Days: Fifteen Years Sober

Prologue

There were chandeliers.  I had rarely been around chandeliers, and even then, never so many, never so shiny.  In fact, nearly everything was shiny—the centerpieces, the candle holders, the forks and knives had glints and sparkles.  Light seemed to reflect and refract from everywhere all at once, off of balloons and from under tables, men’s wingtip shoes had tiny stars in them, large wire-rimmed glasses on women’s faces beamed chandelier light into my eyes.  The whole ballroom was like a universe.

I should have expected to be dazzled at the first wedding I ever attended.  I’d seen depictions of weddings in some movies, sure, but being only eight or nine years old, I didn’t have a lot to go on.  I knew there would be a ceremony, and they’d kiss, and then I heard we threw rice at them, oddly enough.  I must have expected there to be a party afterward, but if I did, I certainly had no idea what to expect from it.  And all this shininess—I hadn’t been prepared for that.

My cousins were there—some that I liked and some that I didn’t, but we all kept playing together, regardless.  That’s what you do with cousins when you’re a kid, after all—you play with them no matter how much you like them.  Once the pomp and trope of the adult rituals during the reception began to wear thin for us (how many times does an eight-year-old think it’s interesting to watch two grown-ups kiss? Just because someone tapped their glass?) we found our way to each other and began exploring.  We found an elevator in the lobby that we rode up and down and up and down, getting off on random floors, running to the ends of the halls.  We made a game where you tried to touch the wall at the end of the hall and get back to the elevator before the doors closed.  It wasn’t easy.  We also devised a contest to see who could, when controlling the floor buttons, go longest without the doors opening to let a stranger onto the elevator.  Again and again we were tempted to press the Emergency Stop button, but we never did.  Eventually, an employee caught onto the fact that some kids were playing fast and loose with their elevator and we got yelled at and told to stop, and, feeling like we’d just been dressed down by a Supreme Court justice, we ran out of the elevator, through the lobby, and back into the ballroom.

We played under vacant tables.  We made forts under there by using spare tablecloths and draping them over the chairs.  We moved the large potted plants out a few feet from the walls and hid behind them until grown-ups gave us weird looks.  We took M&Ms out of our gift baskets and threw them long distances into each other’s mouths.  By and large, nobody was watching us.  The adults were having a grand old time and we were left to play, to run around.  It was a unique environment for us.  Dressed in our little spiffy clothes—suspenders, skirts, ties—we felt like miniature grown-ups, doing our kid things under the shiny lights.

Occasionally, the action in the grown-up world would halt briefly while they did another of their inexplicable rituals—shoving cake at each other, somebody’s dad dancing with somebody else, and on and on.  At one point, everyone stopped what they were doing for the throwing of the bouquet, which did not sound remotely interesting to me, but my cousins ran to the crowd to watch.  I was thirsty and a little tired, so I made my way back to my family’s table to regroup and hydrate.

Nobody was there, as they were off watching something happen to a bouquet.  I pulled myself up to the table, the empty food plates still scattered around, and my mother’s purse hanging on the side of her chair, and more M&Ms in clear mason jars.  I found my Sprite and gulped it down.  It was nice to have a moment alone.  Then my eye fell upon it: the champagne flute.  Full, bubbles creeping up the sides, mysterious presences.  I glanced around and verified I was unwatched.  I took the glass, using both hands to steady it, and brought it to my lips, surprised by the blast of carbon dioxide as the carbonation hit my nose.  I barely tasted anything as I downed the beverage in one quick movement.  I sat back in my chair, looked around myself again to see if I had been observed.  In a moment, the warmth hit my stomach.  A smile crept at my lips.

 

Days of Nothing

 

It had been a hot summer. Summers are always hot, and Pennsylvania summers get that special kind of humidity working for them, but this summer had just been a rainforest ordeal. We spent every day with a thin sheen of sweat on us almost all the time, even indoors, even in the dark in the basement. It was a summer of Sloe Gin Fizzes, chain-smoking Newports, sitting on the front porch.  It was a stoop, really, but we called it a porch, although you entered through the side door, not the front.

I was staying quite suddenly and unexpectedly with two of my friends who were renting a house in the middle of the Pennsylvania countryside. And I mean Countryside. At least a 20-minute drive from where anyone might consider civilization. The view from that front porch was actual and real rolling Pennsylvania Hills, green as Ireland, constantly sun-dappled, you could see the shadows of clouds as they passed overhead, rolling down the hills like boulders. Cows and sheep on the periphery, small tree outcroppings dotting the very tops of the horizons. I make it sound kind of lovely, but in fact, it was a pretty awful time for everybody.

See, if you are from Pennsylvania, it would mean something if I told you this was in Perry County, and really far out in the middle of Perry County. How these friends rented the house, how they found it, I’ll never know. But there I found myself, immediately after giving up on a semester of college, literally walking away from classes that were over three-quarters of the way done, because I couldn’t stop drinking long enough to wake up in the morning, or do homework or even read Mark Twain books. I simply threw in the towel, and after spending a couple weeks tooling around campus aimlessly, I decided to just jump ship entirely, threw what little belongings I had into the back of my 1983 Ford Escort, and drove an hour from my college out into the middle of the rolling god-damned Hills. I did this in order to spend the summer with two people who were likewise as troubled as I was, but in different ways, and we were miserable as hell together. We’d spend entire mornings out in front of the house with a two-by-four, swatting at the huge bumble bees as they flew past us, drinking 20 ounce cans of Busch beer, trying to kill as many of those bees as we could, for no reason other than there was nothing else to do. We’d sit on our plastic lawn chairs on that porch, with our view of the field, secretly hoping that it was manure spreading day, just so that there was something to look at, something to talk about, something to complain about other than the heat and the damn bees.

We spent our nights inside, in the dark basement, lit only by multiple strings of Christmas lights, the smell of must and tobacco smoke, no television, no stereo. Just imbibing and talking, and sometimes in full silence. I spent the whole summer reading one issue of Guitar World magazine, articles I didn’t even understand, once everybody else was asleep, reading these damn guitar articles in the almost total darkness, falling asleep on a dust-covered couch. It was terrible and wonderful.

One morning, as we were sitting on our stoop smoking our cigarettes watching the distant rolling hills as though something might erupt from them, an Amish boy strolled past on the street in front of our yard, walking his ancient bike beside him. He stood and looked at us, as though he were seeing something for the very first time, some true curiosity. Thinking we were some sort of cultural emissaries, we approached him and struck up a conversation. I can’t remember now what was said between us, what inane questions we must have asked in the name of science, but after a 20-minute conversation, he went his way and we went back to the stoop, thinking we had just crossed some cultural divide. I can’t be sure what we said, but I know who I was back then, so I know I was an asshole.

**********************************************************************

 

In my early twenties there was a short time period when I stayed with my mother in a small apartment she was renting in the small Pennsylvania town of Dillsburg. This was during a time when she went on frequent extended trips for her job, so even though it was a place where I wasn’t paying any rent, I would find myself with my own apartment for a couple days at a time, here and there. Living the kind of life I was living then, which is to say, mildly indigent, alone time was a fairly sacrosanct rarity. On these times when she was gone, I would wake up on the couch, still mildly dizzy from my stupor the night before, find some water to drink, and commence sitting there, absorbing cable television, mixing large amounts of Diet Coke with larger amounts of cheap gin, chainsmoking generic menthol light cigarettes until the whole room was suffused with a haze as if it were packing material. Somehow having that apartment to myself, and enough booze and cigarettes and food I hadn’t paid for to last me through a couple days, felt like I had a luxury a room on a cruise liner. I would crank up the air-conditioning, raid her collection of compact discs, listen to Led Zeppelin’s “Gallows Pole” over and over again at an incredibly high volume. One such night, after a lengthy day of solo debauchery, I found myself inexplicably out in the parking lot of the apartment complex, wandering aimlessly, smoking my cigarette with a gin and Coke in a supersize McDonald’s cup. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly I heard from behind me someone yell my name. It took me awhile to realize what I was witnessing, but it was one of my more lengthy roommates from college, suddenly here in this parking lot, 45 minutes from the town we went to school in. At this point, I must have been out of college for about two years and hadn’t heard from him since (this is pre-Facebook and even pre-MySpace). I couldn’t believe my eyes! After getting over both of our initial confusions, I learned that not only did he live in the same apartment complex, but he lived with a man that we were also roommates with. The three of us had shared an apartment for about a year in college, and now they were living together and working in the town of Dillsburg, while I was mooching off my mother in the same apartment complex! It was almost too much to handle. Excited for the reunion, we both walked into their apartment, and sure enough, there was the third roommate, and he was just as shocked as us! We spent about half an hour catching up on what we had done since school, and then sat there in a kind of dazed boredom. We had nothing to talk about. It hadn’t been that long ago we were in college, pulling pranks, making silly movies, running all over the town like young people who would never die, would never have a problem in the world. But now just a few years later here we were, clearly at different crossroads. We sat in silence and watched a movie, and then I left and never went back there again.

*******************************************************************

 

I don’t really remember how it happened, but I know for a fact that once, stone drunk, I found myself walking down the Carlisle Pike in the middle of night, just past the 81 North entrance ramp, headed away from Carlisle. I had just past the entrance ramp when I saw a tractor-trailer pulled over on the side of the road, presumably for the driver to sleep there for the night. None of the lights were on and the engine was off. I thought to myself, ‘I could just roll underneath a truck right there and sleep for the night. I could just lay under there, be sheltered from view and the wind, look up at the underside of that trailer, let this drunkenness and tiredness wash over me, and sleep there for the night.’ And I did roll under that truck, and I looked at the underside of it. I put my hands behind my head and stretched out in the gravel parking lot. I laid there for a little while, I have no idea how long, but even in my drunken stupor, and as low as I was in every aspect of life at that moment, even I knew this was a bad idea. I rolled back out and kept on walking, and I have no idea where I went.

*********************************************************************

 

Time is a sad, dense fog over a sea, and places are lighted buoys.  The people?  I don’t know, maybe they’re boats, or fishes.  The days stretch out like dreams in a desert.

 

Days of Something

 

Just a few months after getting sober, I found myself living back in Pennsylvania, after a short stint in New Jersey.  I had moved in with a friend of mine who had a spare bedroom. I got my old job back, the same job cooking greasy diner food for a company that kept giving me chances.  I would come home everyday and see some of my friends there, hanging around this house I had moved into. Sometimes playing music, or fiddling with the communal telescope, or playing board games.   A few weeks into this living arrangement, I decided that I was going to go out that night by myself.  I ended up going to a movie, “Million Dollar Baby”, and it was a good movie, I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I’ll start watching good movies.’  I walked out of the theater, and it was a late showing, and it was winter, so it was dark and frigid everywhere, and I was the only one in the parking lot, and it suddenly dawned on me that I could do anything I wanted. I wasn’t a slave to anything like I had been before. Nothing drove me to a bar or a convenience store to get a fix. Nothing told me I had to be somewhere that I could fall asleep anytime soon. I didn’t have to work in the morning. I didn’t have anybody who knew where I was or was expecting me somewhere. I walked across the frigid parking lot to the adjacent Walmart, bought a Butterfinger candy bar and a Red Bull, walked back to my car, and drove into the countryside, smoking cigarettes, laughing my ass off at freedom.

 

********************************************************************

 

Philadelphia is a great city, but there’s nothing special about it in the winter. It becomes winter just like every place else becomes the winter: slowly, and then all at once. My first winter in the city was also the first winter I’d spent anywhere without a car. During the summer I had learned to get around by riding my bike and walking, and was just getting pretty good at it when the gradual winter hit all of a sudden. It was cold and it was windy, but didn’t snow for the first few months, and then one day, a day that I also happened to have off work, the sky opened up and dumped down about eight inches. It was a very different experience than my previous winters elsewhere, where you might go outside and walk around, do some shoveling, maybe go see a few of the local landmarks covered in the fluffy cliches. In a densely packed urban area that stretches out for miles and miles in any direction, and where local landmarks are a dime a dozen but breathtaking beauty might be a little scarce, I wasn’t sure exactly what to do with myself, other than sit on my couch and watch Netflix. Eventually I decided to just bundle up, put on some heavy shoes (since I never really am in the habit of keeping boots around) and venture out into the snow and see what happened. I started walking through the streets of my South Philly neighborhood, unplowed, unshoveled, the houses squished up against each other like sandwich bread, snow building up in the trashy pedestrian alleys between them, choking the tops of open the trash cans, pawprints sometimes the only sign anyone had been down a sidewalk.  And I kept walking and walking, taking note how it was different than my previous experience, and also ways in which it was similar, compare and contrast, compare and contrast, that is essentially how I Live every moment of my life. One experience must always be similar or different from previous ones; otherwise, how do you measure anything?  Eventually the neighborhood started to change as I kept walking, buildings got farther apart, the roads got wider, the streets were starting to be plowed, cars started moving around, the city seemed to wake up. I started passing people on the street and there was an air of conviviality, of shared experience. Everyone was saying hello, commenting on the snow, and it wasn’t just what people were saying, but the attitude, the feeling, like we were all finally together, not that we were undergoing any major hardship, but just that the presence of something so different, something so sudden, almost held us together like a web. Connection.  Eventually I realized I was closer to Independence Mall, which is the cluster of extremely significant historical sites in the city, than I was to home, so I just kept on walking. I arrived behind Independence Hall probably an hour and a half after leaving my house, still trudging through almost a foot of snow, surprised to see that there were a few people milling around, but only a few, much less than the hundreds and hundreds that crammed into this park in the summer months. I circled the building, taking note of what the roof looked like covered in snow, imagining it would have looked the same to George Washington or Thomas Jefferson when it snowed in the late 1700s. I crossed Chestnut Street, which is directly in front of Independence Hall, my feet not quite hitting the cobblestones, but still feeling the unevenness of the walk, as the snow impacted into the cracks around the cobblestones, as it surely has done to other foot travelers for centuries. I trudged across the open space in front of Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell to my left, taking note that it was still open, the Park Service still there and operating, but I didn’t see a soul in line to see the famed bell. I kept on going, heading towards the visitor center, with its bright glass interiors, newly built restrooms, shiny gift shop and concession stand. I often used to stop at the visitor center in the summer, as I was riding my bike around the city, for its quick and easy access to a restroom and bottled water.  As I swung open the heavy glass and stainless steel doors, it was clear to me that everyone inside the visitor center was surprised to see me, not because of anything about me, but simply because I was a human being. I was literally the only non-employee in this entire visitor center. It’s amazing what snow does to history tourism. Despite the fact that it was winter and snowing, I was sweating greatly, and was glad of the opportunity to take my coat off, breathe a little bit, stomp the snow out of every crease and crevice. I was thirsty and hungry, as I didn’t leave the house with the intention to walk halfway across the city, so I went straight to the concession stand, got me a bottle of water, a hot coffee, and some sort of breakfast sandwich.  I sat alone in the bright, metal cafeteria, my belly growing content as I fed it.  I took note that outside, it had begun snowing again, and heavier this time.  It was quiet in the visitor center.  I was far from home.

 

**********************************************************************

 

This day started very early. I woke up around 4am not knowing what I was going to do with the day, but knowing that I wanted to wake up early enough to have a really thorough day, if you know what I mean. I was living by myself in Erie Pennsylvania, in an apartment, one bedroom, on the second level of an old house that was nearing dilapidation, but still teetering on the edge of respectability. It was smack-dab in the middle of summer, and waking up at 4am, the whole apartment was already laden with a heat, an oppressive second floor apartment kind of heat; a thin layer of sweat somehow on everything you looked at. I rolled out of bed, made myself a latte on my proudly-acquired home espresso machine, and set about pondering what to do with such a lengthy, summery kind of day all to myself.  I took a long, overly hot shower while the local morning news played on the television which I had crammed into my tiny bathroom. I stayed in the shower for the whole newscast, mind mostly blank. After the shower, while air drying mostly to cool off, I randomly selected a DVD from my bloated collection, and came up with “The 40 Year Old Virgin”, a movie that I don’t know how it ended up in my collection and no longer resides there, but at the time, a mindless comedy seemed just the ticket. I laid on my couch and let the Steve Carell comedy wash over me. Having gotten up so early that an immense amount of day still laid stretched out before me, even after my lengthy ablutions. What to do? Living by one’s self for so long, and so far from everyone you know, turns days and 31316_1458245861882_8379455_nmornings into quiet studies of one’s inner mechanics, and if you linger too long without plans, your cogs and belts begin to make a lot of noise. Suddenly it hit me: Niagara Falls. I’d been living relatively close to Niagara Falls for almost a year at this point, and it was always something bouncing around the periphery of what I wanted to do, but I never quite made it there, never quite made that my actual plan. Almost the moment that it struck me, I bounded off the couch, went to my computer to MapQuest the directions, threw on some clothes and some essentials into a backpack, and I was out the door.  I don’t remember much about the drive, although certainly there had to be a drive. It was close but not incredibly close, probably something like an hour and 15 minutes. A decent trip, but then again, much closer than almost anyone else in the world lives to such landmark. I remember having trouble figuring out where to park when I got close to it, the town itself surrounding it not exactly being incredibly helpful with instructions.  Finally I did get my car parked, and walked across a large grassy mall, the sound of the falls quite distinct, just like you expect the sound of Niagara Falls to be: thunderous, droning, like a white noise that comes from within.  I remember hearing the falls, I remember a large grassy area you had to walk across to get to it, but I don’t remember actually arriving at the falls.  In fact, the order of what I did that day and the specifics of how I did it, are lost in the labyrinth of my brain. I did the touristy things, I rode the boat, I walked up and down the path alongside the falls, I wore the poncho they provide you. I took selfies on the boat, all by myself, surrounded by revelers and families and church groups. After doing the requisite attractions, I found myself walking around the grounds, reading the historical markers, interpreting the interpretive maps. I noticed that there was a small landmass called Goat Island, out of the middle of the river, one of the features that gives the Falls that look, where it is divided occasionally, not one big solid Falls. It was accessible quite easily via a pedestrian bridge across the river, so I went out there, reading the Wikipedia entry on my phone as I went, the long and somewhat interesting history of the island, its ownership and various names. I arrived on the island to find a sweltering patch of grass, the heat dense with liquid, the roar of the falls now like a white noise outside myself, like a curtain descending. The island itself was no larger than a small park, and trees lined the northern edge, so that one couldn’t actually see the land fall away at the end.  I had the island entirely to myself. Of course the only thing to do on an island like that is to walk toward the edge. Walking through the grass I was assaulted by bugs everywhere, insects nipping at my legs, bouncing off my knees like miniature Kamikazes. The closer and closer I got to the river, the more amazed I was that there were no protections of any kind in place. One expects to find some sort of railing here, some warning signs, maybe even Park Rangers or something. But no, the island just walks right up to the river, and right up to the falls, anyone with dark designs would be in no way dissuaded.  The design of the island makes it challenging to walk right up to the falls, but instead it is very easy to sit at a clearing about twenty yards away from the actual precipice. I took my backpack off and sat in the grass, and looked out across the Niagara River, just beginning to get a real good head of steam up, just beginning to get its little whitecaps and wavelets, the water not knowing it was about to fly.  The heat washed over me, the insect buzzing began to mesh with the white noise of the falls, it all became a hot buzzing constant, I laid my head on the grass and sunk in, sunk down into the dirt, I was so far from home, and for a moment, I had no idea where I was, or maybe even who I was.

 

********************************************************************

“Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown
Waiting for something or someone to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun!”

‘Time’, by Pink Floyd

 

Days of Everything

 

It was a cold night, but not too cold, which was fortunate, because we had to park very far away from the arena. I unbuckled Boy from his car seat and heaved him into the air, bringing him next to my cheek to give him a kiss in the crisp evening air. “This soccer game?” He asked. “Yes,” I told him. “This is the big building I told you about.” I sat him down and stuck out my hand for him to grab, as we strolled quickly through the immense parking lot together. He had lots of questions. He kept calling it football, which was interesting, I thought, since most of the world referred to soccer as football, but he couldn’t possibly know that, could he? Most of his questions weren’t really about the sport we were about to go watch, but the building it was in. How could a building be so big that you could play soccer inside of it? How tall was it, was it taller than the telephone poles? Taller than our house? Will there be snacks? Soft pretzels? I’ve become accustomed to the constant barrage of questions at this point, pulling from deep within me a patience I honestly did not think I possessed.  Not that this patience is without limits—but at any rate, I seem to have more than I thought.  I suspect a toddler will prove this to be true of most anyone.

I was surprised by the patience he displayed as we waited in a long line to buy tickets. It seems every day, he is making leaps and bounds, growing in things like patience, understanding, and empathy. Which is not to say he’s still not a little ball of emotions that doesn’t know how to act, just maybe a little less so than a few months ago or a year ago. He’s becoming much more of a companion as opposed to a force of nature to wrangle and watch. While for the most part, time with Boy is still all about teaching, there are moments now of truly just being.  And “just being” with a little guy like boy is more magic than I’m accustomed to.

Finally, tickets procured, we entered the concourse, looking for our section. I hadn’t studied the arena map extensively, and had chosen seats in the section on the complete opposite side of the concourse, so we had to walk past countless souvenir stands and snack bars, him wanting desperately to stop at each, and also wanting to enter into each section as we passed, with me constantly trying to tell him that it wasn’t much farther, not much farther. But through it all, he didn’t freak out or melt down or cry, just implored me strongly. Finally we came upon our entrance to the arena, and I picked him up because I knew the stairs were going to be steep and he was probably going to be shocked by the sight of walking into the big room. Carrying him on my side, we entered the arena proper, and although an indoor soccer field lacks the nebulous breathtaking quality of a baseball field, the sudden shock of green and the expanse of a sudden cavernous room had its desired effect on the countencance of Boy, which is to say, it produced a certain amount of awe. After pausing to allow him to soak it in, we climbed up the steep steps, to find our seats. We were all alone in our section, something I had to ask the ticket man to do, in case it did not go very well. Boy was beyond excited to sit here. He was very into his seat, enamored with the idea that the number on it matched  the number on his ticket, and in this enormous room, this seat was his and his alone. He was not restless as I had feared, his eyes trained on the action on the field. I would steal sidelong glances at him, see his eyes glued to the action, his head swiveling as the ball bounced back and forth, his complete concentration and immersion something only possible in the earliest years of life, and during a first exposure to things; the sights and sounds meshing with dawning understanding, realization writ large across his face. He would sometimes stop his concentration to ask questions about the goalies, which he called The Goal Guys, their different colored jerseys causing him no end of confusion. Later, as he was able to again float back into our world, he would watch me for cues whenever the arena sound system would play the tropes of modern sporting events: the “Charge!” song, the “De-Fense!” chant, and on and on. He saw and understood there was an audience participation element and he wanted to learn.  I would raise my fist and yell “Charge!”, glancing over to see him mimic it, his tiny voice bursting forth its own “Charge!”  This moment, especially, nearly crippled me with emotion.

He paid close attention to the game and stayed quite interested for well over an hour and a half when he started to fall asleep on my shoulder. I told him I thought it was time to go, and he protested quite strongly, saying he didn’t want to miss anything. And I kept giving in, saying we could stay, and then he kept falling asleep again, until eventually I picked him up, went up the stairs to the upper concourse, and told him he should get down and walk around and look at all the empty chairs, all the sections without anybody in them. The arena was quite empty, in fact, especially once one got up to the upper reaches. We got to a very high section, a corner section so high up you could almost touch the roof in a few of the spots, and as we emerged into it, it became clear that it had not even been cleaned out or looked at after the preceding weekend’s Motocross event in the arena. Everywhere there was trash, even half-eaten food and some beer cans on their sides. It was an astonishing array of trash and smells to walk into amid what appeared to be an otherwise normal arena. It was immediately too late for me to backtrack and take him out of this section, he was much too interested in the hows or whys this could have happened. I explained as best I could that they assumed they would not sell any tickets in this section for the soccer game, so they must be waiting to clean up from the Motocross. He did not want to walk around the section, but he also didn’t want to leave. I picked him up and we watched the soccer from way high up near the ceiling, looking down on all that old trash and beer cans, until he looked at me and told me he was ready to go home. I felt that I had a companion here, a little guy who I could teach and learn from, who was now going to be interested in things, who was present with me.

*********************************************************************

 

It wasn’t too long ago that we had a little get-together for Boy’s birthday. My Love’s father was there—and let me tell you, I like Love’s father so much it’s nearly criminal–as well as both of my parents and my paternal grandmother. My parents have been divorced for quite a few years, and yet they get along like the best of friends, and there was my dad’s mother, chatting it up with his ex-wife, all while boy ran around and told everyone he loves them all the time, and climbed on everybody, and climbed on me, while I held Loves hand, while the room was full of talk and laughter, while there was warmth everywhere, and everywhere I looked there was future, future, future.

 

**********************************************************************

 

My love and I put on our light spring jackets and walked into the crisp evening. Just the two of us, we interlocked our hands, and headed down the street toward Midtown. It is one of the benefits of living where we do, that usually, given the right weather and the right child care situation, we can walk to some of the places that we like to spend time together. This night it was simple: we were going out to eat. It was one of the last walkable nights of the year, and we knew it. The cold was setting in, soon we would be driving everywhere and stuck inside like prisoners.  So tonight, we knew, was a walking night.

There was a very popular and artsy restaurant in the middle of Midtown, which somehow we still had not made it to. Recently they had started serving a very popular veggie burger, that all of our friends were talking about, and we still hadn’t tried. It had been on our list for weeks.

The thing about taking a somewhat lengthy walk with the person that you love is that it forces conversation you don’t normally have inside the house or perhaps in a moving car. You see things that you don’t normally see, are reminded of things you might only see or think of by yourself, you’re moving at an interesting pace, a different speed. I love holding hands and walking with my love. I love the way her hand feels, I love being connected to her physically in that way, I love being able to look at her face from the side so often. I love being able to point out things, and have her point out things to me, elements of our neighborhood that we only see when we are walking the dog by ourselves.  I love kissing her outside. Many people spend most of their lives in relationships and begin to take things like this for granted, maybe even very early on in life, they assume they will have a companion in this form. Having spent so long single, small things like holding hands, walking down the street, these things never seem anything other than magical to me. My love thrills me.  Literally every single thing about her. It’s electric.

Twenty minutes later we found ourselves the only customers in the artsy eating establishment, it being only five o’clock. We were talking about the art on the wall, the interesting sculptures, the funny man who kept looking at us askance from inside the kitchen. We talked about the interesting ordering system the restaurant used, the haphazard way salt was placed on some of the tables but not others, we talked about our days, we held hands and looked at each other. Sometimes we didn’t say anything and that was lovely in its own way. When you know someone is your true partner, being in their presence is a constant salve.

The food came and it was delicious, just as delicious as everyone says it is was, and it was fantastic to share a meal with someone who shares so many of my worldviews, who has the compassion in the same places I do, love and freedom in the same proportions, to share a meal with a woman who has taught me so much. As I was finishing off my Diet Pepsi, stealing glances at this woman, I kept thinking some of the same thoughts I come back to all the time.  How I waited so long to find her.  How, when I did find her, I couldn’t and still can’t believe how perfect she is.  How my journey to find her wasn’t about me, or even the journey, but it was about her, about us.  How I still learn about her every day and she’s such a delicious mystery.  How she fits so well.  I looked at her as I sat there, finishing my Diet Pepsi, and I said to her the only thing one can say, given the unbearable weight of the world:  I can’t believe you’re finally here.

 

***************************************************************

The days, good or bad, really do just stretch out like deserts, uncountable deserts, again and again and again.  Some, you find, contain nothing: plodding marches under a bored sun.  But sometimes, they are filled up, filled with everything you ever dreamed, brazen neon signs of days, confetti and love love love.  I don’t know about you, but I’m trying to figure out how to keep them filled up.  I want the days of everything, forever.

Days of Nothing

It had been a hot summer. Summers are always hot, and Pennsylvania summers get that special kind of humidity working for them, but this summer had just been a rainforest ordeal. We spent every day with a thin sheen of sweat on us almost all the time, even indoors, even in the dark in the basement. It was a summer of Sloe Gin Fizzes, chain-smoking Newports, sitting on the front porch.  It was a stoop, really, but we called it a porch, although you entered through the side door, not the front.

I was staying quite suddenly and unexpectedly with two of my friends who were renting a house in the middle of the Pennsylvania countryside. And I mean Countryside. At least a 20-minute drive from where anyone might consider civilization. The view from that front porch was actual and real rolling Pennsylvania Hills, green as Ireland, constantly sun-dappled, you could see the shadows of clouds as they passed overhead, rolling down the hills like boulders. Cows and sheep on the periphery, small tree outcroppings dotting the very tops of the horizons. I make it sound kind of lovely, but in fact, it was a pretty awful time for everybody.

See, if you are from Pennsylvania, it would mean something if I told you this was in Perry County, and really far out in the middle of Perry County. How these friends rented the house, how they found it, I’ll never know. But there I found myself, immediately after giving up on a semester of college, literally walking away from classes that were over three-quarters of the way done, because I couldn’t stop drinking long enough to wake up in the morning, or do homework or even read Mark Twain books. I simply threw in the towel, and after spending a couple weeks tooling around campus aimlessly, I decided to just jump ship entirely, threw what little belongings I had into the back of my 1983 Ford Escort, and drove an hour from my college out into the middle of the rolling god-damned Hills. I did this in order to spend the summer with two people who were likewise as troubled as I was, but in different ways, and we were miserable as hell together. We’d spend entire mornings out in front of the house with a two-by-four, swatting at the huge bumble bees as they flew past us, drinking 20 ounce cans of Busch beer, trying to kill as many of those bees as we could, for no reason other than there was nothing else to do. We’d sit on our plastic lawn chairs on that porch, with our view of the field, secretly hoping that it was manure spreading day, just so that there was something to look at, something to talk about, something to complain about other than the heat and the damn bees.

We spent our nights inside, in the dark basement, lit only by multiple strings of Christmas lights, the smell of must and tobacco smoke, no television, no stereo. Just imbibing and talking, and sometimes in full silence. I spent the whole summer reading one issue of Guitar World magazine, articles I didn’t even understand, once everybody else was asleep, reading these damn guitar articles in the almost total darkness, falling asleep on a dust-covered couch. It was terrible and wonderful.

One morning, as we were sitting on our stoop smoking our cigarettes watching the distant rolling hills as though something might erupt from them, an Amish boy strolled past on the street in front of our yard, walking his ancient bike beside him. He stood and looked at us, as though he were seeing something for the very first time, some true curiosity. Thinking we were some sort of cultural emissaries, we approached him and struck up a conversation. I can’t remember now what was said between us, what inane questions we must have asked in the name of science, but after a 20-minute conversation, he went his way and we went back to the stoop, thinking we had just crossed some cultural divide. I can’t be sure what we said, but I know who I was back then, so I know I was an asshole.

**********************************************************************

In my early twenties there was a short time period when I stayed with my mother in a small apartment she was renting in the small Pennsylvania town of Dillsburg. This was during a time when she went on frequent extended trips for her job, so even though it was a place where I wasn’t paying any rent, I would find myself with my own apartment for a couple days at a time, here and there. Living the kind of life I was living then, which is to say, mildly indigent, alone time was a fairly sacrosanct rarity. On these times when she was gone, I would wake up on the couch, still mildly dizzy from my stupor the night before, find some water to drink, and commence sitting there, absorbing cable television, mixing large amounts of Diet Coke with larger amounts of cheap gin, chainsmoking generic menthol light cigarettes until the whole room was suffused with a haze as if it were packing material. Somehow having that apartment to myself, and enough booze and cigarettes and food I hadn’t paid for to last me through a couple days, felt like I had a luxury a room on a cruise liner. I would crank up the air-conditioning, raid her collection of compact discs, listen to Led Zeppelin’s “Gallows Pole” over and over again at an incredibly high volume. One such night, after a lengthy day of solo debauchery, I found myself inexplicably out in the parking lot of the apartment complex, wandering aimlessly, smoking my cigarette with a gin and Coke in a supersize McDonald’s cup. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly I heard from behind me someone yell my name. It took me awhile to realize what I was witnessing, but it was one of my more lengthy roommates from college, suddenly here in this parking lot, 45 minutes from the town we went to school in. At this point, I must have been out of college for about two years and hadn’t heard from him since (this is pre-Facebook and even pre-MySpace). I couldn’t believe my eyes! After getting over both of our initial confusions, I learned that not only did he live in the same apartment complex, but he lived with a man that we were also roommates with. The three of us had shared an apartment for about a year in college, and now they were living together and working in the town of Dillsburg, while I was mooching off my mother in the same apartment complex! It was almost too much to handle. Excited for the reunion, we both walked into their apartment, and sure enough, there was the third roommate, and he was just as shocked as us! We spent about half an hour catching up on what we had done since school, and then sat there in a kind of dazed boredom. We had nothing to talk about. It hadn’t been that long ago we were in college, pulling pranks, making silly movies, running all over the town like young people who would never die,  would never have a problem in the world. But now just a few years later here we were, clearly at different crossroads. We sat in silence and watched a movie, and then I left and never went back there again.

***********************************************************************

Time is a sad, dense fog over a sea, and places are lighted buoys.  The people?  I don’t know, maybe they’re boats, or fishes.  The days stretch out like dreams in a desert.

You Vanish

Grandma was a short, stout woman who made puddings and hoarded swaths of uncut fabric in an upstairs walk-in closet.  Earlier, she had been a farmer’s wife, raising four children and taking on city “Fresh Air” kids in the Sixties.  Her husband came down with Parkinson’s disease and eventually she had to wheel him around the house in a big wheelchair, help him swallow enormous pills.  She tended a garden out back and taught me how to pick peas.  She watched professional wrestling and baseball with the television on mute.  Then one day she vanished.  She’s no longer here.

********************************************************************

Jenny was a girl I met in college–or so I’m told.  I was a very heavy drinker in those days, and I literally do not remember knowing her in college.  She found me on Myspace about ten years later.  She had stories about me from college that I didn’t remember but we knew all the same people.  Her father had been my philosophy professor, and I vaguely remembered that.  We texted a lot for a while; we were toying with the idea of romance but after getting together in person, it just wasn’t there.  She liked horror movies and had lots of tattoos.  She was a fairly big woman but something happened at some point to make her lose a remarkable amount of weight–suddenly she was tiny.  I never asked what was wrong with her and she didn’t seem to want to tell me.  She’s gone now.  She’s not anywhere you might look for her.

*********************************************************************

I went to high school with Nate.  We weren’t really friends, but we knew each other.  We ran in mostly different circles.  But we both went on the class trip to England.  We got somewhat close over the two-week trip, even though he thought he was a little cooler than I was, and I didn’t disagree.  We bonded over being heavy smokers and enjoying a good adult beverage.  When we got back home we mostly went our separate ways, aside from a minor power struggle we had over a female, and one time I accidentally set off the alarm in his lowrider truck.  He was a moody guy who liked the bass in his truck and wore backwards baseball caps.  He was really, really funny.  He disappeared in his mid-twenties.

************************************************************************

My first real girlfriend’s father was a nut about World War II aviation.  He’d sit in his chair in the living room and watch History Channel aviation shows all day long.  He was balding in a very adorable way, he didn’t try to hide it but a combover look came to him naturally.  He’d worked most of his prime years for a shoe company that went out of business at just the wrong time.  There was always a dog or a cat in his house that everyone else was mad at but he seemed content to ignore.  He enjoyed “black powder shooting”, which is the hobby of shooting antique firearms.  He never really said much to me–maybe “hi” and “bye” at the appropriate times.  The past seemed to weigh on him.  He has vanished.

********************************************************************

What is it, this business we have of ending?  It’s tempting to say we go somewhere–even if it’s just energy, even if it’s another life, anything, anywhere.  Of course, that’s just the rub of it–there is literally no way of knowing.  There is only the ever-present mystery. Although when you confront the thing head-on, there isn’t really much mystery at all.  We all know, at our core, exactly what it is (or better yet, exactly what it isn’t).

***********************************************************************

Someday I, too, will vanish from these daily comings-and-goings, in a poof, like mist, like a lantern you thought you saw in a window.

How You Can Tell You Are Being Controlled

I got booted, declared Mark as he abruptly walked through the door into our campus apartment.  I nearly fell from my perch on the sofa; not because he had been booted, but simply because he had opened the door so abruptly, and as always, he was very loud.  But I managed to play it cool and keep watching “Magnolia”.  I was at the part where everybody sings the Aimee Mann song.

This was our apartment at Seavers Apartments, the place to live at Shippensburg University in the 1990s.  Whereas the other dorm buildings were your typical high rises housing hundreds of tiny, identical rooms meant for two roommates each, Seavers was a more modern building that had the appearance of an actual apartment building.  Each unit housed six students, in two bedrooms of three each, with a large central common room.  Each bedroom had it’s own full bath–a huge change from the communal public showers of the standard dorm towers.  Seavers was also (and this was huge) the only dorm with cable TV.  This was the 90s.  Things were different then.  I remember when I still lived in the regular dorms, being invited to a gathering at Seavers to watch “ER”; it felt like going to the movies for free.

So Mark, one of our six in our apartment, had burst in claiming he had been booted.  What this meant, of course, was that the campus police had had just about enough of giving him parking tickets and had decided to “boot” his car, which entails locking a bright orange apparatus onto one of your tires, making it impossible to drive.  You have to go pay your tickets and then someone comes and takes the boot off your car and your car becomes yours again.  I still find this to be questionably legal, but it’s something that happens everywhere.

This was bad news for Mark.  He worked off-campus and needed his car to get there and back, but if he had money to pay his tickets, he would have already done so.  Not that this wasn’t completely the result of his carelessness–it was, but none of us were diligent, willful people at that time in our lives.  How we perceived the booting was, this was the system making things more difficult for us than it had to.  The system was toying with us.

There were four or five of us in the apartment at the time–I can’t remember who or exactly how many.  But I do know that Mark’s rage over his booting was intense and pointed enough to rouse all of us out of our various stupors, get us to put shoes or at least slippers on, and make the trek out of our apartment, up the small hill and staircase to the nearby resident parking lot to gaze upon the bright orange monstrosity that was now attached to the rear driver’s side tire of Mark’s car.  I don’t remember what kind of car it was.

On our way up the hill we had pounded on the doors of some of our fellow Seavers residents (these were pre-cell phone days) and had gathered more people with us, so by the time we gathered around the car, we had a group of fifteen or so riled up college boys, all mad at the system and rallying behind Mark.  We stood in a semi-circle around the car, shouting obscenities and slogans in the general direction of the campus police station.  It was hot and we were starting to sweat and I know personally I was very thirsty.  Suddenly somebody said something amazing:

Let’s take it off!

It had certainly never occurred to me and probably none of us there that such a thing might be possible.  This was an apparatus employed by the authorities, the very point of which was that it was not removable.  That was the singular reason for its existence.  But once it was said aloud it seemed oddly inevitable that we would at least make the attempt to remove it.

Before there could be any discussion on the topic, half of the guys assembled (yes, they were all males) darted off in the direction of their apartments to locate some tools with which to undo the authority’s handiwork.  I did not have tools but I ran to my apartment with a few of my roommates so I could get an ice cold Dr. Pepper out of the fridge.  I was so thirsty!

When we reconvened at the car a few minutes later, the more mechanically-inclined of the group (which did not include me) huddled by the tire.  It was an exciting venture, but not one I expected to succeed.  You couldn’t REMOVE A BOOT, everyone knew that, but it was nice to be out of the apartment in the sunshine with a Dr. Pepper and engaged in some sort of mission against some sort of invisible foe.

Ten minutes passed, twenty minutes.  Some of the less-interested guys wandered off, went back to their Super Nintendos.  Every now and then I would poke my head into the work area by the tire–there was lots of futzing with screwdrivers and pliers.  It just didn’t seem plausible.

But then suddenly I heard a gasp, then a clanging sound, and then a whoop.  Improbably and amazingly, Mark stood up with the boot in his hands, then held it above his head.  The bright orange of the object somehow seemed out of place with the scene, one of youth triumphing over authoritarian evil, but this color swinging around over Mark’s head seemed to indicate an innocence, a folly.  Mark released a barbaric yawp, a howl that somehow included the words screw and parking authority all in the same syllable.

Mark started jogging with the boot still above his head, much like an Olympic athlete circles the stadium displaying their national flag.  We trotted behind him, feeling victorious by proxy, probably imagining all the other Seavers residents were somehow looking out of their windows at that moment, cheering us on, telling us we had won for them, too!

We ran all the way around the Seavers building once, then stopped back at Mark’s car.  The momentary thrill of the victory was subsiding.  Mark stood holding the boot at this side, and we were silent.  We all looked at each other as a wave of realization slowly came over the group, the true reality of the moment and the truth of life within any tightly-governed environment.  I was the first one to say it out loud.

We have to put it back on.

Everything All At Once

Where you look for meaning, you will find it.  Where you look for symbols, you will find them.  If you dig deeper, more will come.  Look.  Look.

 

 

Every college has it’s “famous” apartment complexes which reside just off of campus, where Freshmen and Sophomores who are stuck in the dorms go to party.  At Shippensburg University, there are the Big Three: Bard, Chateau (I know, right?), and College Park apartments.  College Park is (or at least was) the most famous of these, as it sits right on the edge of campus, separated from University property by a mere 15 or so feet and an 8-foot-high chain-link fence.  It was into this famous apartment complex (with which I already had a rich history as a visitor) that I moved, following the house on Orange Street, with two of my buddies I had befriended while living in the dorms at Naugle Hall.

These weren’t bad apartments, nor were they great.  Fairly standard, three-room, one bath apartments with full kitchens.  Standard, flat-paint white walls, a blue-green loop carpet, ten-foot high ceilings.  The designers had taken great care to make each room have a bit of “shape” beyond a mere four-cornered room.  For instance, our living room was slightly “L-Shaped”, while my bedroom (which I shared with the other single roommate; the roommate with the girlfriend got his own room, which we all found to be fair) was not really a shape as much as it was a 6-cornered room.

I smoked in this apartment, though I was the only smoker who lived there.  We all drank there (we were all 21, and off-campus), although certainly I drank much more than them.  We listened to loud music all the time, watched great movies over and over (it was here that I discovered Magnolia; thank you Rob!), we played golf with Wiffle golf balls. We watched on CNN Headline News with apprehension and beers in our hands as George W. Bush got elected for the first time. I listened to live Pearl Jam bootlegs while playing air guitar on golf clubs for hours on end, while one roommate was playing computer games (or the Hollywood Stock Exchange online…feel like a real geek? Check out http://www.HSX.com) while the other did homework on one of our two horrible, horrible couches.  I have no idea whose couches they were.

The kitchen was, of course, a wretched disaster, as all male (and most female) college kitchens tend to be.  Dishes would pile up and just sit there, until the stench and the visual evidence of vile mold would drive somebody to wash them.  The refrigerator had everything we had decided to use on a regular basis pushed up front, while unwanted foodstuff got pushed to the back, gestating for months until, once again, the tell-tale signs of mold forced someone to do something about it.  And I have never seen anyone use a toaster oven as much as one of my roommates did; frankly, until I lived there, I had suspected toaster ovens were a myth.

These were most certainly my “wacky college days”, the kind of time I had always hoped to have in college which hadn’t materialized until now.  Nevermind that most of the time at this apartment I was more depressed than ever, and more debauched than ever (Henry Miller would blush…really), but at the same time, there was more lighthearted goofiness and exploration of our adulthood/childhood bridge than I had experienced yet.  I often slept on the couch in the living room, and this gave me great opportunities to fuck with the other guys as they slept in the bedrooms.  I was a big fan of finding new and inventive ways to make it impossible for them to open their doors in the morning.  Once I even upended both couched and put them both (standing on end) in front of Rob’s bedroom door (he was the one with his own bedroom), and then I went and slept on my bed.

It was also the only place I ever lived where we had our own beer pong table, which made me finally feel ‘college’.

One day, about halfway through our living adventure there, we got a call from the front office.  Some students who were interested in renting an apartment there next year would like to walk through one to see what they are like on the inside.  Could they walk through ours the next morning?  Sure, we said, and that was that.

Now, our apartment was not disgusting on the whole.  If it had been just me living there, it would have been, but my two roomies were not filthy. They were not clean, neat-freaks either, just standard guys who didn’t want to live in squalor.  We balanced each other out in a fairly democratic way; there were never fights about cleanliness, because there was not a huge gulf between our sensibilities, but there was a large enough difference to keep the apartment in a sort of “cluttered but not gross” stasis.  So it didn’t occur to us (as it most certainly would occur to me now) to clean the apartment for such a visit.

Late that night, the three of us were spending some leisurely hours watching television, sprawled out between our two couches and one obscenely large chair.  At some point, I said something like this:

We should do something that’ll really fuck with those people tomorrow morning.

 

The roommates agreed, but wondered what I had in mind.

We should, like, build a tower of stuff from the floor to the ceiling, right in the middle of the living room.

 

This intrigued them, and in fact, in my memory of the event, one of them was off his chair looking for stuff the moment the words were out of my mouth.

At first, we pulled the coffee table into the center of the room, with the intention of building from that as a sort of head start.  But after some deliberation we decided that building off the table would take away some of the effect.  We wanted the people (hopefully prissy Sorority chicks) to walk into this apartment and be greeted by a complete, narrow, impossible-looking tower of everyday items reaching from the floor to the ceiling…and we wanted it touching the ceiling.

So we started building on the floor.  First, a wall calendar to level out the carpet.  Then, on top of that, our largest text books.  The text books alone got us quite a bit of height, and a sturdy base, as well.

It’s difficult to remember what all we made the tower out of.  I know there were some empty two-liters in there, as well as empty half-gallons of White Tavern gin (what I almost exclusively drank) which gave the tower quite a sad but rebellious look.  There were smaller books in the middle, some cups and drinking glasses, some boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and probably canisters of shaving cream and sticks of deodorant.  The main thing you need to know is that this tower should have been impossible.  When you looked at it, you really could not believe it was standing, or that is wasn’t glued together or didn’t have some wire running through the hollowed-out materials. And it really hadn’t been that difficult.  Things just seemed to keep fitting into one another and holding perfectly.  We only had one or two setbacks, and a few other moments where the tower teetered on the edge of collapse and then righted itself.  It couldn’t have taken more than an hour to get within 2 or 3 inches of the ceiling.  Then, however, we had a problem.

We wanted to tower to touch the ceiling, but to just touch it. We weren’t interested in fashioning a drinking straw to the top that would touch the ceiling and then bend and have an extra 3 inches dangling there.  We wanted it to be perfect, for the tower to be the exact height of the room from floor-to-ceiling.  And we tore our apartment apart looking for just the right thing.  We even measured the gap and then started measuring things, trying to find something that was exactly 2 and ¾ inches (or whatever it was).  We finally found what we needed in the form of a disposable Morton’s Pepper shaker, which had been hiding in the back of a cupboard.  It slid neatly into place (I was not able to participate in the final leg of construction, as, even standing on the chair, I was not tall enough, so I had to participate from the ground) and our tower was finished.

It was an absolute marvel, and we were rightly impressed.  We watched TV a bit longer, with what seemed to now be a fourth person in the room, this presence that was watching over everything.  We went to bed that night giddy in the knowledge that our tower would not be a secret for long; in fact, strangers would soon see it, which is probably the most satisfying knowledge anyone can have about a work of art they have created.

I awoke briefly to the sounds of people in the apartment the next morning.  I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but they were in fact girls.  We’ll never know if they were fully astonished, but I know they saw it.

If you dig deeper and look harder you can see everything all at once.

Hoffman Film Fest, Day Four

During my college years, there were a few movies that we just watched over and over and over.  Some we watched hundreds of times. When I say “we” I refer to a changing cast of characters, different roommates and friends and acquaintances who maybe only crossed paths with me for a few months, or maybe, like Paul, were there for most of the college years.  With Paul, we had two or three movies we watched endlessly: “Friday” and “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”, and to a lesser extent, “The Borrowers”.  With other groups or roommates, the movies were different.  I spent countless hours getting wasted while watching “A River Runs Through It” with one set of roommates (things don’t always make sense in college), and a different roommate and I watched the Star Wars trilogy on a virtual repeat for an entire semester.  Another film I watched at least 50 times sometime in my sophomore years was “Scent of a Woman”, which was probably my first exposure to Philip Seymour Hoffman, although I didn’t know it at the time.

It’s not a huge role for him.  He plays the asshole friend.  I didn’t even know he was in it until a few years after I became a big fan of his, and I went back to watch it again and there he was.  It was a very formative time for me, as far as my movie tastes went.  Who watches “A River Runs Through It” and “Scent of a Woman” while getting wasted?  We did.  I think we were getting used to the fact that we might like serious stuff, that we might be into grown-up movies.  But we were college boys.  We liked to party.  The endings of these movies were like rumors to me, barely-remembered dreams.  I was always blackout drunk by the ends, so it wasn’t until I finally stopped drinking that I can rightly say I enjoyed them all the way through.

There isn’t a great clip of Phil in this movie that I can embed on my blog, but you can see probably his best moment in the movie by clicking here.

My 60th Favorite Song of All-Time

Click here to see all previous entries.

…and my 60th favorite song of all-time is:

“Cumbersome” by Seven Mary Three

Slightly prior to my life-changing introduction to Pearl Jam, I was introduced to 7m3 my freshman year in college.  And their signature song, “Cumbersome”, while far from their best, is undeniably powerful, and no conversation about the band can ignore the song’s influence.  Below you’ll find a link to the original, official video, and then an embedded live version that is an example of how they play the song nowadays.

Watch the original video on YouTube by clicking here.

 

 

My Friend Paul

My homeslice Paul and I just had a public tiff on my blog.  Which sucks, because there aren’t many people in this life more important to me than Paul is, so I thought maybe I’d write a blog about our friendship.  Although it should be noted that we do have a nice history of being little bitches to each other and arguing about stupid shit, but that was mostly over a decade ago, while we were cooking together at the same restaurant, probably sleep-deprived and hung-over, but still.  We fight.

I’m sure I knew who Paul was before he knew who I was.  Why?  Because he played football for my high school.  He was a year ahead of me, and we weren’t within light years of each other’s social groups.  I wasn’t extremely aware of him, but I was aware of him.  Years later, I’d frequently have dreams that I’d been transported back to high school (with all of my intervening memories and experiences intact) and I’d seek out Paul, who, when I found him, had also been transported with his memory intact.  And so there we were, in high school, finally knowing each other.  They were weird dreams.

In the months following high school, I became a regular at the restaurant Paul worked at.  I frequented it late at night with my friend Jeremy and his girlfriend Cory (who I would later coup d-etat away from him); Jeremy had known Paul in high school, so Paul would come visit our table.  I remember being suspicious, because Jeremy had been the star of the soccer team, and here was this Paul guy, also an athlete.  And Cory, although she didn’t attend our high school, was the captain of her cheerleading squad.  I suspected I might soon find myself on the outside.  I know you’ve all seen pictures of me in wrestling or baseball uniforms, but I assure you, I was no athlete.

Fate is a fickle broad.  Before I knew what was happening, suddenly, I worked at that restaurant, too, and before long, I was a cook there, too, and before long, I was working overnights in the kitchen with Paul, too.  And (long story short here) we ended up going to the same college and being roommates and having the same group of college friends.  Paul and I had quite rapidly become insperable, the kind of friends that when you show up somewhere alone, people always ask you where the other one is;  although how that sort of thing happens is beyond me.  All these years later, it just seems natural that Paul and I are hetero-lifemates, but back then, it didn’t seem so simple.  Paul and I are quite different men (as good friends often are).  We share some simliar interests, but actually have more differences than similarities.  And not just the surface items like, he’s into sports and I’m not, or I’m into poetry and he’s not, as these differences are what can make a friendship keep ticking over the years (the male friends I do have whose interests most align with mine, I mostly don’t care for all that much, and I just keep them around because I might need them some day…for what, I have no idea).  But Paul and I’s differences seemed a bit deeper than that to me.  Mostly, he was a good soul and I was a bad one.

Now, he’ll probably want to argue with that, and he certainly could make a case for it.  After all, we were damn young, and drunk and tired pretty much ceaselessly, and in college, and—dare I say it—completely captivating to the opposite gender.  Neither of us were perfect young men.  But in Paul, one could see the seed of a quality adult, and a man who could discern right from wrong (even if he still sometimes chose to ignore that distinction), and how to be honest, and forthright, and helpful.

I, on the other hand, was a total shit.  It was probably obvious fairly early on that, while a whole bunch of us were partying constantly, I was the only one who couldn’t have stopped if I tried.  And no matter what you believe about how much I am to blame for that addiction, the fact is that being a drunk is not often accompanied by positive personality traits.  All those positive traits I listed above for Paul, think of their opposites, and apply them to the me of back then.

But somehow, we fit together.  We picked up some company on the way (“Nature Boy” Chris Davey, Burke “Testudo” Bowen, Heidi “Heidi” Dagen, “Mello” Cory Kelso, “Sultry” Joel Holtry, and quite a few others) and within a year of meeting Paul, I suddenly had a brand new group of friends and a new lifestyle, the old high school chums all-but forgotten.  And this was just in time, of course, for my descent into serious alcoholic oblivion.

There are lots of people to thank for how they handled my alcoholism and for what they did to help me, but as far as my friends go, nobody can really get more credit than Paul, a fact I’ve never really told him (fuck!  I’m crying now!).  Paul never made me feel like I was a bad person because I was unable to stop drinking.  He always seemed to understand that it was like any other addiction; for instance, his own reliance on cigarettes.  Now, he never said that to me, but his actions and the way he treated me suggest he thought that way.  He never told me I needed to stop, or slow down (that might sound reckless to you, but it’s my philosophy that “intevention” methodologies are counteractive.  Making somebody feel like shit never chased an addiction out of their skin, a philosophy my parents also seemed to share, which is another big reason I think I’m alive today);  when I would, on rare occasions, talk to him about my addiction and my fear relating to it (being in the grip of an addiction to a mind-altering substance is absolutely terrifying), he was understanding and helpful, never demeaning or judgmental, but forthright and honest in ways that showed a maturity and understanding that I’m not sure I could master even now, at age 34.

I still remember the day I decided—firmly, absolutely—that I could get sober, and that I would go to rehab and attempt to live the rest of my life and not die ASAP. I was at the apartment of Paul and his girlfriend at the time, Shelley.  I was drinking, but I wasn’t sad, I was just talking to them about being addicted, and how much it sucked.  I’ll never be sure which one of them said it first, but someone said, “Why don’t you just go to rehab?”, and they said it so…normally.  Like it was just something you could do, if you wanted.  Now, obviously the time was right, and there were plenty of other factors and people that contributed to that moment in time, but I said, “OK.  I’m going to!”  And I got the phone book and called a rehab and reserved a bed, that very afternoon, and then called my mom and dad (by then, that was two seperate phone calls) and told them “I’m going to rehab“.  It would be close to a year by the time I celebrated my final sobriety date of April 3rd, but that afternoon in Paul’s apartment stands out as the beginning of the beginning.  And he’s been so beautifully understanding and intuitive in regards to my sobriety.  He was my first friend to order an alcoholic beverage when out to dinner with me;  it was time, I was OK with it, and he just knew.  He knew that at that point I’d prefer him to do what he’d normally do.  It was more important to me that I not feel like the freak.  He was the first friend of mine who seemed to understand that I hadn’t really changed; sure, I had always been known as the guy who drinks all the time, but the core me was the same and now more me than before; the diseased filter had simply been removed.  Many friends felt the need to treat me, for a few years, like a kid who had just barely recovered from Leukemia.  Paul seemed to know that was unnecessary, and just kept treating me like the same guy from before, only without a drink in my hand.

I would love (really, I would) to just keep writing and writing and tell tons of little stories from our lives together.  Paul and I have lots of great stories.  But maybe I’ll just hit some highlights (and maybe there will be more blogs like this in the future…I feel as though I could write a book.  Tonight.  In two hours.  But anyway, the highlights):

—Paul and I share an intense love for two bands: Seven Mary Three and Hey Rosetta!  And these loves mark two distinct eras in our lives: college (7m3) and now (HR).  In an intereting twist, the first TWO times I saw both these bands, it was Paul and I together (along with others).  And these were amazing experiences that have shaped my idea of how concert-going should feel: like you are touching the hand of god.  It rarely is that good, but it is an ideal to strive for.  In many other ways, Paul and I’s musical tastes diverge, but they align where it counts. (hey Paul…the trip to see 7m3 in York…remember D’Marco Farr?  And please always remember, I called the opener in DC (“Peel”), and also, remember that fancy restaurant you picked for us to eat at in Ithaca, NY, the night we saw Hey Rosetta!?  That night was the beginning of my ongoing love affair with the Americano.  But I now drink them iced.)

–The Chair of Good and Evil.  Paul and I found a horrid, ratty, falling-apart recliner by a dumpster when we lived in college.  For reasons unbeknownst to us, we took it into our dorm room.  It really was a horrible chair.  It’s existence to us was more of a joke than anything else.  We wrote all over it in magic marker.  Quotes from movies, things we said all the time, lines from 7m3 songs (“A little motivation goes a long way down, down, down.”)  I somehow got the chair to my dad’s house for a year or two after college, but I’m sure it’s long gone by now.

–Remember that dorm room I mentioned? Yeah, we got kicked out of it.

–“Circus Midgets Ate My Balls”.  That’s all I’m saying about that.

–Movies we watched dozens or even hundreds of times together, even if they weren’t that good:  “Friday”, “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation”, “The Borrowers“, “Mallrats”.

–The first time I visted Paul after I got sober and moved to New Jersey, we played golf and I beat him.  Which is the only time I can remember beating him at anything other than MarioKart.  So I bring it up here again, even 8 years later.  The gloating continues.

–I had the disctinct pleasure of giving the toast at Paul’s wedding to his fantastic wife, Liz.  I have never felt more honored in my life, and that honor continues to this day.

–Paul is a big Baltimore Orioles fan, so for his “bachelor party”, fellow Paul bud “Mello” Cory Kelso and I took him to an Orioles game, making the odd fact true: the last major league baseball game I attended was a Baltimore Orioles game.

–Mr. Turnpike, Nature Boy, and the Wise Guy (Man) in the Back Seat

–Ham on Both Ends

–Aint got me on tape.

I love you, Paul.  You continue to be the model for the type of man I want to be.  Thank you for being part of my life (and helping to save it).

L-R, Paul, Me, Davey (code names: Mr. Turnpike, Wise Guy in the Back Seat, Nature Boy)

Davey, me, and Paul, the first time we ever saw Hey Rosetta!, in Ithaca, NY.

Picture of Paul on the day I beat him at golf. He sucked that day.

2011 Wasn’t Real

Time is of great concern to me.  It always has been.  The movement of it, the steady march of it.  The relentlessness of it.  I don’t think I fear death greatly; not more than is normal.  I don’t think I fear getting old; not more than is normal.  Nor is it a great desire to “live in the past”; I love the present and the future.  But it is a kind of mournfulness for the past; for moments passed; for selves I once was and other people once were.  An acknowledgement—however sideways-glanced and barely-thought about—of the frivolity of crafting a life if it all ends up in memories and tall tales told amongst friends in once-a-year get-back-togethers in Applebee’s.  Here is a picture of me as a little boy at the beach:

I’m a happy man but thinking about time makes me sad.  Happy people can get sad, sometimes, when they think about the right things.  I miss things.  I regret things.  There are things I would do different and things I would hold on to.  You should have these things, too.  Life is not so simple for it to be otherwise.

I’ve written lots of poems about time over the years, but this one is my favorite.  I wrote it in 2003:

Bother With Hours

Things which slowly trickle down
like snow, taxes, or a frown
arrive in fragments of desire
like matches held up to a fire.

This was almost evident
in the way the hours went
as you sat there, humming softly,
fanning flies and drinking coffee.

Why bother with hours, I saw you thinking,
in this day of moments, sinking?
If seconds piling aren’t enough
the minutes stack up like a bluff.

And then you stood, and blinked your eyes.
Imagine the size of my surprise!
That moment trickled by as well
and landed where the others fell.

Here is a picture of me, just a few days after finally getting sober for good, at my mother’s house in New Jersey, petting my favorite cat, Angel.  She’s dead now.

It’s this “new year’s” balderdash that’s got me so honed in on time.  Every year new year’s rolls around and people talk about it like it means something, and every year I just understand it less and less.  Time always moves for me.  I’m always marking new beginnings, sudden endings, tiny whirlpools and eddys of time, memory, sensation.  Existence for me glides through pockets of variation, like a plane through turbulence and smooth air.  I can’t imagine something more meaningless toward my greater understanding of life than a calendar date.  But I also rarely talk about “days”.  You will be hard pressed to hear me say “I had a bad day”; I will tell you a bad event just happened to me (if I tell you about it at all).  The rising and setting of the sun, the ticking off of dates in a month, are not the markers that I live within.

This is my dad teaching me how to ride a bike:

When I first got serious about writing poetry, for a short while, I thought I might be a fancy poet.  It turns out it’s too difficult to be a fancy poet, but I got away with a few good ones while I was at it.  Here is a fancy one I wrote about “time” that I think is brilliant but nobody else has ever seemed to care for.

Ebbing

The line passively rocks,
the weight of warm wool socks
freshly laundered.  Now dry.
I suddenly ask why
I can picture the wool
in the washer, still full.

You don’t get it, do you?  Don’t you hate when you’re the only one who *gets* your own stuff?  Does that happen to everyone, or just bad fancy poets?  When do you think we stop being the people we thought we were going to be?  Of course there’s nothing wrong with not ending up the way you envisioned—frankly I’m glad I’m not currently sitting in my university office between classes and writing my academic manuscript about some horrid Greek epic poem—but the way we change is absolutely fascinating.  Slowly, steadily, influenced by who-knows-how-many waxing and waning forces.  My friends and family, the books I read, the TV shows blaring in the background that I only think I’m ignoring, the weather outside, the paint on the wall.  Over the long, slow crawl of time, they all have their way.  How much is me, and how much is them?  Where did the old me go?

As far as I’m aware, the only surviving picture of me actually drinking from the first few years of my “addictive drinking”.  Aged approximately 22.

I love who I am now, but I mourn the fact that today’s version of me will someday pass, as well.  And I don’t mean death (although that, too), but just change, and that persistent drummer of time and the cosmic forces of influence, will drag me, almost without me noticing, into being a completely new and different man.  I will no doubt be very happy being that new man, but I will look back with a sad fondness on the loss of this current version of me.  I may even look back on this blog entry and think, What a fool he was.  And I’ll probably be right.  It is my experience that New-Version Seth is almost always smarter than Old-Version Seth.

Every 13 year old has fake vogue fights with their sister.

Portrait

Nature has a slow divinity.
Its blight and bounty bend
hushed with eons;
a single leaf swoops slowly
to join the dawdling portrait
beneath the blooming pews.

Nobody’s ever mentioned that poem to me, either.  I also wrote that one in 2003.  It is very fancy.  Now that is a poem that can’t get it’s mind off of “time”.  If you don’t mind me saying so, it’s really quite amazing.

One wonders how others view them after we are gone from their lives.  What has the passage of time done to their perception of me?  How do they remember the time that our lives intersected?

My first formal dance, with my first girlfriend.  I cut her out, as it is considered bad form to post pictures of others on the internet, especially old ones like this, without asking.  And I could ask her, but who knows how she thinks about me now?

Certainly there is probably a disconnect between how I view the past and how others who have shared experiences with me view the past.  Perhaps some women that I still love never think about me, and others who I barely recall think of me often.  How important is this to you?  I find I am rarely bothered by the thought that others may view our past unfavorably, or differently than I do.  Although the possibility of being completely forgotten seems to sting.  Has time really rendered me that inconsequential?  Have your husband and children completely erased three glorious summers, or even one sublime 15 minute car ride through sun-drenched countryside?  Where do those shelved moments exist for you, now?  How easily can you reach them, retrieve them, feel something of their ecstasy?  They are still real.  I am not afraid to admit that they are still real.  The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.  All moments are right there, right there, within your grasp.  Are they not?

I’ve Been Asleep For a Long, Long Time
song lyrics by Tim Baker

I’ve been asleep for a long, long time.
Blonde hair to brown, and brown to white.
My mom is buried beside my dad,
but I was asleep for all of that.

I shut my eyes for a moment’s rest,
’cause I get so tired.
But what things transpired while my body slept
and beset my mind?

The schools that we went to have all been closed,
and all of my teachers are dead I suppose.
The songs that we sung have all gone quiet.
What happens below as we sleep at night?

The river’s up, the reeds are caught
halfway across what never was.
The water rose and swept in slow.
When the reeds awoke, they were half below.

I’ve been asleep for a long, long time.

The blog post where I mention everyone I know who already has an existing “tag” on my blog, so I can tag them again and insert a useful or ridiculous link to them.

1.  Oh hi, billhanna.  I see you ‘liked’ goatees on Facebook yesterday.  Our adversarial relationship about facial hair will continue to the grave.  THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

  2.  Anyone who knows Tasha, check out the link, she just got a radical new haircut!  I love it!

3.  I have quite few friends who are talented musicians—one of them is the great Bootney Lee (real name Ryan Straub).  I double-dare you to click on the link and check his music out.

4.  Guess who I’m going to see next month, as the three of us meet up in central New York for a Hey Rosetta! show???  Well that would be none other than my life-long buddies Paul and Davey!  (he’s Chris Davey, but we call him Davey).  This is going to be exceptional as it’s been a few years since we were together, all 3 of us.  And did I mention it’s a Hey Rosetta show???  I still haven’t seen them live–the shows I was supposed to go to awhile back had to be skipped because life is like that.  I am uber pumped for this!

5.  It has been way too long since I tagged my friend Amanda.  I mean that just like it sounds, too. 

6.  You know who rules?  My mom!  She just quit smoking!!! Raise the roof!

7.  I’m still tickled pink about the Doctor Strange drinking glass that Tony Magni gave me as a going away present when I moved to Erie.  Thanks Tony! 

8.  My friend Denise has a very under-appreciated photo blog.  Click to link to check it out!!!  She’s way talented!

9.  The lovely Sarah P. has just had a baby! Huzzah!  She doesn’t have any sort of online presence so I’ve linked to a picture of Big Ben, which is in England, which is where I met her!

10.  My dad is one cool mofo.  What’s my evidence?  Every single day I become more and more like him, and I am most definitely one cool mofo.  Dad, we are some cool dudes!

11.  I tag Ron all  the damn time, I aint saying anything about him!

12.  Big days for my buddy Burke, who has just started going back to school while also remaining a steadfast David Hasselhoff fan.  Kudos, wanker!

13.  I could probably talk about Mary all day, but I’m pretty sure she’d friend-disown me.  She dislikes scrutiny.

14.  My dear, dear friend Michael (that’s a lady named Michael) sent me the most lovely letter in the mail yesterday.  She sure is a freaking great friend!!  It was quite touching, it brought a tear to my eye.  Everyone should have a friend like Michael!

15.  California buddy Kyle is finally off the unemployment and working at a bank!!! Yay Kyle!  Now:  no more excuses for sneaking into movies, you heathen!

16.  My freaking cool-as-shit sister just got a job working at a law firm!  What what!  Dellingers can do anything!!!  Click the link to read her badass blog!

17.  Also in the world of talented musician friends of mine:  Duane, who records under the name DreamlandNoise.  Click the link for just a small sampling of his superb “space funk”.

18.  What to say about my girl Cory? She recently moved back to central PA, like, RIGHT after I left it.  *frown face*  She’s just the shiznit in every way, and is quite a talented artist.  I’ve linked to some of her art but you might not be able to see it if you’re not FB friends with her.  Which would be your loss.

Orange Street, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

It is the narrowest house ever built.  It is comically narrow, as if it were built for a surreal Hollywood production—perhaps the latest David Lynch film.  From the street, it is less than half the width of it’s neighbors on either side; it’s a free-standing townhouse.  It’s white aluminum siding is only white in the clinical sense; years ago it must have become eggshell, and then the ceaseless machinations of weather and time pushed it over the brink all the way into a yellow, sponge-like hue.

The interior is very dark, everywhere.  Dark– almost menacing–wood-paneled walls soak up almost all of the light in the downstairs rooms, and a deep gray carpet takes any light that’s left over.  The kitchen linoleum is the color of shit, a bold, sickened shit, perhaps let out by a man with rectal cancer; it is shit that’s almost blood.  The cabinets are of the darkest oak the builder (re-modeler?)  could find, their swirly grains almost undetectable in the near-midnight of their varnish.  It is dark down here, and not welcoming.

Up the stairs—the narrowest stairs ever—it becomes lighter.  The walls in the stairwell are wood-paneled, but they’ve been painted over in an off-white.  The stairs are steep.  They are too steep.

On the second floor, the walls are a white Formica.  There are three bedrooms and a bathroom, all done in white Formica with brown hardwood floors (again, the color of death shit).  The bedrooms are small, and mine is the smallest.  I have one tiny window that looks directly at a neighbor’s blank wall.  The window had a fan in it the whole time I lived there, anyway.  I don’t have a closet.  This is the most unadorned room I’ll ever live in.  My posters and artwork didn’t make the move from the dorm.  My clothes are all in a basket on the floor, and on piles beside that, as well.  My bed sits in one corner, my television in another.  This room is remarkable mainly because I had a mini-fridge all to myself in my bedroom, an odd childhood dream of mine that would only be realized in this abode.  It turned out to be not as exciting as a 5-year-old had imagined, but handy, at least, for an active alcoholic.

I didn’t know the guys I lived with, and even now, I could not tell you their names, and barely what they looked like.  The previous school year had been ending and I was out of a place to live (a lot of college students are scrambling for places to live at the end of the year) and some guy I vaguely knew through someone else was scrambling to find a roommate.  I did what I had to do.  When I moved in to the house on Orange Street, I was beginning the heaviest drinking phase of my life, my parents had just gotten divorced, I was still reeling from the loss of Her, and I was secretly not going to classes.  I was beginning the only actual ‘depression’ of my life.  Hence, I did not like the house on Orange Street.

I remember very little.  I didn’t live there long, and most of my time was spent in my room, laying on my bed, trying not to kill myself.  I remember, probably, the smell more than anything.  The whole house was musty, pleasingly moldy, like a drawer with slightly old bananas in a brown paper bag.  I remember the sound of steps on the hardwood floors, sqeezey-echoes, monotonous soft-taps, everywhere the same; there were no floor spots that sounded different, no squeaky stairs or thudding corners.  I remember the pot my mother gave me, in some high hopes that I was becoming an adult (this was the first place I lived with a kitchen) sitting unused, forever, in the high cabinet over the sink.  I wonder who has it, now?

I remember, once, walking downstairs in the middle of the night.  Why? I can’t remember.  I stood in the darkened kitchen, listening to the sounds of the house, the sound of my heart beating, the sound of my brain churning.  Unexpectedly, I opened the door to the basement and went down.

I had only been down there once before, when I first moved in.  I had had to put my dresser down there because it wouldn’t fit up the stairs.  This basement is beyond an ‘unfinished’ basement.  It is a glorified crawl-space, with mud floors, stone walls, cob-webs, the works.  The furnace and water heater are down there, and that’s all it existed for.  That, and to store my dresser.

I stood there, halfdrunk, on the mud floor, with the tiny light of the bare swaying bulb casting moving shadows everywhere.  I didn’t have much time to soak it in, however, because moments after I flicked the light on, a bat flew out from behind the furnace, right past my head.

Of course, it scared the shit out of me, but I didn’t run out of there.  I turned to see where it had gone, but it had disappeared.  I distinctly remember smiling and feeling somehow content.  At the time I didn’t analyze why this should be, why I should feel this way.  Looking back, I suspect it was a comfort to know that something, at least, was alive in this house.

College Park Apartments, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

Where you look for meaning, you will find it.  Where you look for symbols, you will find them.  If you dig deeper, more will come.  Look.  Look.

 

 

Every college has it’s “famous” apartment complexes which reside just off of campus, where Freshmen and Sophomores who are stuck in the dorms go to party.  At Shippensburg University, there are the Big Three: Bard, Chateau (I know, right?), and College Park apartments.  College Park is (or at least was) the most famous of these, as it sits right on the edge of campus, separated from University property by a mere 15 or so feet and an 8-foot-high chain-link fence.  It was into this famous apartment complex (with which I already had a rich history as a visitor) that I moved, following the house on Orange Street, with two of my buddies I had befriended while living in the dorms at Naugle Hall.

These weren’t bad apartments, nor were they great.  Fairly standard, three-room, one bath apartments with full kitchens.  Standard, flat-paint white walls, a blue-green loop carpet, ten-foot high ceilings.  The designers had taken great care to make each room have a bit of “shape” beyond a mere four-cornered room.  For instance, our living room was slightly “L-Shaped”, while my bedroom (which I shared with the other single roommate; the roommate with the girlfriend got his own room, which we all found to be fair) was not really a shape as much as it was a 6-cornered room.

I smoked in this apartment, though I was the only smoker who lived there.  We all drank there (we were all 21, and off-campus), although certainly I drank much more than them.  We listened to loud music all the time, watched great movies over and over (it was here that I discovered Magnolia; thank you Rob!), we played golf with Wiffle golf balls. We watched on CNN Headline News with apprehension and beers in our hands as George W. Bush got elected for the first time. I listened to live Pearl Jam bootlegs while playing air guitar on golf clubs for hours on end, while one roommate was playing computer games (or the Hollywood Stock Exchange online…feel like a real geek? Check out http://www.HSX.com) while the other did homework on one of our two horrible, horrible couches.  I have no idea whose couches they were.

The kitchen was, of course, a wretched disaster, as all male (and most female) college kitchens tend to be.  Dishes would pile up and just sit there, until the stench and the visual evidence of vile mold would drive somebody to wash them.  The refrigerator had everything we had decided to use on a regular basis pushed up front, while unwanted foodstuff got pushed to the back, gestating for months until, once again, the tell-tale signs of mold forced someone to do something about it.  And I have never seen anyone use a toaster oven as much as one of my roommates did; frankly, until I lived there, I had suspected toaster ovens were a myth.

These were most certainly my “wacky college days”, the kind of time I had always hoped to have in college which hadn’t materialized until now.  Nevermind that most of the time at this apartment I was more depressed than ever, and more debauched than ever (Henry Miller would blush…really), but at the same time, there was more lighthearted goofiness and exploration of our adulthood/childhood bridge than I had experienced yet.  I often slept on the couch in the living room, and this gave me great opportunities to fuck with the other guys as they slept in the bedrooms.  I was a big fan of finding new and inventive ways to make it impossible for them to open their doors in the morning.  Once I even upended both couched and put them both (standing on end) in front of Rob’s bedroom door (he was the one with his own bedroom), and then I went and slept on my bed.

It was also the only place I ever lived where we had our own beer pong table, which made me finally feel ‘college’.

One day, about halfway through our living adventure there, we got a call from the front office.  Some students who were interested in renting an apartment there next year would like to walk through one to see what they are like on the inside.  Could they walk through ours the next morning?  Sure, we said, and that was that.

Now, our apartment was not disgusting on the whole.  If it had been just me living there, it would have been, but my two roomies were not filthy. They were not clean, neat-freaks either, just standard guys who didn’t want to live in squalor.  We balanced each other out in a fairly democratic way; there were never fights about cleanliness, because there was not a huge gulf between our sensibilities, but there was a large enough difference to keep the apartment in a sort of “cluttered but not gross” stasis.  So it didn’t occur to us (as it most certainly would occur to me now) to clean the apartment for such a visit.

Late that night, the three of us were spending some leisurely hours watching television, sprawled out between our two couches and one obscenely large chair.  At some point, I said something like this:

We should do something that’ll really fuck with those people tomorrow morning.

 

The roommates agreed, but wondered what I had in mind.

We should, like, build a tower of stuff from the floor to the ceiling, right in the middle of the living room.

 

This intrigued them, and in fact, in my memory of the event, one of them was off his chair looking for stuff the moment the words were out of my mouth.

At first, we pulled the coffee table into the center of the room, with the intention of building from that as a sort of head start.  But after some deliberation we decided that building off the table would take away some of the effect.  We wanted the people (hopefully prissy Sorority chicks) to walk into this apartment and be greeted by a complete, narrow, impossible-looking tower of everyday items reaching from the floor to the ceiling…and we wanted it touching the ceiling.

So we started building on the floor.  First, a wall calendar to level out the carpet.  Then, on top of that, our largest text books.  The text books alone got us quite a bit of height, and a sturdy base, as well. 

It’s difficult to remember what all we made the tower out of.  I know there were some empty two-liters in there, as well as empty half-gallons of White Tavern gin (what I almost exclusively drank) which gave the tower quite a sad but rebellious look.  There were smaller books in the middle, some cups and drinking glasses, some boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and probably canisters of shaving cream and sticks of deodorant.  The main thing you need to know is that this tower should have been impossible.  When you looked at it, you really could not believe it was standing, or that is wasn’t glued together or didn’t have some wire running through the hollowed-out materials. And it really hadn’t been that difficult.  Things just seemed to keep fitting into one another and holding perfectly.  We only had one or two setbacks, and a few other moments where the tower teetered on the edge of collapse and then righted itself.  It couldn’t have taken more than an hour to get within 2 or 3 inches of the ceiling.  Then, however, we had a problem.

We wanted to tower to touch the ceiling, but to just touch it. We weren’t interested in fashioning a drinking straw to the top that would touch the ceiling and then bend and have an extra 3 inches dangling there.  We wanted it to be perfect, for the tower to be the exact height of the room from floor-to-ceiling.  And we tore our apartment apart looking for just the right thing.  We even measured the gap and then started measuring things, trying to find something that was exactly 2 and ¾ inches (or whatever it was).  We finally found what we needed in the form of a disposable Morton’s Pepper shaker, which had been hiding in the back of a cupboard.  It slid neatly into place (I was not able to participate in the final leg of construction, as, even standing on the chair, I was not tall enough, so I had to participate from the ground) and our tower was finished.

It was an absolute marvel, and we were rightly impressed.  We watched TV a bit longer, with what seemed to now be a fourth person in the room, this presence that was watching over everything.  We went to bed that night giddy in the knowledge that our tower would not be a secret for long; in fact, strangers would soon see it, which is probably the most satisfying knowledge anyone can have about a work of art they have created.

I awoke briefly to the sounds of people in the apartment the next morning.  I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but they were in fact girls.  We’ll never know if they were fully astonished, but I know they saw it.

If you dig deeper and look harder you can see everything all at once.

Seavers Apartments, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

Read this.

Seaver’s Hall is the top-of-the-line dorm at Shippensburg University. Each dorm has three rooms (two bedrooms and one common room); six people live in each (three to a bedroom) but the rooms are huge. There is cable TV and air conditioning. You can put multiple couches in the common room. There is a massive walk-in closet in the common room, typically used as a food pantry, but almost big enough to fit another couch in (we used ours for food and guy junk).  The walls are an off-white wallpaper, and the ceiling is a tiled ceiling—in short, it’s kinda like a real apartment.

            I had five great roommates; we were almost like a season of The Real World, we were all so different. Except we were all straight, white males from the Northeast. But other than that we could not have been more different—or more well-suited to one another.

            This particular night that I am thinking of was quite a bad night.  I had endured a rather horrible break-up a few months prior and had not taken it well. I was drinking very heavily. I was writing tons of awful, angry, awful poetry, and I had collected this poetry into a little booklet that I called Ever-Always a Late Dream. Every poem in this collection was about Her, and every poem in it was awful.  I had finally convinced Her to come to my dorm room so I could give Her a copy of it. At least one-quarter of my desire for Her to come over was so my roommates could see how hot She was. The other three-quarters…well, that motivation was probably even uglier.

            I sat on the brown, smelly couch facing the television and got much more drunk than I should have. By the time She got there (around midnight) I was so wasted that I had entered that area where the things you are looking at, the things you are hearing and doing, do not seem real. If you concentrate very hard, you are in decent command of your faculties, but are vaguely unsure of who the people around you are, where you are, and why you are doing what you are doing.  A stage past this is blackout territory; in fact, this stage is often blackout territory.

            So. She arrives. I offer brief introductions to everyone and whisk Her into my bedroom, where I have kept a pristine copy of Ever-Always a Late Dream for Her.  I think I tried to talk to Her briefly about love, or forever, or some drunk whispy bullshit, and when She wasn’t hearing me, I started letting her have it. I was angry as hell with Her. How dare anyone break my heart? I was special!

            Well, I’m sure I had already spent the last two months guilting Her, and She figured (rightly so) that She didn’t deserve it anymore. After all, She was just trying to do what made Her happy, no? How much was She supposed to suffer, simply because I suffered?

            So she stormed out.

            At first, I paced the common room, gently sobbing, unresponsive to the questions and comforts of my numerous roommates. After a few minutes, though, I got angry again, and tried to flee the dorm room to go after Her and make Her feel terrible again. Either that, or make Her kiss me.

            But the roommates stopped me. Shippensburg University is, after all, a dry campus, and you can get in a lot of trouble for being drunk. Which I clearly was.  They spent a good 5 minutes trying to convince me to calm down, but I just got angrier and angrier, and louder and louder. And drunk, angry, and loud is bad even inside the dorm room, because some authority figure is bound to come check things out eventually, and then they’re all gonna get in trouble.

            So, they stuffed me in the closet.  They turned out the light. I’m sure they were thinking I’d just go to sleep or something, but I got even angrier. I got all turned-around and confused. It was pitch black and I couldn’t tell which way the door was or even which way was up or which way was down and I started to howl and claw at the walls I was so angry I couldn’t even remember Her name now I was just angry at everything and god oh so drunk I started throwing the food off the shelves the Slim Jims the Captains Wafers I stubbed my toe kicking the big Igloo cooler it hurt but just for a flaring moment I got angrier still and tore the shelving unit down on myself and howled even louder howled like I was outdoors or on a mountain not stuck in some pitch-black closet I got a full head of steam and ran into the wall hoping it was the door but it wasn’t I couldn’t find the door then somewhere in there I forgot where I was and then a moment later who I was I am not exaggerating this is not the only time this would happen to me and there is nothing more terrifying than being so drunk yet so cognizant that you are aware only that you are drunk at this point I stopped howling and forgot I was angry and became utterly terrified who was I? what was I doing here? why wouldn’t they help me? I knew there was a they somewhere who could help me but didn’t have the smallest clue who they were or where they were it was like being encapsulated in a huge malevolent concrete womb I slid my hands along every wall surface but it was all just smooth cold painted cinder blocks no knobs no windows no magic buttons I began to cry in earnest and wonder if in fact I was dead or in some kind of prison but at the moment I could not picture what prison looked like not even images from TV or that movie Escape From Alcatraz that my mother had helped me buy on VHS when I was ten I could remember that though I could remember my mother helping me buy Escape From Alcatraz from Hills department store but I couldn’t picture my mother I had no idea what she looked like or what her name was so maybe Escape From Alcatraz was all a dream…

When I emerged into the common room the next morning, the front of my pants were covered with piss and there was dried rancid shit in my ass crack.

I sure did love high school and college (selectively recalling only the non-terrible parts, of course), but working with teenagers and college kids for all these years after, I realize I sure am glad I don’t have to do that anymore.  Homework sucks!

Naugle Hall, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

Read this first.

The lights are all off except the lava lamp, which I’ve had burning for days. The remnant smoke from dozens of cigarettes hangs like a wraith throughout the unventilated room.

            The ceiling—which is spackled concrete with waffle-like indents, not unlike you might find in a recording studio—is covered in those glow-in-the-dark plastic stars that are meant for people much younger than 19, but I’ve always been a slow grower. The walls (tan cinder block) are plastered with predictable posters: Rage Against the Machine, Carmen Electra, Albert Einstein.  The precise mixture of a confused young man who’d like to fuck his own angry intelligence.

            There is some kind of carpet, and some kind of bed sheet on the too-small bed, and the too-small bed beside it that is sometimes (but not right now) occupied by a roommate I never knew, and whose name I only sometimes foggily recall.  Between the beds is a lawn chair which faces our television, used mainly for playing video games.

            I used to play video games.

            Currently the first Seven Mary Three album is on the stereo, very quietly, and I am seated at my desk (which is connected to the wall, and is made of white hospital Formica) pounding away on the keys of my electric typewriter (which I was still using embarrassingly recently). Beside the typewriter sits an open, slender volume of W.H. Auden poetry, and I am reading his “O Tell Me the Truth About Love” and trying to somehow mimic it without copying it. I haven’t been writing poetry very long, but I know I am very depressed and lonely, and if I don’t write something magical about her very soon I am going to kill myself.

            It doesn’t work. I keep writing really bad things that sound like a mix of Auden and Seven Mary Three (do not try that) and nothing I write brings Her to my door, or in my bed, or out of my head. In point of fact, writing will never do these things (or, at least, it will do it very rarely), but I am new at it and am expecting it to be…cleansing, therapeutic, transcendent.

            I smoke another cigarette, pace the room, glance out the big window that peers into the Naugle Hall courtyard. There are people down there, smoking, holding hands, hackey sacking.

            I take my pants off and lay down on my bed, quiet, unsure, almost not even there, to commence yet again the only real way I know of seeing her.

& the Click Boom Boom

So I had a really, really amazing time seeing (and, yes, meeting) Emily Wells last night!  My heart is still all sorts of aflutter!

First, although you may percieve my fandom of Ms. Wells as being brand new, allow me to direct you to my 100 favorite bands post from January of this year, where I list “the Emily Wells trio” at #43 (I even linked to a video!).  Of course, this is kinda a cheat—the trio is only a touring band, Emily records as a solo artist, but I really wanted to get her in there!

Anyway, she’s been circling around the periphery of my favorites for a few years now, and has really been climbing over the past year as more and more new songs started to hit YouTube (a new album is coming soon).  Also, I follow her more closely than a lot of artists because her Facebook is actually HER, and she responds to comments and actually interacts with you.

In short, I am totally in love with her, which is very rare for me.  I’m not the kind of guy who goes gaga for women he hasn’t met and/or famous women.  But Ms. Wells is just amazingly talented, adorable, cool as shit, and has a huuuuuuge sex appeal.  So when I saw she was coming to within a few hours of me, I jumped at the chance to see her live.

The show was at an on-campus “coffee shop” at Oberlin College.  It was a nice drive there–it took me right through downtown Cleveland.  I’ve been to Cleveland before but not for many years, and never sober or by myself, so it was a cool experience.  Then I arrived at the coffee shop, called The Cat in the Cream.  The doors were locked, as I could hear Emily and her trio still soundchecking inside (I arrived at 7, show was slated for 8:30).  What I found interesting was not just a lack of anyone else milling about waiting for the doors, but the generally deserted nature of the campus in general.  After wandering around for awhile, I overheard some students mentioning that this was the first Friday evening since classes started; no one was really into hanging around campus, and despite Oberlin’s reputation as a hip arts and music school, Emily Wells just might not be famous enough yet to keep kids from going to off-campus keg parties.

So around 7:45 I went back to the Cat in the Cream.  I could still hear Emily soundchecking, but I tried the door anyway, and it opened.  Inside was a tiny coffee shop with about 20 tables and a stage that was clearly built for singer-songwriter open mic nights.  The trio was soundchecking a song I’d never heard, but I didn’t look at them right away–for some reason I was “playing it cool”.  I walked to the counter and bought a coffee (they didn’t have espresso drinks; some coffee shop!), walked to a table in the front, center stage, and experienced my first ever bout of star-struckness at a female (I’ve been star-struck a few times at male artists, but this female thing was very very new to me).

The first thing I noticed was she was short; at least as short as me if not shorter.  This rules.  And she is just so, SO adorable.  No pics or videos properly convey her level of adorablness.  Here is some video I took of her talking to the sound guy during the soundcheck:

At this point, it was just myself and 5 other people in the coffee shop.  The trio ended their soundcheck and left.  The lights went down as we waited about 20 minutes for the show to start.  During those 20 minutes, the number of attendees swelled from 5 to approximately 30–most of them on a few couches in the back.  As bad as I feel for artists playing to half-empty rooms, this is even more cool for me, as I get more eye-contact time from the artists.

The trio came in and opened with a song I’ve never heard (Emily kept telling us they were playing mostly new stuff, and she was right.  I only knew about 5 of the probably 15 songs they played, but it was all really incredible).  Anyway, here is video I took of the show opening:

In all seriousness, I am not just in love with Emily’s personality and looks.  Her music is fucking incredible, and I honestly can’t imagine a more talented single musician I’ve ever seen live.  What she does with looping and multi-instrumental songs is beyond anything you’ve ever seen.  If she were a man, I’d be just as into him.  This is addictive music that takes a few listens to completely fall in love with.  The fact that I think her and I are perfectly matched as a couple only adds to the allure.  :)   Here is some video I took of some between-song banter of hers:

As I said, most of the songs were new but incredible, but they did play the best of the already established songs, all of which I was way too into to spend any time shooting video.  Of the “symphonies”, they played 1, 2 and 6, and they were OUT OF THIS WORLD.  Especially notable was “Symphony 2: The Click Boom Boom”, which was one of the most satisfying live experiences I’ve ever witnessed.  There appears to only be one video in all of YouTube-land of this song being performed live, and the quality os not great, but here it is (NOT from the show I was at):

So, after the show, most everybody just filed out of the coffee shop.  After seeing a truly incredibly performance from an incredible woman, my usual fearlessness had been replaced by a tiny amount of nervousness, but I did approach Emily as she was packing her stuff up.  “Emily!”  I said, and she looked up from the wires she was…doing something with.  “Great show!”  I extended my hand and shook hers, which was miraculously smaller than mine!  “Thanks for all the great music.”  She smiled and said I was welcome, and thanked me for coming.  I wanted to gush more and perhaps ask for a picture with her, but I was not getting a “say more” vibe.  I also wasn’t getting a “leave me alone” vibe, but I was pretty content with the interaction I’d gotten.  I also told the drummer, who was right next to her, that he was amazing (he was, too).

After meeting 7 Mary 3 last year, and now the incredible Ms. Wells, I am fully addicted to meeting and thanking my favorite musicians.  And it’s that thanking part that’s key; I have rarely been as happy in my life as I am when I get to tell the artists who bring me joy how important that is to me.

Emily, if you read this: marry me?

My 15 Minutes?

How many minutes of fame does all this stuff add up to?

(before you call me an arrogant idiot…this is meant quite ironically.  Though it is all true.)

1.  My mother was photographed riding a bicycle with a very young me in a basket on the front of the bike, and my sister behind her on the bike.  This photograph appeared in a parenting magazine in the early 80s.

2.  Around age 14, I was on the local news, cheering at a game of Harrisburg’s minor league soccer team.  It was a close-up.

3.  I had a letter printed in an issue of the short-lived Marvel comic book DOOM 2099.

4.  I appeared on the cover of my company’s newsletter, The Smile, beside the company president.  We were both wearing sombreros.

5.  Although miniscule, my picture has appeared in Entertainment Weekly.

6.  An issue of the Shippensburg University literary magazine was dedicated to me.

7.  After a “multi-cultural” day at my high school, my photo appeared in the Carlisle Sentinel. I was once again wearing a sombrero.  I was eating tacos.  It was a close-up.

8.  I once sold a dozen cookies to Earl David Reed, host of 105.7 the X’s “morning zoo” show here in Harrisburg.

9.  In college, I was on a terrible, terrible radio show called “The Worst Show in Radio”.  Really, that’s what we called it.  It was on one day a week at 3am.

10.  My dad was the announcer and then coach of the Newville Cardinals for a few years.  That aint nothing to sneeze at.

What do you think?  I’m saying I’ve got maybe 4 minutes in.

A Couple Funny Videos:

CAN YOU BELIEVE THIS SNUGGIE COMMERCIAL?!?!?

Violent Memories

1.

The first I remember it was with a groundhog. We were young but I don’t know how young; younger than pubics but older than diapers.

We were riding our bikes in a field. We often did that, although it wasn’t easy, or altogether fun, either. But still we did it, and partly because you will find or stumble across things on a bicycle in a field that you normally wouldn’t. This particular day (which wasn’t rainy, but wasn’t especially sunny) we found a sick groundhog. We knew it was sick because it didn’t run from us as we approached it. In fact, it didn’t move away from us at all, but instead sat looking directly at us. It was huge, larger than the groundhogs you would see scampering across the road, under cars. Larger perhaps by twice as much. It looked at us with sad brown eyes, shifting it’s weight–not nervously, but in boredom or perhaps general frustration–knowing it was going to die. I don’t think it knew we were going to kill it.

Young boys move and perform tasks in an almost wordless, symbiotic fashion. All at once they know the plan, whether they all like the plan or not. And whether they like the plan or not, it makes sense to them.

That groundhog looked at us with sad brown dying eyes and we all knew we were going to kill it long before whatever terrible field disease killed it; the groundhog would feel us, and by close association, the world would feel us. And we knew, allatonce, that we were going to do it with a large rock.

Caleb is the one that found the rock. Large enough to do the deed but not so heavy that it would be difficult to heft. I remember thinking it was shaped like a Clipper Ship.

He didn’t hesistate. I would have hesitated, but he didn’t hesitate. One moment, he was holding it high above his head, silhoutted against the day’s dying light, like a stone tablet held out for God to write on; the next moment, a wet thud.

The groundhog gushed out of it’s own asshole, like a stepped-on ketchup packet. It’s innards sprayed backwards, onto Jared’s shoes and pant legs and Adam’s kickstand. We were schooled enough to recognize the intestines and maybe the stomach. The rest looked like an exotic bean soup.

There was never a doubt in any of our minds that that was what had to be done.

2.

My sister was in the bowling alley. I’m not sure what I was doing there. I was certainly too young to be there on my own, and my sister was too old to have me tagging along. Perhaps I was over at the little league field, which was directly adjacent to the bowling alley. I was in front of the building, on the sidewalk, which is always a notable sidewalk in my memory because it’s curb was only half an inch high. It seemed flush with the parking lot, which seemed a gross anamoly to my childhood mind.

Of a sudden, Sister was outside the bowling alley and on the sidewalk, arm’s length from me. Just as suddenly, an older girl my sister’s age was there too, and they were yelling at each other. They stood close, like a baseball coach arguing with an umpire, their 80s bangs commingling like Velcro rolling pins. The other girl called my sister a bitch. This wasn’t the first time I’d heard the word, but it was the first time I’d heard anyone I knew called one. I was scared by that, beyond reason.

3.

BethAnn and I always used to stand in front of the auditorium doors before we had to part ways and go to 6th Period. We’d hold hands and talk about our friends. On this day, Joe, a mutual friend, sidled over to us and began making conversation. I can’t remember what we talked about. Joe wasn’t the type of guy I identified with, but he was the type of guy that BethAnn should have been dating. She was a farm girl, and he was the type of guy farm girls dated. Which meant two things: I didn’t speak his language, and he was a threat.

In those days I responded to male threats in this way: I pretended I was oblivious to it.

As BethAnn and I were talking to Joe, we were holding hands. Unexpectedly, Joe hugged BethAnn and swatted my hand out of hers. Here is how I responded to things like that in those days: I laughed. Ha ha Joe, very funny. He released BethAnn and laughed as well, and the conversation continued as normal. BethAnn and I re-clasped hands. Seconds later, Joe repeated his odd cut-in move. I laughed again, but less this time. He released BethAnn and laughed again, but also less than before. He turned and directly faced me, stared at me with a confrontational glare that I was not used to.

And then he punched me in the face.

I had never been punched in the face. It took a moment to realize what had happened. In the quick moments following the impact, I experienced the most intense confusion of my life, having, at first, no idea just what had happened; and once it dawned on me what had happened, I was still more confused by why it had happened.

It came as quite a surprise to me that the punch barely moved me, even though Joe was a big guy. And the shock of it all kept me from registering any pain. As the world and reality flooded back in I was able to hear BethAnn freaking out, asking in turns if I was OK and what the fuck is wrong with you, Joe? The few onlookers who saw the incident–as it was quite fast and without prelude, not many saw it–were standing, gawking, not saying a word. Joe still stood facing me, his hands drooped at his sides, his face expressionless, as if to say, I did that, and I don’t feel one way or another about it. I don’t have anything against you, but I’m not sorry.

One of the few people who did manage to see the incident was Mr. August, our lovely 22-year-old World Cultures teacher who always called me Darbinger and hit a cigarette of mine once in the old MJ Mall. He was striding quickly toward Joe. He glanced at me, making sure I was physically OK, grabbed Joe by the sleeve and pulled him to the office. He didn’t say a word.

Mr. August and Joe were 20 feet away when the bell rung, signifying the beginning of 6th Period. I still hadn’t said a word to BethAnn, who was still looking at me, just as stunned as I was. I told her to go ahead, go to class, I’d be fine. She walked away slowly, glancing back over her shoulder at me until she rounded the corner.

I stood perfectly still until the hall was empty.

Then I turned on my heel and walked the length of the school, to the bathroom by the administrative offices. This was the bathroom closest to my homeroom. It was the bathroom I was used to, and when I used it during school hours, I could usually hear Mr. Hankes’ voice creeping from under his door as he lectured people about Catch-22 or “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. It was comforting to hear him talk.

That bathroom had a green glow about it. The tiles were all a dull lime green, the color of a ten-year-old tube of toothpaste. And the tiles comprised the entire room except the ceiling, which was a tan stucco. The light seemed to be green, the toilets seemed to be green, and after the janitor had just been in there, it even smelled green.

I thought about smoking a cigarette quickly, but I knew they’d soon be looking for me. I just wandered around for a bit, re-reading the misspelled graffiti for the dozenth time. I came to stand in front of the mirror. I studied my face. There was no bruise, no blood, no cut, no evidence that anything irregular had just happened. I felt it coming and I tried to stop it. In small heaves at first and then uncontrolled spasms, I wept silently until they called me to the office over the loudspeaker.

4.

My first year out of high school I went away to college–20 minutes away. I went to a State School in the town next to us, and even though it was so close to home, my parents wanted me to live on campus so I would have the experience (further proof that both of my parents are awesome parents). I didn’t take well to the college experience at first (although later I would take to it much too well); I simply wasn’t making friends or doing the whole “college thing”. I was holing myself up in my room all week, ignoring everybody except the roommate I got stuck with, spending my nights on the phone with my girlfriend Steph back home. On weekends, I went home and worked at McDonalds. And hung out with my real friends. And partied.

One weekend I’m at a party at some kid’s parent’s house. I have no idea who the kid was, or any good recollection of who was there. I’m not even sure where it was, except that it was in a guest room above their garage. I spent much of the night at the far end of the rectangular room, beside the ping-pong table (it wasn’t in use; we were too lazy for Beer Pong) on old bench seats from the local Little League field after a dugout renovation some 20 years prior. I was with three good friends who were still in high school, and we were ignoring most of the party.

Late into the evening, as most of the revelers had left and a dozen or so inebriated folks remained, a fat, bearded man approached us from across the room. I had noticed him all night because he was so out of place. He was at least 28 years old, and a severe Redneck. He wore a red flannel, and not the kind of flannel that was so popular in those days: this was the kind of flannel you wore so you could do physical labor in the cold, and it was really ugly. His voice was a thick drawl, thicker than a Pennsylvania redneck; this guy was from the South. This wasn’t a Redneck party, and it wasn’t a 28-year-old party either. In fact, it was a high school party. Even I was kinda old for this party. This guy was a sore thumb.

He squeezed his way past the ping pong table and stood before us. I got ready to stand and shake his hand, introduce myself, ask him what the hell he was doing there. But before I could stand all the way he says this: “I know what you guys are.”

We all sorta chuckled, waiting for the punchline or explanation. One of us said, “What are we?”

“Fags. You’re fags, and I hate fags.”

This was shocking. It was shocking because, firstly, we were all raised rather liberal kids, by parents who thought just about everybody was OK and that everybody should be treated OK. Which is not to say that I never uttered the word fag, but we were all misguided youth who thought it was OK to slur if you didn’t mean it in your heart. And this guy obviously meant it in his heart, which was disturbing. Secondly, it shocked us because we were all rather straight, and anyone who had actually observed us throughout the party would have known that. The Redneck’s statement clearly confused us.

We tried at first to convince him. The hostess of the party had slept with one of my friends, and an ex-girlfriend of mine was also present. We called them over to testify. But the more we tried to convince him, the angrier he got. He started to raise his voice, he started calling us more and varied names (it doesn’t take a genius, after the fact, to realize that this man was quite clearly struggling with his own hidden homosexuality, and his probable attraction to at least one of us. I wish I’d have realized it at the time; things may have ended differently). It didn’t take long for the remaining partiers to flock around us. The hostess and her friends stepped between the man and us. Of course, as soon as they took up that “we’re-stopping-a-fight” position, he took their cue and began to threaten all four of us with physical harm.

While it is true that this man could not have beaten up all four of us, he would have created one hell of a mess and more than a little pain by trying.

The ruckus lasted the better part of an hour, the Redneck screaming at us, everyone standing between us, the four of us on one side of the room bewildered. This kinda shit didn’t happen to us. We didn’t get in fights, nor had we ever had to get out of a fight, and this made it difficult for us to remain the coolest cats in the room. It was too bizarre of a situation to know what to do. Everyone was now imploring the Redneck to leave. At one point, someone suggested that we leave, but Redneck made it clear that he would not let that happen.

Finally and somehow, the man left. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Some people laughed, some stalked around, pacing out their anger, muttering about how he had ruined an otherwise chill party. The hostess was afraid the neighbors had heard the noise and would tell the parents.

This idyll lasted only briefly, as perhaps ten minutes after he left, someone reported that he had pulled his truck up to the stairs leading down from the garage apartment–the only way out. His truck was idling. He had his parking lights on, and the glow of a cigarette could be seen behind the wheel. We let out a collective groan. We waited. Fifteen minutes later, he was still there. Our hostess was elected to go down and talk to him.

She returned moments later with the grim news: he wasn’t leaving until the fags left, and when the fags left, he was gonna kick the fag’s asses.

Suddenly and strangely the tone started to shift; although no one would say it, people were clearly beginning to resent us, and somehow blame us. With the Redneck no longer present to directly blame, the party was still ruined and there we were. We were quite clearly now blamed, having done absolutely nothing. Us “fags” sat ostracized in a corner while Hostess and Friends tried to figure out what to do. Do they call the cops? Do we wait it out? And somewhere in their subconscious–in that Lord of the Flies part of the brain–I know they had a third option: Do we sacrifice them?

The uncertainty seemed to last forever, but in reality it was only about half an hour. The tension in the room was broken by a frightening smash, followed by even louder splintering and cracking noises. Everyone ran to the door, the gray dawn sky and birdsong of the morning shocking us all. And then even more shock, as we saw the Redneck’s taillights driving away, faster than a gunshot down the curvy country road, and directly below us the shattered remnants of the wooden steps leading down from the room we were in. The Redneck had smashed into them with his truck, rendering most of the lower half useless lumber, and severing the top half from it’s landing. The top half of the stairs now hung from the building by a few weakened planks, swinging slowly in decreasing circles.

Three days later, the property damage was listed officially as the work of a hit-and-run driver, who was never caught.

5.

I’m in a bar in the Detroit airport and can’t remember why. There was a short drive, and then a flight. Someone I love is here with me, but where, and who, and how can I find them again? And ultimately, who the fuck am I?

I am coming out of the most severe kind of blackouts, the ones that most closely resemble amnesia. You fight to get your memory back as soon as possible. You struggle, you close your eyes and ball your fists, forcing minute by minute of precious recall back into your brain. Strangely, the first memory to come back is always this: I’m a severe alcoholic and this happened because of drinking. And oddly, that usually helps, because then you can think this: where was I drinking, and with who?

I’m on a barstool and it’s midday. The room is coated in mirrors. One entire wall of the room is a window with a view of the tarmac, and the light coming through it is intensified because of the mirrors. It is a bright room, too bright to be a bar. In my right hand a Newport Light is burning, and a Gin and Coke sits in front of me on a cardboard coaster, half empty in a Collins glass.

Slowly I remember important details: I’m on a layover on my way to Athens, Georgia. I’m going there with an ex-girlfriend of mine to stay with her father for a week, who she had not seen in many years The trip was planned before we broke up. I offered to give my plane ticket to her new boyfriend, but she insisted she wanted me along. I was miserable, because I was still immensely in love with her, and she was no longer mine, and I knew she never would be mine again. I was miserable because this trip was planned not only so she could see her father, but as an escape for us as a couple, a sexual romp, a drinking and drug fevered getaway where I may have even asked her to marry me. Now it was a “friendship” trip. I was miserable because I was an alcoholic and my body hurt as much as my heart, when I was able to remember what my heart had endured.

Here is what–while sitting on that barstool–I was unable to remember: how long I had been in the bar, where my ex-girlfriend was, when our plane departed, what plane we were on, what part of the airport I was in, if there was a plan to meet up with her somewhere, how much money I had spent and if I had a tab running. I could not remember our arrival at the airport and hence had no mental map of how I had gotten there or where to go.

I finished my drink. I smoked another cigarette. I panicked a little but not a lot. Experience had taught me that if I just got back to the serious business of drinking, someone would eventually come along and save me.

I had to piss. Somehow I knew where the bathroom was. I rose from the barstool, and despite my severe intoxication, walked steadily and quickly to the bathroom. Once inside the one-person room, I locked the door and did my business in the toilet–I didn’t trust my ability to hit a urinal in those days. Turning round, I rested my arms on the sink and sighed into my armpit. Here was another fine mess, and she still didn’t love me, and she never would again. Before I knew what I was doing I had ripped the paper towel dispenser off the wall and thrown it to the floor. I entered the stall and did the same to the toilet paper dispenser–then I jumped on it, shattering the plastic shell. Then quite unpredictably, I reached my hand into the urinal, grabbing the plastic piss-deflector thingy that you always see in urinals, and hurled it at the wall with all my might, as though expecting it to crash through the tile wall and out onto the tarmac. I then rushed back into the stall and promptly vomited up what must have amounted to forty dollars worth of Gin and Cokes. Staring into the soda-brown water, I mourned it’s loss.

I flushed the toilet and wasted no time leaving the bathroom.

Sidling back up to the bar, I calmly and with genuine concern informed the bartender that someone had really done a number on that bathroom and that someone should look into it. I ordered another Gin and Coke–this one with Tanqueray–lit a Newport Light, and waited.

6.

During my darkest years I had a very violent mind but found myself unable to act on these impulses. I had violent desires but not violent tendencies; which is to say, I lacked the balls to carry out my desires, even at my most drunk or depraved moments. I thought often of killing people for no reason whatsoever, people I loved who’d done nothing to me. Part of the appeal of this was that it would break the monotony of life. Another part of the appeal was that I would become known for something. Another part of the appeal was the thought of what it would feel like immediately after killing them, the realization of what I had done, the horror of it all being quite a rush. Another part of the appeal was that I would go to prison, where I would not be able to drink anymore, and might find some comfort of mind and soul.

Although I moved around quite a bit in my early and mid twenties, to apartments and houses that were never mine and often squalor, I maintained one curious possession throughout: a set of golf clubs. I do play golf, but so infrequently as to render my carting this somewhat cumbersome package with me through my travels a somewhat ridiculous notion. I had left much more important things behind before: mattresses left in college apartments, whole bookshelves full of my favorite tomes left for new tenants to deal with, air conditioners, window fans, corduroy blazers and thirty dollar neckties. But I always brought the golf clubs, for three reasons: 1. One day I was going to become an avid golfer, I just knew it. 2. My father had given them to me. 3. I was going to kill someone with a golf club, smashing their skull and seeing what they looked like inside.

This is something I really wanted to do.

My obsession with killing someone with a golf club began when I was living with a married couple in a very cute little house in a very cute little town. The house was nestled on a cute little piece of green land and it had a very cute little stream running through the backyard. A canoe even came with the house, as part of our rent. I had the basement bedroom, but it wasn’t a true basement, because of the way the backyard sloped downward toward the stream. I actually had a door that opened directly into the lush green yard. I had a window that looked directly onto the cute little steam, not 30 yards away. Large ferns and saplings dotted the well-manicured lawn, and it was all very nice. I didn’t have a lot of storage space for my stuff, so I kept the golf clubs outside, beside my door. They painted a lovely picture there and looked rather becoming, I thought. Exposure to the elements soon made them rusty, though, and spiders took up residence in the ball pouch.

On a typical evening at this house, I would get quickly drunk in my basement bedroom while watching TV. Once drunk, I became bored. I would exit the house via my door to the lawn, spend some time wandering around the vegetative outdoors, then make my way (with my Gin and Coke, usually in a McDonalds plastic Super Size cup, because Gin eats through the cardboard cups) up the hill to the front porch of the house, where I would sit outside the window to the living room. In the summer, the window would be open, and I would announce to the married couple that I was out there, usually startling them a bit. Then one or both of them would come out, sit and smoke cigarettes with me and we would chat about this-or-that.

I had about one good hour of that in me, because the more I drank the more I wanted to kill somebody. I got mean. I got judgmental. I went from sarcastic to mean to asshole rather quickly. But by this stage of my life, everyone knew that was going to happen, and most accepted it. At some point throughout the summer, I started bringing golf club up to the porch with me.

The married couple would be sitting on their chairs on the porch, and I’d no doubt break off a diatribe of mine and say You know what I’m going to do to you? I’d reach into the bushes and pull out my 3 Iron, which I had determined would work best to split open a skull. I’m going to smash your fucking head in with this golf club. I’d take practice swings. I’d hold the club head at their face, to judge the distance, and take slow-motion swings, imagining the sound, the solid feel of it entering them like a fist into a watermelon. They’d smile, they’d laugh. It made them a little uneasy, but not because they thought I’d ever do it. They were uneasy because I was obviously troubled. Everyone could see much clearer than I could that, deep down, I wasn’t the stuff of a murderer. I was just an on-the-edge alcoholic.

Of course, it infuriated me that I was not taken seriously. In my mind, I was very close to killing these people. But I’ve never in my life been taken seriously as a violent or aggressive mean. It’s not because I’m short, either. It’s something in my countenance. People can see that I will get quite angry, and perhaps even violent with words, but they can also see that the last thing I will do is strike them. I give it away in my body language and tone of voice, which says If I could think you into oblivion, I honestly would.

I started carrying the whole golf bag, with all the clubs, in the trunk of my car.

Despite my erratic and often embarrassing behavior, I still got invited to many parties in those days. I suppose, at the very least, I was interesting to have around. And it is because of parties that I put the golf clubs in my car. I thought if it were people who didn’t know me as well, they may be a little more scared of me.

On one particularly rainy summer night, a girl from work was hosting a party at her parent’s house, which was way out in the country. We had partied there quite a few times before (as a matter of fact, I still have a video tape from the final party there, which is my last remaining reminder of what I looked and sounded like while drunk. I watch it occasionally. It is a fantastic reminder.) and it was a perfect spot. There was a large above-ground swimming pool, acres of land that included fields and woods, a comfortable and welcoming house and a small man-made pond with fish in it. Also, her parents were aware of the parties, so there was no stress attached to hiding the event. I arrived early, about five in the afternoon on the overcast day, and began drinking beer, singing songs and performing skits with my more animated associates, and in general being the life of the party that I was capable of being when I still had just a buzz working.

Then there is a large blank spot in my memory.

Reality floods in and I’m naked, and it is pouring rain, and I’m in the middle of the woods. I’m carrying a golf club, walking with it as if it were a cane, or a walking stick. It is freezing cold and more than anything I am feeling anger.

It is far from unusual for me to be naked at a party. It would normally begin as a way to make someone laugh, or shock someone, and if I was drunk enough when I disrobed I usually just stayed that way. For what reason, I’ll never know.

I am alone and naked in these dark woods and I am so angry. I don’t have a drink or cigarettes with me and that makes me more angry. I become aware that I am walking toward the house, and the sounds of the party. I can see the multi-colored porch lights and hear the quiet rock music. I emerge by the swimming pool and am now aware that it must be quite late at night, as only a dozen or so folks are still here. They are all huddled under the roofed-in porch, smoking cigarettes, playing cards on the table, nursing Yeunglings.

They see me and give no sign that my approach troubles them. Obviously I was naked when I left them, and whatever is angering me they are probably unaware of. A few people signal me and shout Hey! I walk onto the porch, out of the rain, and ask the closest person for a cigarette. I go into the kitchen and pull a Yeungling from the sink, which is full of ice and beer, and return to the porch.

I walk up to one of my friends and say to him, quite loudly, Do you know what I’m going to do to you? I’m going to bash your fucking face in with this golf club.

There is laughter, but it is only kind laughter. Someone says Not this again.

I step back from the friend and hold the club head beside his face. I am measuring for distance to improve the accuracy of my hit. I tell him not to move. I take a slow-motion practice swing. I touch the tip of the golf club to his nose. He does not move. He is smiling. I say That’s where it’s going to hit, right there.

I glance around. People are smiling at me the way they smile at a small dog that can’t quite get up on the couch. The game of cards continues without interruption.

Throwing the club aside, I yell something like Fuck all of you, then! Picking up my burning cigarette and my beer, I stalk back off into the woods and freezing rain, imagining them all staring after me, impressed with the size of my gusto and wondering how they could ever manage to be just like me.

College Park Apartments, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

Where you look for meaning, you will find it.  Where you look for symbols, you will find them.  If you dig deeper, more will come.  Look.  Look.

 

 

Every college has it’s “famous” apartment complexes which reside just off of campus, where Freshmen and Sophomores who are stuck in the dorms go to party.  At Shippensburg University, there are the Big Three: Bard, Chateau (I know, right?), and College Park apartments.  College Park is (or at least was) the most famous of these, as it sits right on the edge of campus, separated from University property by a mere 15 or so feet and an 8-foot-high chain-link fence.  It was into this famous apartment complex (with which I already had a rich history as a visitor) that I moved, following the house on Orange Street, with two of my buddies I had befriended while living in the dorms at Naugle Hall.

 

These weren’t bad apartments, nor were they great.  Fairly standard, three-room, one bath apartments with full kitchens.  Standard, flat-paint white walls, a blue-green loop carpet, ten-foot high ceilings.  The designers had taken great care to make each room have a bit of “shape” beyond a mere four-cornered room.  For instance, our living room was slightly “L-Shaped”, while my bedroom (which I shared with the other single roommate; the roommate with the girlfriend got his own room, which we all found to be fair) was not really a shape as much as it was a 6-cornered room.

 

I smoked in this apartment, though I was the only smoker who lived there.  We all drank there (we were all 21, and off-campus), although certainly I drank much more than them.  We listened to loud music all the time, watched great movies over and over (it was here that I discovered Magnolia; thank you Rob!), we played golf with Wiffle golf balls. We watched on CNN Headline News with apprehension and beers in our hands as George W. Bush got elected for the first time. I listened to live Pearl Jam bootlegs while playing air guitar on golf clubs for hours on end, while one roommate was playing computer games (or the Hollywood Stock Exchange online…feel like a real geek? Check out http://www.HSX.com) while the other did homework on one of our two horrible, horrible couches.  I have no idea whose couches they were.

 

The kitchen was, of course, a wretched disaster, as all male (and most female) college kitchens tend to be.  Dishes would pile up and just sit there, until the stench and the visual evidence of vile mold would drive somebody to wash them.  The refrigerator had everything we had decided to use on a regular basis pushed up front, while unwanted foodstuff got pushed to the back, gestating for months until, once again, the tell-tale signs of mold forced someone to do something about it.  And I have never seen anyone use a toaster oven as much as one of my roommates did; frankly, until I lived there, I had suspected toaster ovens were a myth.

 

These were most certainly my “wacky college days”, the kind of time I had always hoped to have in college which hadn’t materialized until now.  Nevermind that most of the time at this apartment I was more depressed than ever, and more debauched than ever (Henry Miller would blush…really), but at the same time, there was more lighthearted goofiness and exploration of our adulthood/childhood bridge than I had experienced yet.  I often slept on the couch in the living room, and this gave me great opportunities to fuck with the other guys as they slept in the bedrooms.  I was a big fan of finding new and inventive ways to make it impossible for them to open their doors in the morning.  Once I even upended both couched and put them both (standing on end) in front of Rob’s bedroom door (he was the one with his own bedroom), and then I went and slept on my bed.

 

It was also the only place I ever lived where we had our own beer pong table, which made me finally feel ‘college’.

 

One day, about halfway through our living adventure there, we got a call from the front office.  Some students who were interested in renting an apartment there next year would like to walk through one to see what they are like on the inside.  Could they walk through ours the next morning?  Sure, we said, and that was that.

 

Now, our apartment was not disgusting on the whole.  If it had been just me living there, it would have been, but my two roomies were not filthy. They were not clean, neat-freaks either, just standard guys who didn’t want to live in squalor.  We balanced each other out in a fairly democratic way; there were never fights about cleanliness, because there was not a huge gulf between our sensibilities, but there was a large enough difference to keep the apartment in a sort of “cluttered but not gross” stasis.  So it didn’t occur to us (as it most certainly would occur to me now) to clean the apartment for such a visit.

 

Late that night, the three of us were spending some leisurely hours watching television, sprawled out between our two couches and one obscenely large chair.  At some point, I said something like this:

 

We should do something that’ll really fuck with those people tomorrow morning.

 

The roommates agreed, but wondered what I had in mind.

 

We should, like, build a tower of stuff from the floor to the ceiling, right in the middle of the living room.

 

This intrigued them, and in fact, in my memory of the event, one of them was off his chair looking for stuff the moment the words were out of my mouth.

 

At first, we pulled the coffee table into the center of the room, with the intention of building from that as a sort of head start.  But after some deliberation we decided that building off the table would take away some of the effect.  We wanted the people (hopefully prissy Sorority chicks) to walk into this apartment and be greeted by a complete, narrow, impossible-looking tower of everyday items reaching from the floor to the ceiling…and we wanted it touching the ceiling.

 

So we started building on the floor.  First, a wall calendar to level out the carpet.  Then, on top of that, our largest text books.  The text books alone got us quite a bit of height, and a sturdy base, as well. 

 

It’s difficult to remember what all we made the tower out of.  I know there were some empty two-liters in there, as well as empty half-gallons of White Tavern gin (what I almost exclusively drank) which gave the tower quite a sad but rebellious look.  There were smaller books in the middle, some cups and drinking glasses, some boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and probably canisters of shaving cream and sticks of deodorant.  The main thing you need to know is that this tower should have been impossible.  When you looked at it, you really could not believe it was standing, or that is wasn’t glued together or didn’t have some wire running through the hollowed-out materials. And it really hadn’t been that difficult.  Things just seemed to keep fitting into one another and holding perfectly.  We only had one or two setbacks, and a few other moments where the tower teetered on the edge of collapse and then righted itself.  It couldn’t have taken more than an hour to get within 2 or 3 inches of the ceiling.  Then, however, we had a problem.

 

We wanted to tower to touch the ceiling, but to just touch it. We weren’t interested in fashioning a drinking straw to the top that would touch the ceiling and then bend and have an extra 3 inches dangling there.  We wanted it to be perfect, for the tower to be the exact height of the room from floor-to-ceiling.  And we tore our apartment apart looking for just the right thing.  We even measured the gap and then started measuring things, trying to find something that was exactly 2 and ¾ inches (or whatever it was).  We finally found what we needed in the form of a disposable Morton’s Pepper shaker, which had been hiding in the back of a cupboard.  It slid neatly into place (I was not able to participate in the final leg of construction, as, even standing on the chair, I was not tall enough, so I had to participate from the ground) andour tower was finished.

 

It was an absolute marvel, and we were rightly impressed.  We watched TV a bit longer, with what seemed to now be a fourth person in the room, this presence that was watching over everything.  We went to bed that night giddy in the knowledge that our tower would not be a secret for long; in fact, strangers would soon see it, which is probably the most satisfying knowledge anyone can have about a work of art they have created.

 

I awoke briefly to the sounds of people in the apartment the next morning.  I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but they were in fact girls.  We’ll never know if they were fully astonished, but I know they saw it.

 

If you dig deeper and look harder you can see everything all at once.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Naugle Hall, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

The lights are all off except the lava lamp, which I’ve had burning for days. The remnant smoke from dozens of cigarettes hangs like a wraith throughout the unventilated room.

            The ceiling—which is spackled concrete with waffle-like indents, not unlike you might find in a recording studio—is covered in those glow-in-the-dark plastic stars that are meant for people much younger than 19, but I’ve always been a slow grower. The walls (tan cinder block) are plastered with predictable posters: Rage Against the Machine, Carmen Electra, Albert Einstein.  The precise mixture of a confused young man who’d like to fuck his own angry intelligence.

            There is some kind of carpet, and some kind of bed sheet on the too-small bed, and the too-small bed beside it that is sometimes (but not right now) occupied by a roommate I never knew, and whose name I only sometimes foggily recall.  Between the beds is a lawn chair which faces our television, used mainly for playing video games.

            I used to play video games.

            Currently the first Seven Mary Three album is on the stereo, very quietly, and I am seated at my desk (which is connected to the wall, and is made of white hospital Formica) pounding away on the keys of my electric typewriter (which I was still using embarrassingly recently). Beside the typewriter sits an open, slender volume of W.H. Auden poetry, and I am reading his “O Tell Me the Truth About Love” and trying to somehow mimic it without copying it. I haven’t been writing poetry very long, but I know I am very depressed and lonely, and if I don’t write something magical about her very soon I am going to kill myself.

            It doesn’t work. I keep writing really bad things that sound like a mix of Auden and Seven Mary Three (do not try that) and nothing I write brings Her to my door, or in my bed, or out of my head. In point of fact, writing will never do these things (or, at least, it will do it very rarely), but I am new at it and am expecting it to be…cleansing, therapeutic, transcendent.

            I smoke another cigarette, pace the room, glance out the big window that peers into the Naugle Hall courtyard. There are people down there, smoking, holding hands, hackey sacking.

            I take my pants off and lay down on my bed, quiet, unsure, almost not even there, to commence yet again the only real way I know of seeing her.