gasps of the children were focused on the inevitable tears that would flow from his cheeks. Alas they never came, Zoltan sat down, his eyes reddened, but no water escaped from his eyes. His face sweltering beat red from fear, shame and astonishment at what transpired he nodded towards me; he was ok. Anger filled me, it was like the room had been filled with water, submerged in anger at the unjust treatment of a child, my brother and trembled inside but could do nothing. Weighing maybe seventy-five pounds, arms as thin as red and white stripped straws, I struggled to keep my ass in my seat, wanting to flee but realizing I had to stand fast. “Mr. Zudak, what is your problem? Did you not bring anything to detention?!” Mr. Davis obviously wasn’t satisfied with assaulting one child today, “Get your butt up here!” Eric moved slowly towards the front, taking the side steps up to the stage he stopped well short of the big man, “Well, it’s the last day of school so I turned all my books in so I don’t have anything…sir.” Mr. Davis stepped towards Eric, his boat-like leather shoes echoing across the stage, the wooden floorboards wheezing under his weight, even these planks of dead trees were fearful of this man. Eric took as step back with every step Mr. Davis took towards him, an odd, almost graceful dance of mimicry. Eric was a bright boy. Finally, the bearded giant stopped, “well get a piece of paper from one of your classmates who actually came prepared for detention and write about what got you here.” With that, Mr. Davis turned in disgust and returned to his afternoon newspaper. Eric, hopped off the stage, waited as a classmate handed him a single page of notebook, the left side riddled with the tiny flaps of paper that had once held it fast to the small metal rings. The last day of school indeed.
Summer came and went, soft sounds of adolescent burbled through our veins, things were changing fast, the nineteen seventies were over and the eighties were now unfolding in our lives fueled by teenage hormones that would dictate our collective lives for the remainder of the decade. The sounds coming from the uptown record shops were changing, chugging and whirling sounds of electrical guitars popped through the air of Haffa’s and the newly opened School Kids Records, punk rock had settled in firmly in the small college town, and mixed with the early sounds of hip-hop, the cold disco beats of a disintegrating club scene in NYC and England, the air was electric and from a thirteen-year old’s perspective as wide open as the universe. Reagan had not yet launched his assault on defunding every government program to help the poor and middle class, AIDS had not been named, therefore it was mostly a hidden scourge the was quickly burying homosexual men on the coasts—it had not yet torched the gay community in the Midwest. The school year of 81-82, was a step towards adulthood, albeit in the clumsiest manner a boy of thirteen could muck his way into. Sex was a mystery, one that was witnessed through the eyes of R rated movies like Porky’s, Animal House and The Rocky Horror Picture show, funny and confusing situations that played out on giant canvas screens in our tiny town. Snickering in the back row, the boys were brave, puffing out meager chests, pretending we weren’t virgins while wondering what a vagina actually felt like let alone an orgasm. Acne popped out of faces like dandelions overnight and the fear of being discovered was played out every morning in choosing out the most looking casual outfit that was planned with early-morning anxiety that produced buckets of tears in many households. Eighth grade. A big step and at the time, there were kids in Athens County, whose parents never finished the eighth grade, as the importance of a college education was not yet baked into the national consciousness.
Pro-Ked sneakers grew smooth as I slummed all over the town, bouncing from record store to record store, arcade to arcade and people in town started to know my name, stepping from beneath my older brother’s shadow, finally gaining confidence as the year went by. Classwork wasn’t too difficult with the exception of math, where an undiagnosed learning disability started trickling in fear and self-doubt about my academic abilities, and many of the teachers were receptive to my dark and sarcastic humor with the exception of the curly haired science teacher, who hung a large smooth wooden paddle on the wall behind the aquarium. A silent statement about who was in charge. And Mr. Davis, who taught math, a double-whammy for a kid who played Dungeons and Dragons, couldn’t sit still and had trouble keeping his mouth shut. Sitting in the middle of the class for most of the year, staring out the window as cars rolled by, birds sang songs that mocked the children sweltering in the broiling classroom, there was no air conditioner in the building, until finally the last day of school arrived. I had made it, not one issue in Mr. Davis’s class, the plan for the entire year was not to talk. Ever. And on that last day of school, I thought that this girthy foul man did not even know my name, I was proud and excited, the eighth grade dance would be that night and I had a date.
I sat in my chair, it was the first class after lunch, mid-May and the sun baked the grass outside, cicadas were escaping from their fifteen-year slumber, their chirping sounds of lust filled the air. An insect choir singing for all the children, a cacophony of sexual urges by bugs stuck to the sides of trees, trembling against the rough bark for all of adolescences on the final day of school. The hallways were polished, set for a summer of sleep where no small feat could rub the sheen away, rubber soles upon the floor would instead be traded for thin flip-flops and bikinis at the local pool, where small gestures of kindness could propel a teenager into roiling states of awkwardness. Crumpled bits of paper, lined the corners of the hallway as lockers were cleaned out in hurried rushes, as if the process of tossing old assignments out as quickly as possible would rid our lives of all the anxiety they once inspired. “Fuck ya’all”, went the thought as notebooks were emptied out into circular metal trash bins. Going years without a diagnosis, living with ADHD is at once thrilling and at other times a jumbled mess of panicked moments and feelings of inadequacy, at times the shame and self-loathing are as heavy as trying to pull a tireless semi-truck. Filled with boulders. As big as the trucks hauling them. Massive. Big. Large. Thick.
Mr. Davis was my math teacher in 8th grade, leaning nothing in the class except to realize that I sucked at math (again, the learning disorder that wasn’t diagnosed until I was in my mid-thirties). But it was the final day of school, it had passed without once being a target for his brutal teaching methods, his classroom was built upon fear with him pulling out that wooden paddle and tapping it on his large cracked leather feet. His personal life must have been one of misery. Mr. Davis did very little to educate the children under his responsibility and his lack of concern for the education of the children in his classroom was palatable even to the young eyes of early teenagers. If we were flies, he would have pulled off our wings. As the students would enter his classroom, the large man would peer at each one, dark eyes half shut would scan every child up and down—needing no practice for intimidation as the small folds of skin above his eyes would strike fear in every child who entered his classroom. It was a talent he no doubt relished. But on this, the final step of a long journey of middle school had reached its apex with nary an issue, somehow despite a proclivity to draw attention to myself I had made myself small the entire year in this behemoth’s classroom. This trait of staring down young children, I have learned, is quite common among intimidating teachers. A trait that some regard as a talent while others feel it no room in a place of learning.
The desks were small, with a small plank of wood used for the top, it was connected by a green metal arm to the chair, itself another hardened piece of wood that had caused great unrest to little narrow butts over the past forty years. Underneath the chair was a small cubby where a student could stash books, notebooks or a miniature backpack, but on this day, the final day of school there were no books, papers or backpacks to stash. It was the second to last class of the day, a trembling sigh of relief hung over the hallways and classrooms from the 400 students. Usually, I sat towards the back of the classroom, it was more ubiquitous and for a small kid like myself it was easy to huddle behind all of the bigger boys in the class and at this point in my life all the boys were bigger than me. Alas, all the chairs were taken when I danced into the room, just under two hours to go and we had the 8th grade dance that evening. Perhaps the burgeoning awaking within my body played even a larger role in the giddy anxiety I felt, as I had a date with a very pretty brunette girl who no doubt was as nervous as I was. Even in the days, it was hard to believe that any female would be nervous around a boy, working hard to maintain whatever sliver of cool I had and usually plugged my hands into my pocket and cracked wise. As I skidded towards the lone remaining seat I apologized to Mr. Davis as I was a few minutes late after helping to set up the cafeteria for the dance.
“You’re still late BKK, and if it wasn’t the last day of school, that would earn you a detention. Now just sit there and shut up until the end of the period.”
“But Mr. Davis, I was with Ms. Anderson helping to set up the dance.”
“I said SHUT UP and put your head down!”
Placing my head down and looking sideways, I saw my friend Danny Abdella sitting next to me, he made a wide eyed face, his eyebrows arched high, staring at me as if to tell me that this was no time to act up. Smiling, I pointed my finger at Danny, making like a gun with my fist, I pulled the trigger. Suddenly I was lifted out my chair, in one fell swoop Mr. Davis flipped me into the air, all 80 pounds of me, hitting the floor he kicked me over the smooth wood towards the far corner, “I told you not to move, not to talk, not to do anything! Now get up and stand in the corner!” his voice lurched above my fear. A pitch black shadow covering my emotions. Hunkering in the corner, fat tears crawling down my soft boyish face, I eyed the window. It was half-way open, “it’s what maybe six feet to the ground, I can jump out and run to mom’s office, he would never catch me.” The soft green grass beckoned, a six-foot jump was safer than being in the room with the bearded brute. Bees flew from soft white flowers while the wind made tempting waves upon the green carpet. Cars drove by, and college students walked the sidewalk, feeling a kinship with them I suddenly yearned to be old, to be strong and to be big enough to fight back. In the end, I wept softly in the back of the classroom, all the children’s eyes upon me and after the bell rang, I hurried out of class away from the hesitations of my friends, as if approaching me would put themselves in harm’s way.
Making my way to the cafeteria was a blur, wanting to run as far as away from the school, exiting the wide glass doors, up the concrete steps towards the gymnasium I felt sick. Nausea had replaced the fear that had choked the breath from my throat, confusion bounced around my head as feet didn’t need a command to take me towards safety. Behind me I heard my name, “Bela, Bela, wait up!” Turning my brother stood in front of me, “we gotta call mom, if you leave then nothing will get done and she can meet you out here.” If anything, he was usually right, “O.K., but I’m not going back in there unless mom is with me.” Zoltan called our mother from the payphone in the cafeteria doorway, I slinking his head between the door and the corner of the black and silver metal phone, it was fastened into the wall as if someone may try to steal it and every teenage secret it no doubt stored amongst it green, red and white wires. The spiral metal cord wrapped around his finger, the phone call took a least two weeks to finish. A few moments later, he hung up, taking me by the elbow he guided me outside. “She’s on her way, she is going to meet up by the gym. I told her you were too scared to go back into the school.”
There is nothing like seeing a mother come to the rescue, her short red hair and confident walk comforted me but in the end I was ashamed, and it wasn’t until she pulled me in tight to her waist and kissed the top of my mussed hair did I let myself feel again. More droplets of water escaped my eyes as I described what happened, “We are going to talk to Mr. Smith about this.” Mr. Smith, was the principal, a short stocky man with a full Grizzly Adams gray beard, his daughter was in my grade and they went to the same church as us. Entering the office my mother asked to see him and he ushered us in, closing the door his first words were, “why didn’t you come straight to me?” “I was scared. I wanted to go home.” I meekly replied. Looking down the barrel of the past 35 years, it makes sense, as the school did nothing when Mr. John Davis manhandled my brother the year before and broke the arm of another kid. “Well, I want an investigation Donald!” my mother was angry, “and I’m taking Bela home now, we can talk next week.” The short fat man, held his hands together, parsing his words he was careful, “Susan, if Bela leaves now he will only be counted a half day and he can’t attend the dance tonight.” He stared across the desk from me, “that is the rule of the school and I can’t override it but if you want to stay you don’t have to go to your last class you can stay in my office until the end of the school. There is only about 45 minutes’ left.” With a small voice I pleaded with my mother, “that’s not fair, he beat me up, and now I have to stay. I already have my ticket to the dance and I’m taking Coleen.” “Sorry, rules are rules” Mr. Smith replied. “This does not seem to be fair, he is upset and there is no reason he shouldn’t be able to return for the dance.” “If he leaves school now, he can’t return tonight.” In the end, full of weary fear, and stress I stayed, I returned to school that night for the final dance of the year. Less than two weeks later we moved from Athens to Catawba, Ohio. There was no investigation.
Northeastern High School basically consisted of five hallways, one story, a cafeteria, and gymnasium. It was a small school, surrounded by cornfields and a pockmarked gravel lot for the handful of beat up cars and pick-up trucks. The majority of teachers in the school had been there for years, and many had been born in the area, attended nearby colleges and returned. Besides a handful of excellent teachers such as my freshman and sophomore English teacher, Jon Barber it was safe to say that many of them did not encourage intellectual curiosity. The guidance counselors were lacking in skills having told both Zoltan and I were not “college material” and we should think about trade schools. Walking through the doors for the first time felt like a prison sentence, as I overheard hushed voices whispering “did you see that new kid, with the funny name, is he even old enough to be in high school?” or “I bet that kids a fag with a name like that.” Climbing into books helped, fantasy stories, history books and Kurt Vonnegut provided the relief that was a life outside the gold and red cinder block walls of Northeastern High School. Retreating into the shyness of my younger adulthood, I kept my head down but being an adolescence with Attention Deficit Disorder was an obstacle as it one-liners fell forth out of my mouth without nary a thought to hold it back, a quick quip is worth every ounce of punishment. The freshman science teacher, Mr. Stevens was a younger man, he looked a bit like a boyish Mr. Keaton from “Family Ties” with parted wispy hair and sometimes he caught hold of one my jokes and half smiled, giving me the impression that he actually liked me. Other times, he asked me to sit in the front or to wait outside of the classroom to gather myself if I was too excited and bouncy. One day we were working with some sort of acid, using thin eyedroppers we were to put dab of the acid on various organic and inorganic items such as a hardboiled egg, the skin of a dried lizard, and wood. We worked in teams, two or three of us, each placing the acid on the item and the others recording the results. Very pedestrian stuff unless the student has a difficult time following directions because he can’t focus. Jeff Entler had the luxury of testing the frog skin, a small billow of smoke rose out of the dried reptile, he handed me the small glass container, carefully I put the eyedropper in, mindful of the oversized plastic gloves and how they made a clumsy boy more clumsy and squeezed the small black rubber top on the white springy egg. I had misjudged as I placed the end of the eyedropper directly onto the egg, a small amount of acid shot out from the sides, like a cherry tomato popping in an open mouth. It squirted into my face, and my eyes, luckily the protective goggles protected my forehead and black curly hair as I had forgotten to pull them over my eyes. Importunely for my eyes, a small amount landed right on my below my eyes, “shit!” I yelled, as Jeff called for the teacher, who rushed over and with astute thinking lead me to a small sink and rinsed out my eyes and face. Remarkably, it did not hurt too much and it all happened in a matter of seconds. “Thank you” I said, being a little nervous, grabbing me by my wrist he hustled me into the hallway. “What that hell are you doing to my classroom?! You could go blind fooling around with that stuff!” Clutching my collar, he threw me against the lockers, “If I could kick your ass right now, I would you little shit! I didn’t like you the minute you walked in my classroom and if I could get you out of my class I would!” Mr. Stevens then shoved me against the locker a second time. “Not again” I thought. Being a little older, I defended myself, “Mr. Stevens I was not fooling around, you can ask everybody at the table, I was doing what you said to do.” Wrestling the goggles off my forehead, yanking my hair in the process, “Bullshit, because if you did you would have these on your face! Listen, I want you to stay out in the hallway for the rest of the class and to shut your little mouth for the rest of the year.” “yes, sir.” Learning from my previous encounters from angry aggressive teachers, I never said a thing. Why would I?
Tucked in the corner, beneath a hand-drawn map of the world, and next to a wooden shelf that was exclusively built for LP records, with the top shelf constructed to hold roughly 100 7” singles, cover’s facing out for easy flipping but now holding one shelf devoted to Star Wars, Pokémon and the original dog-eared Charlie Brown paperbacks that Zoltan and I learned to read with sits two small guitars. One is an acoustic purchased with love by an adoring grandfather and the other, a small red Fender Stratocaster, which is housed in a stainless steel stand, and when the light hits just right, both the guitar and red guitar twinkle like specks of glitter on a girl’s face. There are actually three of those shelves lined together, all stuffed with tiny cubbies, books, baseball cards, guitar picks, stuffed animals that provide comfort when the maple tree branches thump against the green colored garage, reminding the neighborhood throughout a stormy blackened night that, yes, nature is still in charge and is something to rile the fear out of a small boy tucked under a mountain of blankets. On the other wall, a framed Spider-Man puzzle given away by a musician friend and tacked up around the room are a bevy of silk-screened rock posters, all hand made with the names of the everyman musicians that dot my record collection: Karl Hendricks Trio, The Whiles and Dinosaur Jr. At first impression the room looks just like a youngster’s room, the Pokémon shelf, the Charlie Brown, the hand-drawn pictures of mom and dad, sister too, even the lines drawn against the far wall marking age with lead pencil lines as the children in the house climb higher and higher over the years, an inch here and another inch there. Then the other items, the rock posters, the guitar, the line of Christmas lights, hung carefully along the walls, and some tools scattered on the floor. These are not little kid tools, but the adult flavor, heavy made of metal and heavy plastic and Bruno knows how to use them. He can spend hours outside making ladders, stages for his drums and guitars, a fort that never quite makes it past floor level, for his seventh birthday he wanted a toolshed. Every day when our friend Mike came out and built it, Bruno was outside helping, watching, carrying wood, holding the sides up and in the end helping to paint it. The kid has more tools than his father.
Children bring the world into a perspective that is never imagined, it’s as if a person lived their entire life living underwater. In the dark. And suddenly they are thrust of above the waves, into the shimmering sun, pulled from a cold and blurry life into one of brilliant colors and yes, choppy waves. One may not know one has ever been drowning until they can suck in the air, that is what life can be like for an alcoholic who discovers sobriety, and children. Some of the elements we look for as adults are the ones that we felt we had to find as teenagers, sex, intimacy, and the feeling of not being alone, and for a while, they come easy and at other times they come desperately, a three am desperation with trembling fingers and awkward pauses that break through the brittle darkness like darts aimed at the moon. Usually falling short, but at times, charming in their feeble attempt. My children did this for me, and slow process of time management, sacrifices, with the mundane being the gravity that holds they family together. Such as the yearning for a crying child to finally fall asleep, transforming from a screaming, shrieking animal caught in the bear-trap of its mind, into the soft salve for a violent universe. Bruno, cracks wise, he has a sense of humor that stands wise and cutting that makes one think he is a very old soul, like his sister who reads books that aren’t always age-appropriate and listens to the Mountain Goats alongside Taylor Swift. When he runs across the soccer field a determined look across his face, his blond curls dangling past his shoulders, it’s as if I was there with him, living a childhood I never had. The joy that dances from his cheeks is as infectious as lighting dotting the dark summer sky, brilliant flickers of white energy that booms across the landscape. Bruno has arrived.
One never thinks that a child’s life can be broken by the inner violence of an adult, unless you are the child that is licked by the adult or at times a parent that feels the hidden experience of abuse sideways, when it erupts in small earthquakes. What I understand as a parent is that it is my job allow that child to be a child for as long as he can be, no matter what and by doing so, he will always be a child on the inside.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JcCXUzZWWpY&list=PLFBEA5C8D8536B1F0&index=13
Small, poorly lite buildings dotted the neighborhoods around campus and the Short North, places that served as extra homes where the lonesome and social anxious moored themselves to thick cut planks of polished wood, brown bottles and tall stools where one had to be careful if he sat on it too long, getting sloppy, wavering legs stuck in the small metal rings at the base of each stool. On the walls of some were posters of former gridiron dreams, moments of spectacular (for the winners, that is) athletic feats seized by the camera and now bronzed for ever more on the walls of these establishments. Reminders about the smoky din that, yes, there was winners along High Street at one time, for many of the inhabitants of these spots we went not be a winner or a loser, although most of us related to the semi-ironic motto of Sub-Pop records “Loser”, but because we wanted to be felt and to feel even if it was just the cold touch of a beer bottle or that small moment as the hushed regulars all erupted in unison to Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried.” I had my favorites, all on the convenient way home but more likely I chose my resting place to be near to my other homes, as I was wary of drunk driving and enjoyed the stumbly-walks or even, on occasion crawls home with jeans burnished from the tumbles and falls, hands bloodied by gravel and specs of green, brown and white glass scattered among the alleyways of North Campus.
Court Street was a smorgasbord of bars, from townie bars like the Crystal to the one-night-stand fanfare of the Nickelodeon, I had my first Chili-Dog at the Union Bar and Grill at the age of 11. At the time it was mostly a biker/hippie bar, this was 1979 or so, around the time that punk and new-wave were splitting the halcyon days of weed soaked turntables that had been spinning over-produced dreck like Yes, ELP and REO Speedwagon, into the speedy-blasts of two minutes of guitar and the savvy technical dance music of the Ramones, Talking Heads as well as the pronged attack of English bands such as Wire and David Bowie’s Berlin records. Colleges across the country were undergoing mini-revolutions in cramped dorm rooms and in the various nightclubs that co-eds bounced off one another in, in just ten years the Union would become a mainstay for traveling punk and indie artists traipsing through tiny college towns.
The drinking age in 1982 was 18, and shortly thereafter it changed to 19 where is stayed until the summer of 1986 when it was elevated to 21. I was fifteen, in Athens for Spring Break, where my best Athens friends, Eric Zudak and Rick Winland and I got a cabin at Lake Hope. The first day we managed to drink through the weeks’ worth of alcohol, several cases of beer and a bottle of Jack Daniels. It was a revelation for me, as I managed to go to bed with a girl who was year older, performing fellatio on me while a TDK cassette looped Bowie’s “Ziggy Stardust” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Smash Hits.” Outside, wind forced trees to bend in yoga poses, rain smacked against the wooden walls and thin windows, and in the other room a frantic game of quarters was being played, “..there’s a Starman waiting in the sky, he’d like to come and meet us…..” Clumsy hands mimicked a slug trying to drive and the world unpeeled itself note-by-Bowie-note as the room turned itself inside out in those foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Later in the week we drove into Athens not only were we out of beer it became apparent that there were not too many teenage girls wandering the banks of Lake Hope during the early spring of 1984. There were two bars that were easy to get into, the Greenery which sat on the far end of Court Street, just small downhill walk from the rest of uptown, it had a wooden balcony the drooped over the side walk, a minor miracle every weekend that the balcony didn’t collapse into the pavement from one too many lusting, drunken co-eds. At the other end of town on Union Street, a few store fronts from the Union Bar was the Nickelodeon, otherwise known as The Nick. Its motto should have been “getting high school kids drunk for the past fifteen years” and sitting down near the door, Rick came back with a handful of beers. My face was a smooth as the bottle of Pabst Blue Ribbon Rick handed me, I asked if I needed to go show the ID I didn’t have, “no, shut up. Don’t make them notice you.” Rick was already 18, getting ready to graduate and had purchased all the beers. The room was relatively empty, the smell of bleach and beer still permeated from the floors, shiny with the fresh glow of mopping, and on the walls were beer lights and a giant disco ball twirled tiredly in the middle of the empty dance floor. A Thursday night during spring break in a small college town meant the bar scene was propped up by townies. Drinking a few beers at the Nickelodeon planted a seed of confidence, one that sprouted the idea that with a few drinks, anything socially was possible. By the end of the evening, inside the more crowded Greenery, we found ourselves contorting our bodies to the sounds of Blondie and Adam Ant as bodies stretched and silently begged for the kind of attention none of them had ever encountered.
Living with depression is akin to licking a flame, engulfing the senses it is as if the moroseness of breathing has slowly strangled every other part of the person other than the breath. While the lungs keep working the rest of the body and mind chokes on concrete blocks of sadness and apathy, in the end, for many the chunks of sadness overpower everything else. Jerry came by the store, shortly after Gaunt got dropped from Warner Brothers, he was still living above Larry’s getting ready to move into his new house. His mood vacillating from being optimistic about renewing his relationship with his father to utter despair at being dropped from Warner Brothers; his lifelong hope of being famous, in his eyes being shuttered during the Great Purge by major labels in the latter part of the 1990’s, it was obvious by the broken dreams of many musicians across the country that the “modern-rock” era of major labels was a ferocious bust. In Columbus, the finest bands of the 90’s had been guinea pigs in this experiment, Scrawl, The Thomas Jefferson Slave Apartments, V-3, Watershed and of course, Gaunt had all been signed, and spit out after failing to make a dent in record sales. For some, like Ron House and the women of Scrawl, they had been through the experience of being on small independent labels and were used to little support as well as minimal paychecks. Jerry had wanted to be famous and on his own terms, for a kid growing up in Parma, Ohio, listening to Kiss records over and over before discovering the sheer beauty of the DIY scene through the near-by sounds of Death of Samantha, The Mice and Prisonshake the idea of affirmation and financial stability was made more real with the affirmation by being on a major label. It was analogous to having the blessing of a father who was never there, a nice idea maybe but totally unfounded by experience. Certainly the community at large felt that being on a larger label validated the music, the one independent “modern-rock” radio station, CD101 only played Gaunt, and the New Bomb Turks when they were on larger labels, ignoring their combustible earlier indie records and the station never played many of the other superb true independent bands such as Jenny Mae, Moviola or Greenhorn. One afternoon in 1998 I ventured into Discount Records, a store I used to run and sold a large amount of classical records. I went in to purchase the newest Spin which had a review of a new Jenny Mae single, they also sold Paper magazine and she was also in that edition. As I paid, the young man behind the counter, himself in a band, his attire was the “set-piece” of the current bands vying to be radio playlists. A soul-patch, a ring of bracelets, a chain of necklaces dangling from his neck and a primitive tattoo crisscrossing his well-manicured arms. “Wow, somehow you get your bands in all these magazines, you must have some secret cause we can’t even get the local paper to write about us.” Feeling peevish, I mumbled, “I don’t know, I just send them stuff. The bands work hard, and are good, so….” “They can’t work harder than my band does. I listened to her record, I don’t know what the big deal is.” “Thanks, have a great day” I mumbled as I walked out. This was the context of Jerry coming to me that one spring day in 1999, on one hand he was very successful and on the other there was a need for validation from his parents, and the community at large for his music and more so for himself. Many had this need.
Wearing a white polka-dotted, short sleeve buttoned up shirt with a collar stretching from Columbus to Bloomington, black jeans and Chuck Taylors, Jerry walked in the store, went to the dollar bin and flipped through the records, pausing he eyed me while he lit a cigarette. The spring sunshine danced through the cast-iron barred windows, making the job of eyeing vinyl more difficult as the sheen from the rays made every blemish on the wax more pronounced. A stack of crappy seventies and eighties rock records sat next to me, I was almost blindly putting the waxy stickers in the right corner of each record jacket and making them a dollar. “Hold on Jerry, let me get this stack out and we can go for a walk. You want a beer or something?” He shook his head, waving the offer away with some slight disgust from his eyebrows. It was mid-afternoon, I was in the midst of some poorly executed self-control with my own alcohol consumption. A large black coffee from Buckeye Donuts sat next to me. Bim was manning the turntable, at the time he was infatuated with the Cheater Slicks, “Forgive Thee” and the entire Unsane catalog the latter which could empty the store faster than a fire at a movie house. “I got this, go see your man”, Bim lit a cigarette. “cool, thanks. Let’s go Jerry.” Nodding at Bim on the way out as a way of appreciation, Jerry and I headed up the stairs onto the hot sidewalk that was drowning in sunlight, “what’s up man?” We headed south down High Street towards Bernie’s, “I don’t know man, I’m just kinda going crazy. I sleep half the day, I’m trying to stay out of Larry’s because when I go there, I just drink all night, I’m thinking of buying a house. Honestly, I need to get a fucking job. I wish I could have my job back at Used Kids.” I had mentioned this to Dan and Ron, Dan was against it as Jerry had become undependable as Gaunt had heavier commitments due to the signing to Warner Brothers as well as Jerry not having a phone for many years. He tended to use the store phone to do all his business, at times setting up recording time, European and National tours via the Used Kids phone. To focused on what he needed to do than realize our credit card machine went through said phone line, “O.k., Jerry get off the phone we have a credit card” Ron would say. Jerry tossing an incredulous look at Ron, “I’m fucking talking to our booking agent in France, hold on” He would turn his back, “sorry about that” Ron spoke to a bewildered customer. Thirty second pause……… “O.k., Jerry get off the phone we have a credit card” Ron repeated. Jerry huddled in the with his back to us, he turned down the volume of the stereo. “Jesus Christ Jerry, you aren’t even working today, get off the phone we need to do this credit card!” I yelled. Jerry hung up, glaring at both of us, “Well if our European tour falls through it’s your fucking fault!” Marching up the stairs, we could see Jerry lighting one of his ever present cigarettes. “I don’t think you’ll get your job back. Let’s go to Brennen’s and get a coffee, I don’t want a drink yet, besides it’s too nice to be in Bernie’s.”
Brennen’s was on the corner of 15th and High, a well-spring of memories for thousands of Ohio State graduates, a spot marked by history from the giant Long’s Bookstore sign that hung over High Street like a beacon for the best and brightest of Ohio, to the grand entrance to the Oval just a half block away, it was a spot where Governor Rhoades called the National Guard against protesting students, who teargassed them to hell and back, at one time Jeffrey Dahmer probably tripped over the curb in a drunken haze, with one death behind him and many more to come and marker of future dreams that spread from Ohio State into the world. Brennen’s had a curious spot in my heart, walking in, I glanced around. The small table to the left upon entering bore into me as if it were a six-inch nail and I was a rotting board. A few years prior, I had been seeing a lovely young woman on the side, and one day over coffee she looked at me and said, “we can’t do this. Sorry, I think you are terrific but this isn’t right. Good luck.” And with that she left, leaving another pin-prick in a chest full of holes. She had already shaken Columbus out of her life when Jerry and I walked in, went to the counter and ordered two black coffees.
Some people never learn to talk about their insides, all the while the insides bleed into the outside, via behavior, fashion and the interesting manners of interacting. Alcohol helped, it split the unease in half, buffing off inner anxiety into something round around the edges, a small filter from the rest of the world. Sensitive hounded Jerry, who could recoil at the smallest slight and push back with switchblade of words that could slice a hole into the nearest victim. Depression works in odd ways, and when married to mood swings, no matter how severe the upswing or downswing can make for haphazard interactions leaving all parties bewildered. Humor helps, defusing the inner tension as well as allowing someone to see a more human side of the inner battle of self-depreciating thoughts that move through the brain, a slow lava of despair that clogs all perception. Jerry, was at the least, hysterical as is Jenny.
We crossed High Street, a bevy of cars with competing radios blasted the music of spring around us, competing heavy bass flavored songs, mimicking the thrust of passion bullied out the lesser sounds of top 40 hits as we caressed coffee cups trying not to spill them as we dodged the metal love-making machines. Finding a bench that provided a panoramic view of the Midwest’s largest campus in full seasonal bloom, young women with shorts hugging tight to polished thighs, skateboarders weaving through couples holding hands, a bountiful mix of frat-boy-baseball-hat-on-backwards crowding the sidewalks with broad shoulders that belied their already entitled attitudes. We were oblivious, focused on tying to connect with our splintered emotional systems, transformed and frayed from lonely childhoods, drinking and an inherent feeling unease around others. Jerry furrowed his brow, his pointy incisors sucked against his lips, and his hands shook. Small trembles that I was very familiar with after my own bouts of heavy drinking, at first when I encounter these tremors, I laughed it off as I joked I was turning into so many of the people I admired, the first tremors appeared in my early twenties after laborious successive nights of drinking. They came and went, infrequent as if they were your favorite song being played on the radio. Jerry spilled his coffee, is splattered onto his grimy jeans. He still never did his laundry. He rubbed the coffee into the black crusty cloth, maybe a Genie would appear and lift the black curtain of depression from him. “Jesus, look at me. I can’t quit shaking, every fucking morning.” His eyes gazed across the street, to Buckeye Donuts and farther afield, “I don’t know what is happening to me. I can’t leave my apartment, I think I want to be a cook, maybe go to culinary school.” Isolation already a problem had gripped him hard, his muse Anna had moved away, he was quiet about the loves of his life, maybe if they were made public he would be discovered. Jerry constantly chided me for falling in love as easy as a leaf falling from a tree, “love is for suckers” he would giggle at me, taking long pulls from his cigarette.
“I don’t know Jerry, you know I have my own history of depression and I’m not drinking as much as I used to.” Jerry had pulled me from the ledge of suicide some year’s prior, my shifting emotional state teetering with every moment. “Have you thought about not drinking?” “All the time, but I don’t really know how to stop, my band is done, I lost my job at the store. Ron had a kid, he never goes out, you never go out. Brett fucked my girlfriend. I don’t even want to play my guitar.” He wiped his pant leg again, a soft breeze filtered in, bringing goose bumps to my forearms, I watched the hair raise and felt Jerry’s depression. I could relate.
We were as sensitive as water, reacting to every outside stimulus as if we were made of liquid, a gaze sent us to heavenly heights of love or to the utter rejection of the cheese-stands-alone. We both loved based on the idea of romance, which was genetically implanted in both of us, whether it was Russian literature or the transporting sounds of a crackling record. There was no division between lust and love, a tangled yarn of emotions that dictated evenings, words and dreams. The list of lovers unrolled through my mind on a daily basis, four Jennifers, Sharon, Nora, Robin, Dawn, Sara, a couple of Beths, and the list went on and yet the feeling of total acceptance was something I never felt, a small piece kept behind somewhere in the bottom of my brain, hidden next to frayed Spider-Man comic books, Lincoln Logs, and the baby sitter who took my clothes off. In thoughts and words, I would sculpt my lover’s bodies with words, trying in vain to tack what I felt through the sluggish sounds of a clunky typewriter and cups of black coffee followed by the watery Maker’s Mark that was sipped ever so carefully.
“What about college, have you thought about that?” Jerry shook his head, “nah, I went to Kent for a while, it’s not for me, a bunch of phonies.” Somebody was carrying a large stack of records down the stairs into the record store, “I gotta go Jerry, Bim is there by himself. I’ll hang out later if you want, I just need to let Merijn know that I’m going out.” “Thanks, buddy, I think I’ll go look for a job.” There were no hugs, no handshakes, just a few sparse words between us, but we understood. Shortly thereafter, Jerry got a job as a line-cook at a Short North diner, he excelled at it his food was tasty and spicy, he bought a house with the help of his parents just across the highway from Clintonville.
Hearts are sometimes made of Paper-Mache, tender yet with a ruffled shell, they are set above us on thin strings, emotional wind chimes that are tethered to memories, ideas and for some of us minds that are as jumpy as a cowering mouse. In the end, the one thing that has never failed is music. It’s as if there really is a strum of all existence that ticks from the bottom of a perfect melody, it mirrors our insides, speaking for words that don’t exist for the way we feel. For me, still, it is the one anti-depressant that still works, and it is the secret code that many of us use. In the end we have the sounds that keep us grounded, furtive bits of sound that we trade and experience together that pull some of us together if just for a two and half minutes of understanding. Then the song ends and we wait in awkwardness for the next song to begin. When the music doesn’t work anymore I don’t know what happens.
The shore was pocketed with holes and debris, the tide rolled into the beach in terrible fits, white peaked waves hurtling themselves towards the houses that lined the coast, a competition to see which one would wreck one of the million dollar homes. Heavy gray clouds hung just above the sea, like a water logged ceiling waiting to burst, they mimicked the waves, tumbling and wheeling over one another, almost dipping themselves into the ocean. The storm was most probably the residue from Hurricane Faye, that battered the beaches of East Long Island as if the beach houses were constructed out of Styrofoam We walked the beach, the winds blowing hard against us and the sea wrestling with itself, we happened upon a row of houses that had been eaten by the sea, large bites from the waves had splattered the houses, exposing the skeleton of the houses, some were literally cut in half. It was like giant sized doll houses, with paintings still visible on walls, bedroom sets, and furniture exposed to the world. There was nobody else on the beach, and if there were they would have most likely been Midwestern transplants who had never walked the beach before as the natives knew better than to stroll the beach post Hurricane.
My fondness for the sea was planted there, and I still think about living near the ocean, the mystery and wisdom of the water has held sway in me since that year and a half on Long Island. Memory has a way of making people trip over the cinders in their mind, some things happened and others didn’t but the emotion of the memory is seared into the skull like a branded cow. This summer on the way to Boston to pick up our children we stopped in Rhode Island, taking two hours to fall into the sea, I breathed in the salt and felt the hard pebbles of the craggy sand under my toes, swimming into the calm waves, letting the water ride over me as if I were floating in space, my soul tried to swallow the sea instead of it swallowing me, and I was transformed back into a child, all of six years old gazing and the wonderment of the North Atlantic.
Larry’s smelled of old wood, beer and cigarettes, a pocket of familiarity that was at once calming and inviting, unlike the beer soaked enamel floors of the south campus bars, that someone smelled of both stale beer and bleach, two chemicals that can induce nausea, the heart-worn décor of Larry’s and a few of the other neighborhood (i.e. dive-bars) felt as comfortable as an old blanket. Larry’s was the bar where my father met my mother, it was where I met Jerry Wick and the place that felt safer than almost anywhere else I went, including home. After we split up, Jenny avoided most of the haunts we ventured into together, she kept her distance from me for nearly a year, ex-lovers have the power of dismantling a person with just a shadow or a scent. She asked me several times to warn her when I was going to a show she might be at, although the chances of us running into one another were rare as I didn’t want to see her as much as she didn’t want to see me. She drifted towards Dick’s Den, where the nightly jazz musicians provided a solace to her as she entertained whatever man was trying to uncover her secrets and I stuck to Larry’s, Bernie’s and Staches, all of them now shuttered. And with a sound of a song or the scent of a beer I am transported back there.
The neighborhood of North Linden in Columbus, was eaten from the core outward from the parasitic substance of crack-cocaine, the fall of a once proud neighborhood was swift and like most African-American neighborhoods over the course of history the powers that be left it die from neglect and a careful, deliberate ignorance of the facts. I sat on my grandfather’s Austin’s knee, as the fireplace snapped and popped, small hissing sounds seeping from the wood just a few feet away. On the black and white television, images of Archie Bunker flickered and small chuckles slipped out of the old man’s mouth. Reaching his hand around me, striking a wooden match against the sandpaper-like side of the match-box, he lite his Winston and was careful to blow the smoke away from me and took a sip off his Jim Beam and water, I held his brawny hand. He had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, had a shotgun in the closet of the guest room and spoke very little, whenever we asked about the war he would say it was a long time ago. In those days, as a five-year-old in 1973, the Second World War seemed like another life-time, when in reality it was less time than my first discovery of Larry’s nearly 30 years ago.
Stomachs leaped high into our throats, while our bottoms went the other way, the yellow bus tilted this way and that, rocking to and fro with every pothole, sharp turn and stop. Hills grew steeper when in the bus, it chugged up the steep Appalachian foothills like a retarded Little-Engine that could (n’t) as the shocks had long been shocked out of existence. We lived roughly eight miles into the recesses of Athens County, a forty-five-minute marathon of a bus ride that choked the childhood out of me. It was a mass of sticky tweeners and early teens, and the children on the bus were not really the well to do kids of University professors, we were on the far west side of town heading towards Fox Lake, up and behind the soon to be closed State Mental Hospital, this winding road was dotted with poverty. With pit-stops along the route, that were furnished with dilated trailer parks, barking dogs, massive mud puddles that appeared to have springs of brown polluted water under them, and small bare-legged children screaming every time the bus pulled up. This was a hellish ride, some of the children grew cold at this early age in their lives, the emotional coldness manifesting itself as hardened cruelty towards some of the other children. I sat quietly, I stood out for my nerdiness, I was small kid, liked to draw pictures of rock bands and cartoons in my notebook and cracked wise whenever I good, much of my sarcasm flung at many of the poor Appalachian kids when I was in the safe confines of the school. The rednecks could be brutal, and the bus-driver, a young man who wore a ball cap and smoked a cigarette while driving would play the radio. The only time when the kids all agreed on something was when Pink Floyd’s “Another Brick in the Wall” or Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust” came on the small portable radio that hung from the large dashboard of the bus. The bus would erupt with the chorus of children screaming “We don’t need no education!” and for the majority of the kids on Athens County Public School Bus number 24, their scholastic education would end in a few short years.
There was a petite young girl on the bus, a year older than me who had long stringy blonde hair. She always sat quietly, looking forward, not making eye contact and clutching her books tight against her. She wore a Navy Blue coat, with the elbows rubbed thin, her pink sweater poking through and the collar pulled up tight. Suddenly a boy behind me threw a spit-ball at her, it landed in her thick hair. “Ain’t you gonna pick it out!?” he snarled as he spits another one at her, this was also landing into her blond locks. She didn’t move. I looked back at the boy, he was fat-ish, with large teeth that made the rest of his pudgy cheeks smaller, he wore a fishing hat and a jean jacket. “Gimmie another piece of paper,” he motioned to the boy next who him, who snickered away, ripping a corner of paper and quickly chewing it he spit it out on her again. “Hey, you got three now!! Quite a collection going!” Soon, a barrage of spitballs was landing atop of the girl, I sat quietly as boys and girls around me hurtled insults pasted on the end of bits of wet paper at her. Caught up in the moment, I ripped a piece of paper from my notebook, the one with carefully drawn pictures of Cheap Trick and John Lennon and stuck it in my mouth and in a moment, I too, spit it upon her. I looked at her, and saw large bulbous tears running down her cheeks, and I was suddenly flooded with shame, the remorse I felt was unsettling and even though I was just a child, maybe twelve it was one of the worst moments of my life. I climbed across the aisle of the bus, and watched her gallop across her mud-caked yard as a large brown dog, tied up with a hunk of twisted rope barked madly—surely he loved her, and witnessed these boys and girls yelling insults at her as she scampered into her house. “Mom, I don’t want to ride the bus anymore.” She looked over at me, a spoonful of mashed potatoes dangling above my plate. “Why not?” she looked concerned, no doubt her mind wondering just what I would do with myself after school. “Well, it takes forever to get home and sometimes Zoltan has football, why can’t I just hang around up-town until you are done with work?” “Mom, the bus is pretty gross” my brother answered. “Well, I suppose but you can’t bother me at work.” Soon my afternoons would be filled with sitting behind the record counter of Side-One Records (where the fellows had to be the only Herman Brood fans in the midwest) and the basement dwelling of Haffa’s records and books, themselves making emotional imprints on my mind with the smell of cardboard records covers, paperback books and the musty smell of comic books, and while I deeply regretted my act of bullying that fall day in 1980, the feeling of guilt and sadness for that young girl has never left me.
Explanation: I began writing around 1991 or so, my first attempt was a story based on a woman I went out with who worked in the sex trade industry, was a heroin addict and was sexually abused by her father for many years. I can’t recall her name, and I believe she is dead now. We only went out on a few dates, one of which resulted in a very funny story involving my dog Istvan. Sadly, I have nothing left of this story–but it was pretty long, all hand typed, etc…. I then wrote a short story for my ex-wife called “Napoleon Trees”, I think this is gone as well, it was about love, an old house and trees talking to each other. I also wrote a story about a little boy based on Jenny Mae’s little brother finding a candy wrapper and it containing the history of the world. I think this is gone as well. Oh, well. I wrote a lot of poetry in the 90’s hardly any since 2005. The following is a story I attempted to write as I was wrestling with my alcoholism, I think I started it around 1999, I continued it off and on until I couldn’t really write any longer due to depression and drinking. This is a fairly long story, here is the first chapter. Currently I am writing a children’s story for my daughter.
Statis: Chapter One,
PART ONE:
To the left of him sat five nights of drinking, sitting still in their half filled glasses the oldest glasses were just collecting dust. To the right of him sat nothing really, just the blankets and sheets. He could hear the news jammering away across the room, something about the Saudis, something else about the prime minister of England and a lengthy discussion about sports by someone who didn’t care very much about sports. He rolled over and stared at the ceiling. Sighing deeply he felt the regret that had slowly seeped into his brain this morning. Another wasted evening that turned today into a soon to be wasted day. The hangovers stayed with him now like a stink that won’t wash off, he found himself forgetting things, easy things like phone numbers- bits of information he had always known-like the capitol of Maine. He realized all this, but still when eight or nine o’clock (or earlier as has been the pattern more recently) rolled around those facts just disappeared–poof and out came the drinks. Not too many to start with, he now tried to limit his beginnings to also include the endings but after two or three it didn’t matter. Everybody was an old friend, even the ones who he had barely gotten to know in the past fourteen years. And so it went. He imagined not how much money he had spent on booze that never bothered him- money that is. He wasn’t materialistic he would have spent it on something else. No, he was thinking how big the hole in the ground would have be to fill up all the bottles of booze he had drank in his adult life. It would be big; He figured he had drunk at least 40 drinks a week for eleven years that totaled at least twenty-eight thousand bottles of booze. That was giving and taking the weeks where he binged averaging ten to twenty drinks a night for a week or two at a time to those days where he just had one or when he was sick. That’s a big hole he thought as he counted the spider webs on the ceiling. “God, I need to vacuum the ceiling.”
He could hear her downstairs, getting ready for work, now she was in the living room putting on her shoes then back to the kitchen to finish her coffee. She didn’t even try to get him out of bed lately; she just arose and quietly did her business. Fed the dog, making the coffee-enough for both of them and quietly eating her breakfast by herself. He knew she hated that worst of all. She enjoyed his company while she ate it took her mind off the fact that she was eating. It was nice. She was now gathering up her briefcase, her purse and boom-she was gone. “Fuck” he thought. He was now rubbing his face trying in some half stoned way to wipe away the guilt, the carelessness but it didn’t work, the Pabst had made a nice comfortable home for itself inside his head. It was on a ski vacation within’ his brains, sliding down one end then taking the shuttle back into his skull, then sitting by the campfire of his ears. He slung his feet over the side of the bed as stared at the pile of clothes besides the bed. They were lying on top of a singular shoe; he sat there for a moment staring down.
Even his penis was still drunk, lying between his legs like a wrinkly caterpillar. He lay back down looked at the ceiling again. “Oh man,” he thought. The spider webs were still there. The sun was coming through the window making sure he couldn’t fall back asleep, “get up lazy man” it was saying with it’s fifteen billion rays of light, “get the fuck up.” He yawned, pushed himself out of bed, and bent down to put on his shorts and made his way towards the bathroom. After a pee he put on some old orange shorts covered with cartoon dogs and went downstairs and the rumble pounded inside his head with every step. He made his way towards the kitchen all the while telling the dog to “settle down, settle down, and please for Christ’s sake settle down.” The dog needed to piss like a racehorse after drinking a six pack of Coke. “Gotta pee. Gotta pee. Gotta pee” thought the dog in his small doggie mind. He could see she left him some coffee and had left him some cut melon for breakfast. Slightly smiling he poured himself some coffee and sat down.
The newspaper was lying on the table neatly folded in half, with part of a headline shouting out into the world. “P ACROSS MIDWEST” is all he could read. He turned it over and read the other half “TORNADOS RI.” “More like Tornadoes Rip Through Hungover Man’s Mind” he said to himself. Underneath there was half a picture of a wrecked grocery store, it was so wrecked it looked more like an unkempt ten year old’s bedroom. The photo was taken in Indiana. He rubbed his head and sat down. He immediately went to the sports pages, he never really competed in sports, never cared for the macho sensibility all the athletes seemed to need when they were around one another, but he loved sports anyway. He enjoyed the fact that nothing was planned out, nobody was acting they were just going, just like the Romans did. It was fun-a very affordable way to escape. He yawned. It was still early, not on everybody’s terms but on his. Eight thirty, he knew he most of his friends would still be asleep, at least for several hours more, he also knew a few folks who would already be at work. He thought how much better they were feeling now compared to the way he felt. They would be laughing in their cubicles or answering e-mail with a studious face. Perhaps they would have the easy healthy buzz that comes after a five-mile jog. These thoughts didn’t make him feel any better in fact he felt a bit worse. He knew he had to do something but he wasn’t sure what or how but it needed to be soon. He felt the coffee slide down his throat, felt the heat rise in his head. He cheeks felt heavy as if they were swollen. He was trying to remember how he got home last night, if he ate something when he arrived because he wasn’t hungry at the moment although he never really was on most hangover mornings. He turned towards the wastebasket. Sure nuff, Taco Bell. “That’s right ” he thought, he drove to Taco Bell and then drove home. It must have been 2:30 or so.
He picked up his cup of coffee and walked to the window, gazing outside at a lone rose perched above a billion pieces of dirt his face looked grim, almost gray. It was late summer early fall depending on the evening temperature at night which could dip to the low forties only to bounce up to eighty-five the next afternoon if it so desired, the roses were supposed to be already going to sleep for the coming winter, their once proud stretching green limbs now turning into a knarled brown twisting shell, but not this guy it had one more oomph left in him. Now atop a fairly lonely bush it waved in the morning sun like a school flag over a country school. Below the rose bush there was nothing just those billion specks of dirt, she had been weeding and preparing the soil for the next spring, it was quite a beautiful sight. The rose was looking for it’s friends but they had long since passed and it hadn’t even realized it. It had decided to wait for them. Every morning it thought to itself “they’ll be here any minute,” but they weren’t. He smiled at the rose in its singular glory and he looked at all the hard work that went on underneath it all. He shook his head at the thought of his hours wasted during the night, the hours wasted on the day after. He thought of time as a light that one can only turn on in special circumstances and one must choose carefully before their light blows out. He was wasting his light and the power to keep it burning was gonna go somewhere else. He knew that because patience runs the same way as time. In fact, they went to engineering school together, way back when even gases and cosmic dust were just distant thoughts in the grand scheme of things. He needed to gather his time together and put it in it’s proper outlet, he needed to get his priorities straight, he needed to quit drinking, he needed to get some more coffee and maybe an aspirin.
His headache was now forming a life of it’s own, without him knowing it the headache had appointed itself chief-of-staff of his very being. Its main objective was to make every waking moment a moment of thud-thud-thud, regret and slow moving action. It was giving directions to all the figures who helped develop these traits, even the throat was ordered to keep dry, to send a shudder to the forehead every time he swallowed. He got some more coffee to help against these movements but it only did so much, the smell of the coffee seemed to provide as much help as the liquid itself. Funny how those tiny beans from ten thousand miles away could provide relief from just their scent. As he made his way to the table the phone rang causing him to spill his coffee, not too much just enough to cause him to utter “shit.” He hurried to the phone muttering under his breath; his body thinking this was hard work but his mind knowing better seems like his body always knew better. “Yellow” he spoke into the receiver. “Hi…are you up?” came the sweet voice over the line. “Yeah, uh I’ve been up for a little while” he spoke slowly into the phone, adding, “sorry I didn’t make it up to join you for breakfast.” She paused on the other line then in a voice as sweet as the towering rose outside answered “that’s all right I knew you were tired; how do you feel?” She must know he felt like shit but she knew hangovers liked to pick their spots, sometimes they would only present themselves as a casual headache while other times they would appear as massive body quake affecting every thought and move. “Oh, I feel fine.” This was only a mild lie. She then asked him what was on his agenda for the coming day knowing he didn’t have to go to work for at least three and a half hours yet. “I suppose I’ll read maybe putter around the house.” That’s about all he was capable of doing at this point. There was another pause at the other end of the phone, and then she told him she would be home at seven o’clock and she was planning on making them dinner. “That sounds fine” he replied and then he added that he had to go not really to do anything but there was a certain degree of guilt clouding his being, “should have woken up”, “shouldn’t have drank so much last, better yet should have come home when I said I would” and so on and so forth. These thoughts hovered in and out of his thudding brain as mist on a mountain. What could he say? His mind as slow as it was moving had been diverted to the first time they had met, over seven years ago when all his annoyances now were at that time somewhat charming. She said “Goodbye, Nicholas, please be careful today.” Be careful.
That first memory of their meeting had now grown up around in his head and was all he could see. She was beautiful he remembered, and at the same time he remarked to himself “she still is.” Although he slightly noticed that she had lost some of the mysterious strength he had thought she carried so well to be replaced by an unassuming nervous calm that sometimes pervaded her every movement. He on the other hand had drifted somewhat towards some liquid edge since then. She smiled at him that afternoon, she must have known he was staring at her with every speck of sight his eyeballs could summon up out of themselves. He never realized that he himself could be handsome, and even more charming than he thought. It still amazed him that any woman, let alone a beautiful gentle creature like herself could take anything more than casual interest in him. Maybe for a laugh, a curious smile but really nothing more. It made him a bit nervous, but for some reason that nervous energy never came off as such it appeared more like an innocent comment that made the room a bit lighter. She walked towards him then, her perfect hips swaying just oh so softly and her mouth was in a half flirtatious smile, his eyes were immovable. In his mind he was thinking, “Holy shit, she’s coming over…here.” Wanted to check behind him but that would be too much, it would show too much vulnerability-he had been around enough to read the faces of women even if he thought there was no way in hell they were communicating with him. Men are guided by the unspoken rules that there are in fact different levels of league play in regards to the fairer sex, never paying too much attention these invisible masculine games still he knew when his charm could only work so far and for sure his other limitations: education, looks and money were lacking. She was out of his reach when he first saw her. “Hi,” he spoke without a bit of hesitation but his head was thinking Super Bowl Sunday, winning the Lottery, a huge cash settlement and all the good things that happen to people that don’t deserve them. “Hi” was all she said back as she raised her perfectly formed hands up to her cheek. He had no idea that she could be as nervous as him, none, but she was. He thought to himself “not only is she beautiful but she’s smart.” For when her hand touched her cheek she looked very intelligent, it was as if she had just put on glasses. She was still smiling that half sexy half world-stopping smile. He was in love; it was like the first time the earth had drank from the sky. “What’s goin on” was all he heard himself say, in a somewhat deeper voice than he normally spoke. “Nothing much, how about you?” she replied and as she spoke her eyes did the whole ballet “Swan Lake” in a moment. How could two people fall in love over such simple words, of course they weren’t hearing each other. That would be like the centerfielder trying to listen to the guy selling beer nineteen aisles up. They traded idle chitchat as nervous people are prone to do, and finally they decided they needed to get past the silly words and make plans to spend time together.
That in itself is quite a step in any relationship, in fact it’s the first step, the one where you plan and realize you actually enjoy someone enough to spend time with them. For some people it’s harder to do those things because they value their time more than anything else. Sometimes they get paid a lot of money to spend their time somewhere. But these two young people decided to spend some time over dinner together. It made sense everybody needs to eat, and eating in itself is a very intimate procedure. People do it because they have to, because they enjoy it and best of all they use their mouths. Chewy chewy. For any beginning relationship the mouth is of course a central part of communication. It involves voice, smiles, frowns, eating and most obviously kisses.
She picked him up on that first date he hadn’t a car at the time, which was probably good, he most likely wound have wrecked it or getting it towed or something like that. He thought she would have a very practical car for she seemed very practical, not like a teacher but more like someone who just thought out all the important details. That is very important when purchasing a car. His experiences in buying cars were very impractical when obtaining some of his former cars, that’s why they were broken all the time. Some were almost missing floors, some had engine parts that were nine hundred and fifty years old in car time and others simply gave up the ghost hours after he bought them. Other times when he did have possession of an automobile he would lose it between three and ten am. It was as if the car had driven them home and dropped him off while it parked itself. It would only realize the dilemma of this when was struck dumb on the street with the fact that it had to way of informing him where it had parked itself. This would result in lost hours the next day as he muttered to himself while he walked down the street looking for the wayward car. Yes, it was better he didn’t have a car. She drove up on a faded blue VW Rabbit. It had a bit of rust around the hood-near the headlights, like lines around a middle-aged woman’s eyes. She was smiling at him, the same smile she had flashed him just days before, he grew excited not just sexually but in his mind. It would be a good night. He could tell.
She circled the block, when she drove by leaving him sitting on his porch with his shiny green shirt built in Nineteen Sixty-Five, she must have noticed what a wreck his life was, somehow she could just tell-and left him sitting on the stoop. The daylight revealed all his scars. He felt naked sitting on the steps, even the three drinks he had didn’t help, when her car passed in slow motion his heart quickened. When she passed and turned the corner he knew for certain that every broken dream that sat in his life was laid bare before her. The fears he wore inside his funny laugh must have been doing rabbit ears when she drove past. His knowing heart sank as she drove out of view. But when she appeared again in a few minutes his heart went from south to north and he flashed her a smile that could launch a whole advertising campaign for Oreo cookies. She climbed out of her car, well not really climbed more like floated out of her car he thought, she was a graceful as a branch bending ever so slightly in the summer breeze, moving not because of the wind but for the wind. A dance of gratitude. She was wearing a sort of weird jumpsuit that only a certain type of woman can pull off (well maybe a very happy fellow in a Rodgers and Hammerstein musical), and a tight gray shirt underneath that proudly displayed a very beautiful pair of breasts that caused an immediate reaction on his body. “Holy fuck” he thought as he said “hey, how ya doin thought you were going to just drive on by.” He was smiling as he spoke to her, he couldn’t help it, even if he had just had a root canal he’d be doing the same thing albeit with chipmunk cheeks, and the words he had just spoke would have came out like this: “ray, throw your doing taught youth wrr juth doing to dwith by”. But he didn’t just have a root canal he had just had a few beers. That was six years ago. On a Friday evening. Somewhere around six thirty or so. Six forty-one. And seventeen seconds. P.M.
2001–present.
Cleveland lays at the end of I-71, like a large gray concrete cloud, full of billowing smoke stacks spewing flames and pollution into the air as the highway arches over factories and ethnic neighborhood, in the short distance lays the Terminal Tower, which is also the name of Pere Ubu’s greatest hits package. Cleveland actually starts nearly forty or fifty miles down the freeway when exit signs begin more numerous upon passing Lodi, Ohio and soon Akron, from here on out one finds oneself in the vast suburbs of what was once the crown jewel of the Mid-West. Cleveland, city of lights, the proud blue-collar town that built the steel that first made the first steamships and later the cars and buildings that made America what it was. The suburbs are famous by themselves, Parma, University Heights, Euclid, Lakewood and Bedford Heights, these were much more romantic than the suburbs of Columbus which have always had a more rural feel to them, not only from the inhabitants but also in their names: Grove City, Whitehall (need anymore be said), Dublin, Hilliard and Plain City. The names speak for themselves, the suburbs of Columbus are as white bread and the names themselves, whereas Parma, Bedford Heights all had a connotation of ethnic blending and big-city drama. Jerry was from Parma, his last name was shortened from the Polish Wickowski, dropping the last five letters gave him the last name of Wick. His father worked in a factory, and Jerry would spend his weekends in Cleveland or in his bedroom dreaming of becoming a rock star while listening to Kiss records along with a mix of Cleveland greats such as My Dad is Dead, the Dead Boys, Death of Samantha (Jesus, there IS a death-thread here?!).
Jerry’s funeral was in Parma Heights, his gravesite just a stone’s throw from the exit ramp off of I-71 and a few miles from the Cleveland International airport, as a huddled mass of outcasts, musicians and his bewildered family gazed on as the priest said a final prayer over the muddy hole that would soon envelope his casket one could hear the hiss of car wheels spinning over the asphalt of I-71. Roll on Cleveland, indeed. I was drunk that week, and when I went into the funeral home for the first time and saw Jerry’s body laying in his casket, I hurried out of the wood-paneled room and out into the cold air of January. Moving across the busy street, I bustled into the perfect Parma dive bar that sat just catty-corner from the funeral home. This was perfect civil planning. The bar still had Christmas decorations up and the bartender was sympathetic, “you here from across the street, the funeral home?” she asked as she put my Jim Beam shot and beer in front of me. I nodded as I downed the shot and motioned for another one, “a friend of yours?” “Yeah, he was from Parma, but lived in Columbus for a while now.” “Ohhh, was he that musician? That was in the paper up here.” “Yup,” and I downed the second shot and ordered one more. “Such a pity, did they ever catch that man who hit him?” “Not yet” as I took a pull from my beer.
The next few months were restless, I was trying to maintain my relationship with my soon-to-be-wife , get a handle of my drinking, deal with the death of Jerry all the while living with one-foot in dishonesty and the other in righteous anger, much of it from what I perceived to be great injustice in the world. I was thirty-one at the beginning of 2001 and I felt like fifty-when it ended.
My wife had graduated from Ohio State with a Masters in Fine Arts a few years before and was working at Denison University, she had won a National prize given to an outstanding MFA graduate, and while she was committed to staying in the United States, she was worried that her visa may expire. We had been together for nearly five years and been engaged for two years but I was gun-shy to marry again, the commitment to personal responsibility frightened me, and besides, I had already proven to myself that I was awful at marriage once before. Merijn came home one day as I sat on our blue couch, “my parents are coming next month and we are getting married.” Looking up from my New York Review of Books, “um, ok, what do I need to do?” She shook her head, smiled and said, “nothing, just be there.” She had been applying for teaching jobs, traveling to several conferences and in a short while she interviewed with UC Davis, The Cleveland Art Institute, Columbus School of Art and Design and the University of Florida. On our wedding day she accepted a job at the University of Florida. Gainesville was in our horizon. Soon we were staying at a hotel on the campus of the University of Florida, the area had been hit hard by fires and the smoke of the fires shrouded the campus, as I peered from our room window I had the sensation of living in a dream while gray clouds of smoke crawled across the green carpet of Alachua County.
My drinking was limited to several times a week, I drank very little in the house, maybe a beer or two with dinner and we usually had at least three bottles of hard liquor in the house. Maker’s Mark, some vodka, and maybe a bottle of gin. Merijn liked to drink wine and we bought several bottles a week. I shied away from wine as the hangovers were too much and once I had a glass, we would finish off whatever wine we had left in the house. We went out to eat several times a week, usually on Friday or Saturday we would go to a more expensive restaurant, usually downtown and our bar-tab was as much as the dinner. On the way home, I would ask her to drop me off at Larry’s, Little Brothers or somewhere else to continue my drinking and making up little lies to have her drop me off, saying so-and-so’s in town or that I would have to meet somebody to talk about a record. Slivers of truth became towering trees of lies and I would let the night swallow me up.
Alcoholism is a malady of feelings, one where the reality of life is processed through a perception of reality that is always shifting, like solid ground melting into liquid as if the soil that once held tight to your feet had slowly turned into a pool of alcohol. Believing for years that the only truth that existed was the certainty of feelings, the hurt from personal relationships and perceived slights pushed against the sanguine nature of every other person who entered my circle of self. Clutching onto fixed beliefs that were only enhanced by the world that I swam in, the derision I felt (feel) towards anything outside my comfort zone, slowly, over years painted me into a corner. Addiction, to be sure is a motherfuck. One that can render the ability to navigate through an hour at a time difficult, at once tying up feelings and then moving towards the brain and finally, fitfully into action and behaviors.
I had my first drink as a child, probably four or five, my grandmother would serve us tiny glasses of port wine mixed with sugar and every grandchild who wanted a small kid’s serving of beer would get one at her dinner table. My brother and I would try to convince our sister to take one so we could have hers. This was natural, and it only goes to reckon that it was quite normal in the old country. Grandma Isabel’s house was a museum of the Gundel and Koe-Krompecher families, the walls stuffed with artifacts of our history, a veritable dare to any guest to question the greatness of the family names. The Krompecher family dates to the 14th Century, and she had the family coat-of-arms on the wall, just above the entrance way to her kitchen. Diagonally, there was a photograph of the Hungarian government, and there in the circle of leading politicians was our great-great somebody, who was Chief Justice. On the wall above the brown vinyl couch hung a picture of my great-grandfather Karloy Gundel, one of the great chefs and restaurateurs of Hungary. My grandmother could barely utter a sentence without extolling the greatness of her father, he was empathetic, a larger-than-life figure whose shadow lorded over her house as if he were the sun itself. This made an indelible mark on the grandchildren, whose trips to her house were adventures and yet, at the same time I felt a mark was etched into my being that, I too had to achieve greatness to even be in the same breath as this history.
Unspoken in these rooms was anything that had to do with mental illness, depression, isolation or substance abuse. The drunken stories of my dear uncles Pablo and Peter were propulsive in fueling a sense of adventure, the lives they lived were epic and even today some elderly grandfather or grandmother will approach me and ask, “Koe-Krompecher? Wow, I haven’t heard that name in a while, are you related..” It is here where I cut them off, “Peter and Pablo?”. “Yes, how did you know?” their eyes sparkle and a mischievous smile crawls across their face, as if they can recall the first taste of adventure. “Oh, I know. Trust me.” “Man, they were some crazy guys, so much fun, I’d tell you but you probably shouldn’t know.” Oh, I know. Trust me. These yarns were slyly dug into my conscious as we ate egg and chicken soup, Hungarian paprikash, mashed potatoes with sour cream and a dessert made with copious amounts of rum. I got drunk the first time around the age of nine at my Uncle Peter’s house at Christmas, there is a wonderful picture of my brother Zoltan, tipsy as fuck holding a glass of champagne. He is eleven. That party was crazy and perhaps was the first inkling that there were some anger and mental health issues in my family, my father got into a fist fight with his younger brother outside in the winter cold and I remember vividly the spots of blood in the snow. My father left hastily that night and we stayed at my uncle’s. A few years later my father would exit my life, pretty much for good, leaving a void that years later had me contemplating having my children having my wife’s last name as if this would prevent the misery of depression, rage and substance abuse from their lives.
When I was 14, a goofy, nerdy smartass stuck in the middle of cornfields, pick-up trucks, John Deere hats and coveralls, a veritable intense scary version of Hee-Haw to my adolescent mind I got wasted for the first time in Jeanette George’s barn party. All of a sudden the farm boys who didn’t understand the dopey kid with the weird name was kinda cool as one-liners poured out of my mouth as if directed by God himself, and those girls who had been conditioned to fall for the stereotypical macho country boy smiled slyly at me. I had had several girlfriends when I lived in Athens, but the move to rural Ohio, burst whatever yearning hope I may have had in those budding teenage years. I was lonely. The cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon went down slowly and soon I found some good friends who were much like me, Chris Biester, Jon Baird, Mark Geiger and Jeff Entler were boys who loved music as I did and liked to drink beer on the weekend as we mocked everybody in our school, trying in vain to shake the awkwardness we all must have collectively felt.
It was brisk that night, one where the soft wind pulled the weakening hold of the leaves on the chilly trees, the breeze would blow up into the branches and slowly tug at one leaf and suddenly, like an invisible trap door a flutter of leaves would empty towards the ground. The changing fall season crept into our adolescence psyches, enveloping up with the social anxiety that dwells within children who are budding adults and fueling late night hopes of kisses, heavy petting and the wonderment of sexuality. I wore large wire-frame glasses, they were new to me as I was fitted with them upon complaining that I couldn’t see the blackboard in Mr. Chamberlin’s oh-so-boring Freshman English class, I suppose Mr. Chamberlin just thought I was another over-active dumb kid but I just couldn’t see his shitty sentence diagrams on the board. Sometime during my sophomore year, I got contacts which I wore until my alcoholism told me glasses were easier when you passed out. Glasses didn’t tend to stick to someone’s eyeballs.
The didn’t unfold as much as it burst forth as if rocketed from the barrel of a shotgun, the minutes flicked past as if they were motorized and as stars twinkled and winked from the deepest of space, I had collected a small audience as I bellowed jokes and asides. The warmth of smiles is something I cannot forget, while the thirty years that have passed since then have swept whatever funny words that tumbled forth from my lips, I realized then and there that a tiny bit of beer carried me a long way. Drinking happened on the weekends, mostly in the back seat of a car or at Mark’s house as his mother and stepfather went on trips to ride horses. It was sporadic, alcohol was easy to procure and the summer between my sophomore and junior years, I spent in Athens. It was there that drinking became easier, I looked old enough to get into bars and the hurried energy of bars excited me. Besides there were a lot of college women in Athens and this fueled my feelings of being older and a part of something much grander than a fifteen year old boy lost in the Ohio wilderness.
When I was child I would sit upon my grandfather’s knee in his cracked leather chair, he would hang his left leg over the side with a small wooden knob at the end of the arm chair being the last guard of his leg slipping off onto the floor, his foot dangling, pants leg pulled tight revealing his black socks collapsing around his ankles. He would welcome me up as he watched the news, rocking me on his knee and I could smell the Jim Beam in a glass that worked more like an extension of his hands as he nursed the smooth bourbon from late morning, to mid-afternoon to early evening before rising from the comfy chair and lumber off to bed. The smell of water and Jim Beam dug deep into my brain and when I started drinking liquor, I soon lost interest with the intense and feverish buzz that Jack Daniels gave for the smooth comfort of Jim Beam, somewhere buried into my essence was the memory of my grandfather holding me, murmuring in my ear and letting me eat salty Lay’s Potato Chips right from the bag as Walter Cronkite spoke from a black-and-white universe and for moments the world was safe. I would order a beer and a Beam and water and soon learned the fine are of cultivating a buzz. Giving up on shots after I smashed my ribs into the floor of Staches one night and after several summers of puking into an old brown bucket the lure of shots no longer enticed me, the art of drinking was about establishing a pace that could hold off the desperation of loneliness until deep into the night, and when cruising one did not want to get to sloppy as it would be easy to scare off any suitors who could take away the pangs of desperation.
Towards the end of my drinking I would loathe the night, a farce compared to just a few years prior when the twisting inside of me burned as if there were simmering coals alighting the innards of my body during the day while I pined for the night. For the comfort of cigarette smoke, music wafting overhead and through my body and the twinkle of a pretty woman, all to soothe an unsettled fragment of me. Conditioning takes years, whether it is the body or the mind, with alcoholism it is a combination of both, one feeds the other while the circumstances that compels a person may shift the symbiotic relationship remains strong. Desperation came in bursts, emotional upheavals the unraveled as the moon rose high above, pining for affirmation was a sick exercise one that still urges me to this day.
Undercurrents of discourse percolated through my mind and veins, as the excuses to drink piled on one another my behavior became dishonest, selfish and in the end extremely risky. Jerry had this at times during our friendship, where the haunting of his depression could sink him to tears or to futile anger at anyone around him. His look of utter frustration with his obsession of drinking stunned me, “Bela, I can’t fucking stop” he would utter as I clutched a handful of Black Label’s to disperse around the chunky wooden booths at Larry’s. “Aw Jerry, relax, come on. Everybody is having a good time.” He would then slide away, camping in his upstairs apartment surrounded by his best friends, that is his record collection. Jenny, on the other end approached her alcoholism with glee at that time, “I’m a fucking alcoholic, so fucking what” she would blurt out as she downed a whiskey, her life by then had not yet unraveled a horrific pace that would have her living in a mansion in Miami to the streets of Columbus in a matter of months. “Shit, I know what my problem is, and I frankly I don’t care” she would say, as we sat around her glass tabletop playing a game of quarters. Later, as a resident of Jackson County Hospital in Miami, when the apparitions that would sporadically spring from her mind grew too dangerous and the alcoholic tremors would grind her to the floor, she confessed, “I’m so fucking scared of being alone BELA,” her intensity almost breaking solid heavy plastic of my phone, “I don’t know how not to drink, it’s the ONLY THING THAT HAS EVER WORKED.” By then, I had gone through my own treatment for alcoholism and was sober. I believed her only answer was the same path I had chosen, which was twelve-step groups although I had little knowledge of the severity of her mental illness.
Sadness has cloaked me since childhood, at times burying me deep into my mind as is the sky were trying to shake the clouds free, I tore myself loose through alcohol, as a means to find companionship. At times, depression is a salve, especially when young as emotions are so strong, so immediate and encompassing, the uniqueness of heartbreak is by itself a shelter from the rest of world. Later, I would discover meditation and other acts of non-acts, so to speak but depression still pokes its head out, a goblin of sorts to trip up my day. Music has always been the consistent, more than the booze, and certainly more than the women. It was there when I was twelve and around still as I turn the page into middle age. Headphones yank me back from the precipice of the dark gloominess of my mind, of emotions that lie to me, over and over. Today, I don’t pick up a drink but many of the reasons for drinking are still there. Inside of me.
Belakoekrompecher's Blog 