I am not sure whether I will be able to fully describe the overwhelming fear I experienced. From all that I can recall these are two of the most terrifying moments I've been through in my entire life. Neither one is particularly eventful but during both the sensation of fear was palpable. The first is simple but the combination of a climactic moment in a book and the dark teepee came together to scare me out of my five year old mind, and the second was my father yet again including me in something I wouldn't want to be involved in even today.
As I mentioned in the first part of the teepee adventures for my fifth birthday I was given a boxed edition of The Lord of the Rings books by Tolkien. I was reading those and Jack London on my own a year later but in the teepee when we sat around the fire my mom would read Tolkien to me. I am sure this treatment would intensify the experience of any book but at times in my young mind I was half-ready for Urakai and Balrogs to run out of the woods into our camp. To be clear, I knew the difference between fantasy and reality but could find myself becoming very immersed in the story.
The movies do an adequate job of capturing the scene that overwhelmed me, after fighting the creature that guards the entrance to Moria and after opening the door, Gandalf and the party make camp inside the long abandoned dwarven cavern. I forget which Hobbit drops pebbles into the well, maybe Merry or Pippen, but after dropping several stones into the dry well he awakens the orcs that live below. After they camp and discover the fate of the dwarves that had been sent there, they hear drum being played and are attacked.
I distinctly remember sitting by the fire as my mom read this scene to me. As a young boy Gandalf was my favorite character and this scene is expertly written by Tolkien, who can often drag on into his mythology without any apparent purpose, he manages to build the tension gradually and incredibly. Before ever heading to Moria the Fellowship is warned not to use that passage and that it is not safe. After fighting the Watcher in the Water there is a feeling of relaxation as the party escapes into Moria. Then there is the dropping of stones, and later they read the diary of Balin, the dwarf who was sent into Moria in an attempt to reclaim it from the orcs and Balrog. Just as Gandalf reads the final entry, where it is clear Balin died in a terrible fight and drums are mentioned, the party hears the first dim sound of a drum. From then Tolkien builds the tension to a frenzy before the orcs attack, but he manages to maintain the tension even after - as the party tries to escape and Gandalf seemingly sacrifices himself to the Balrog so that Frodo may survive. Like I said, I can remember this stuff!
I remember being so afraid for these imaginary characters and completely enthralled but also simultaneously hoping that somehow I could stop listening to the story. I don't remember if I could fall asleep that night but I was mesmerized by that moment of the book for a very long time.
Later that summer my father started to work at a store several miles away. He would walk or hitch-hike his way down the mountain in order to get to work. At night he would come back with food for dinner and a proud smile. During some of the time in the teepee my dad was the happiest I ever saw him. He was always more at home in nature than the rest of the world, even behind his drum set. Those idyllic moments didn't last long. On his walks he took to exploring the woods and streets around us. One evening he came back with pans but they weren't new. This raised some predictable questions that he gracefully avoided answering, but a couple of days later he asked me to come with him on a walk. That wasn't anything out of the ordinary, aside from reading, running through the woods with a stick, and watching my sister try to crawl there wasn't much to do in the teepee other than walk around the forest.
"I want to show you something buddy," he said and we crossed the stream. Then we walked up the hill to the main road and walked along the shoulder for a mile or so. The road itself was fairly quiet with a house alongside it every couple hundred yards. Eventually he stopped and walked up toward a dilapidated, run-down, white two-story house. We walked up the driveway and he said to be quiet. There wasn't any car in the driveway and it didn't look like anyone had lived there in awhile at least from the outside. Even at my age I could tell my Dad had been there before. He was comfortable and opened the side door that opened into the kitchen. I have no idea what he was thinking bringing me there. Maybe he was lonely, maybe it scared him too, but regardless he brought me into an abandoned house. It wasn't the sort of abandoned house that pervades television, with junkies passed out everywhere and graffiti on the walls, although that would have been terrifying in its own right. Instead it was a fully furnished, mildew smelling, abandoned house with no signs of the occupants having any idea that they would be leaving.
I am not a superstitious person so do not misinterpret this as being a ghost story. All of the belongings to the family, or couple, or person that lived there still remained. I don't put a lot of value into material possessions, but with someone's entire belongings left behind I couldn't help but wonder why no one knew or claimed anything, or took care of the house. My father looked into the refrigerator and some of the drawers to the side of it, everywhere he looked there were clear orange prescription bottles. Whoever had lived there had been very sick or very old. I don't remember if he grabbed anything, I would imagine he had looted what he wanted before bringing me but maybe he was hoping he had missed some painkillers. Toward the front of the house was the living room which was dusty and dark because the blinds were drawn. For whatever reason David wasn't interested in the living room, but we walked through it to the stairs. Upstairs was darker because we were in a windowless hallway, but we went into the master bedroom. It had a four post wooden frame and a queen size bed made with a floral comforter, in front of it was a medium sized television and I remember standing as close to the door as I could while he went through the television cabinet and later went into the master bathroom to look around. I knew we weren't supposed to be there and I knew that places like this weren't really supposed to exist. Families were supposed to take care of things like this after someone died, or moved, or went to the hospital, but here no one did anything. The power was shut-off so this had to have happened awhile ago, and yet no one had been into the house except for my dad and I. I had all of these questions, why wasn't anyone there? Why didn't anyone care? Didn't someone want this house or these things? What had happened here? Why were we here? Could we leave? But I didn't ask anything. I implicitly understood that what we were doing was wrong and that it was best not to mention anything about it. When I stood there at the threshold to someone's abandoned bedroom, where they may have died but had surely once lived, I wanted more than anything to get out of that house. The terrible unfinished reality of it was suffocating. I didn't say anything, I wasn't very good at standing up for myself then. I stood quietly, trying to look brave and waited for my dad to find whatever it was he was looking for. Thankfully he either found what he had wanted or realized how terrified I was and we left. We walked back to the teepee and I pretended we had gone on a normal walk, I didn't mention what had happened to anyone for years. I had no idea about his drug-use then and even through all of the grotesque scenes that he put me through, this one was the most lasting and shocking to me. I think of it differently than when he overdosed, or was drunk and angry, under those influences I could make excuses for him - but on his own to bring me somewhere like that without any consideration for me was a huge mistake. I honestly don't believe my father was being neglectful or careless.. unfortunately, I think this was a misguided attempt at showing me something exciting. His notion that I was special and therefore didn't need the coddling protection afforded to normal children allowed him to thoughtlessly hurt me without any malicious intentions. This one simple misunderstanding of me led to painful, strange drug-fueled discussions of fate, love, and saving the world.
My father's dad was absent most of his childhood, using his job as a shield from his wife's ongoing descent into dementia. I do not think David had any idea what it meant to care for and protect another person, because of this I learned quite early how to protect myself as well as how to care for those who couldn't care for themselves. What is interesting to me about these two different stories is that even then the world of books offered something that was sorely lacking in my minimal experience of the world: clarity and resolution. I never learned why we went to that house. I guess he was looking for more drugs, but really past that I have no idea what happened there or why nothing was fixed. Life is messy like that.
I personally don't have a deep love for neat parenthetical clean books but I loved the safety and logic behind novels. I wasn't versed in literary criticism but I intuitively knew that every word was chosen, every scene crafted with a purpose in mind. This vision and direction was deeply reassuring. In the midst of a chaotic, careless world people were creating beautiful, captivating people, places, and stories that had a reason for everything.
Oct 4, 2009
Oct 3, 2009
Teepees and house pets
My sixth birthday I celebrated in a tent during a rain storm in Phoenicia, a small town near Woodstock in Upstate New York. My parents gave me a cupcake with candles in it to blow out,a boxed set of The Lord of the Rings, and a small ornate jeweled dragonfly statuette. I am not sure what happened to the dragonfly or even why I had wanted it or if I had a desire for it in the first place. I honestly cannot give an accurate accounting of how long we spent living in the teepee but it was to my knowledge almost a complete summer.
Ostensibly we lived in the teepee to experience nature and test ourselves. I think that the true motive for our living situation experiment was to see if such a drastic change could help my dad clean up his act. When I was very young, four or so, we lived in a house near the Highschool I would later attend. The family that owned the home had split it into a duplex and rented to us. I remember watching Thundercats and some of the Disney channel there, and making a snow triceratops in the winter with my dad. The house itself was an older home with tall ceilings. It could easily have been two stories but instead had lofts at the ends of a large living room with vaulted ceilings. This was before my sister was born so it was just my parents, our cats, and I. I don't think we had kitty boy yet, my first cat, but we had Muskrat who was a pretty terrible cat at times. I remember he didn't like me and would intentionally use my bed as a litterbox.
In that home I have some of my earliest memories of my parents fighting. The kitchen was immediately to the right as you entered the home, to the left was the living room and dining area, above the kitchen was the loft my parents slept in, across from that on the far end of the living room was another loft that my mom used as a studio, and below that off to the side was my bedroom. I am sure the house is smaller than I remember it being.
At the time I didn't piece everything together, but this particular night was so confusing and troublesome that it has stuck with me my entire life. I think it was a night in the late summer when my mom didn't come home. David, my dad, asked me to come up to the loft with him and keep him company. He was an expert at asking me questions that children should not be asked. As a baby I had answered some of them remarkably well which I think gave him reason to continue this habit throughout my entire life. An anecdote about my precociousness as a toddler (?) was that once I came to him and asked what was at the end of the universe.
"I don't know, bud, what do you think?"
After a short pause, "The past."
Who knows if this is true. I also had a very convincing story that I told them about my other family. I invented a black family that I lived with in San Francisco. I said that my father was a poor trumpet player who drank all of the time and that my mom had to work so she could feed me and my 5 brothers and sisters. This was not so different from my future.
On that strange night my dad asked, "Do you know where your mom is? She's with another man tonight. Do you know how that makes me feel?"
I am not sure I would have an adequate response to this even today 22 years later. I didn't know then nor did I know for years but apparently my parents had agreed that when they got married if they felt like they had met someone who they had a special connection with they could pursue that without betraying their marriage. This experiment was a huge failure.
"I don't know dad, maybe she'll come back. I know mom loves you. Its going to be okay."
I spent the night upstairs with him and mom didn't come home. We talked and he showed me the book he cherished, it was some sort of ancient Rosicrucian book, small leather-bound and gold leafed. After he died that was one of my two requests that I receive from his possessions but it was no where to be found. The other is a piece of the Golden Gate Bridge that sits on my dresser as I write this. What I've learned is that this isn't a true piece of the Golden Gate Bridge, but it was used as a promotional material for a book by the same name by Alistair Maclean. The novel is a conspiracy thriller about the President being kidnapped in plain-sight as his motorcade crosses the Golden Gate. I'm sure my dad knew what it really was but he let me go on thinking that it was a real piece of the bridge for most of my life. It is fitting that the one thing I wanted from my dad was something used by a writer. I stayed up very late with him and did my best to comfort him.
The next day my mom came back and immediately they were screaming at each other. My recollection is hazy but I remember David putting a hole in the wall with the shillelagh, how is that for Irish by the way? A shillelagh is a club used to cudgel people and wild dogs. For most of my life at home we had it in place of an American baseball bat, you hear a loud noise you grab the shillelagh. I think ours was made from blackthorn sapling. Its bark was pitch-black and the wood beneath it was a deep red. It felt deadly and looked intimidating despite its relatively small size. It was probably no longer than two and a half feet. As a terribly small and innocent child I stood in the middle of their screams trying to calm them down. I remember being shocked at how angry and careless they could be while I hoped with all of my heart that something I was saying would make them stop fighting. Nothing ever did. The fight would escalate until my mom would become afraid for her safety, then she would take me and leave. I believe the subject of this fight wasn't only her sleeping with this other man (who knows what really happened) but also that my mom was threatening that we would leave.
"I'm going to take him back to my mom and start a new life. This is wrong. David, you aren't listening, David I can't take this.. Look what we're doing to him. David calm down."
In all likelihood he was drunk by now, and my father was a particularly malicious venom-tongued drunk. At some point during her attempt at communicating David grabbed the shillelagh and smashed it through the wall. "You're going to take my son from me? Therese you weren't even here last night. Where were you? Who's going to watch him when you're off doing whatever that was?"
My mom grabbed me and left. We flew across the country to Los Angeles and her mother took us in. David soon followed. He tracked us down and somehow convinced mom to take him back. Shortly after my sister Emma was born. Later that year we moved back to New York and started this whole teepee business.
Rita and Chris were a lesbian couple that were family friends. Chris had a stable with an Appaloosa and was more handy than I will ever be. She had lived in a teepee for a couple months and loaned us hers to use. She helped us set it up but we didn't do a very good job of things. The top of a teepee is supposed to be very tight, in order to allow smoke to leave but not much rain to enter, our opening was about four or five times the size it should have been. The property where we made our semi-permanent camp was owned by an older couple that were friends of friends. I would lurk around outside their house, well as much as a five year old can lurk, until the woman would give me shortbread cookies. Because of our lacking teepee skills when it rained the water would put out whatever fire we had burning and collect inside the teepee, quickly turning the earth into mud. For this reason we kept our three person tent set up in case of rain.
That summer there were record rains. We spent entire days inside that tent. At the beginning of the summer we brought a small zoo along with us. I brought my turtle, Five Dollar Bill (his cost), my hamster (which ate all of its young and would readily attack even me), and a cat. Unlike the humans of our family, including my less than one year old sister who was learning to crawl on the forest floor, the animal family members quickly realized that there was no benefit to living with a family outdoors.
As unlikely as it seems, Five Dollar Bill was the first to escape. Our campsite was half a mile from a healthy river and the noise of rushing water could be heard during the night. On a night early in June, Five Dollar Bill slowly and purposefully walked out on me, right into that river.
The cat occasionally still came for food but had become even more aloof until one day it altogether stopped showing up. Most likely it replaced us with another family, a family with a house.
On warm, dry nights we slept in the teepee and took full advantage of the extra space. We kept some of our belongings in the tent, mostly books and things that had to stay dry. Among those things was the hamster's cage and in it the hamster. So on this night my sister and I were already asleep when my parents heard something rattling the cage. I must stress that this hamster was a terrible creature. Even at an age where I loved all living things and refused to eat meat, I knew this animal would never love me. It stood on its hind legs and hissed at me, barring its petite fangs whenever I tried to feed it.
So upon hearing this rattling, my mom says "Gee, it really sounds like something is trying to get into the hamster's cage.. Don't you hear it honey?"
"I don't think I hear anything."
"Are you sure? I sure wouldn't want anything to happen to her."
And as my parents feigned concern my last pet, although it was a poor terrible creature, was eaten alive by a raccoon.
Ostensibly we lived in the teepee to experience nature and test ourselves. I think that the true motive for our living situation experiment was to see if such a drastic change could help my dad clean up his act. When I was very young, four or so, we lived in a house near the Highschool I would later attend. The family that owned the home had split it into a duplex and rented to us. I remember watching Thundercats and some of the Disney channel there, and making a snow triceratops in the winter with my dad. The house itself was an older home with tall ceilings. It could easily have been two stories but instead had lofts at the ends of a large living room with vaulted ceilings. This was before my sister was born so it was just my parents, our cats, and I. I don't think we had kitty boy yet, my first cat, but we had Muskrat who was a pretty terrible cat at times. I remember he didn't like me and would intentionally use my bed as a litterbox.
In that home I have some of my earliest memories of my parents fighting. The kitchen was immediately to the right as you entered the home, to the left was the living room and dining area, above the kitchen was the loft my parents slept in, across from that on the far end of the living room was another loft that my mom used as a studio, and below that off to the side was my bedroom. I am sure the house is smaller than I remember it being.
At the time I didn't piece everything together, but this particular night was so confusing and troublesome that it has stuck with me my entire life. I think it was a night in the late summer when my mom didn't come home. David, my dad, asked me to come up to the loft with him and keep him company. He was an expert at asking me questions that children should not be asked. As a baby I had answered some of them remarkably well which I think gave him reason to continue this habit throughout my entire life. An anecdote about my precociousness as a toddler (?) was that once I came to him and asked what was at the end of the universe.
"I don't know, bud, what do you think?"
After a short pause, "The past."
Who knows if this is true. I also had a very convincing story that I told them about my other family. I invented a black family that I lived with in San Francisco. I said that my father was a poor trumpet player who drank all of the time and that my mom had to work so she could feed me and my 5 brothers and sisters. This was not so different from my future.
On that strange night my dad asked, "Do you know where your mom is? She's with another man tonight. Do you know how that makes me feel?"
I am not sure I would have an adequate response to this even today 22 years later. I didn't know then nor did I know for years but apparently my parents had agreed that when they got married if they felt like they had met someone who they had a special connection with they could pursue that without betraying their marriage. This experiment was a huge failure.
"I don't know dad, maybe she'll come back. I know mom loves you. Its going to be okay."
I spent the night upstairs with him and mom didn't come home. We talked and he showed me the book he cherished, it was some sort of ancient Rosicrucian book, small leather-bound and gold leafed. After he died that was one of my two requests that I receive from his possessions but it was no where to be found. The other is a piece of the Golden Gate Bridge that sits on my dresser as I write this. What I've learned is that this isn't a true piece of the Golden Gate Bridge, but it was used as a promotional material for a book by the same name by Alistair Maclean. The novel is a conspiracy thriller about the President being kidnapped in plain-sight as his motorcade crosses the Golden Gate. I'm sure my dad knew what it really was but he let me go on thinking that it was a real piece of the bridge for most of my life. It is fitting that the one thing I wanted from my dad was something used by a writer. I stayed up very late with him and did my best to comfort him.
The next day my mom came back and immediately they were screaming at each other. My recollection is hazy but I remember David putting a hole in the wall with the shillelagh, how is that for Irish by the way? A shillelagh is a club used to cudgel people and wild dogs. For most of my life at home we had it in place of an American baseball bat, you hear a loud noise you grab the shillelagh. I think ours was made from blackthorn sapling. Its bark was pitch-black and the wood beneath it was a deep red. It felt deadly and looked intimidating despite its relatively small size. It was probably no longer than two and a half feet. As a terribly small and innocent child I stood in the middle of their screams trying to calm them down. I remember being shocked at how angry and careless they could be while I hoped with all of my heart that something I was saying would make them stop fighting. Nothing ever did. The fight would escalate until my mom would become afraid for her safety, then she would take me and leave. I believe the subject of this fight wasn't only her sleeping with this other man (who knows what really happened) but also that my mom was threatening that we would leave.
"I'm going to take him back to my mom and start a new life. This is wrong. David, you aren't listening, David I can't take this.. Look what we're doing to him. David calm down."
In all likelihood he was drunk by now, and my father was a particularly malicious venom-tongued drunk. At some point during her attempt at communicating David grabbed the shillelagh and smashed it through the wall. "You're going to take my son from me? Therese you weren't even here last night. Where were you? Who's going to watch him when you're off doing whatever that was?"
My mom grabbed me and left. We flew across the country to Los Angeles and her mother took us in. David soon followed. He tracked us down and somehow convinced mom to take him back. Shortly after my sister Emma was born. Later that year we moved back to New York and started this whole teepee business.
Rita and Chris were a lesbian couple that were family friends. Chris had a stable with an Appaloosa and was more handy than I will ever be. She had lived in a teepee for a couple months and loaned us hers to use. She helped us set it up but we didn't do a very good job of things. The top of a teepee is supposed to be very tight, in order to allow smoke to leave but not much rain to enter, our opening was about four or five times the size it should have been. The property where we made our semi-permanent camp was owned by an older couple that were friends of friends. I would lurk around outside their house, well as much as a five year old can lurk, until the woman would give me shortbread cookies. Because of our lacking teepee skills when it rained the water would put out whatever fire we had burning and collect inside the teepee, quickly turning the earth into mud. For this reason we kept our three person tent set up in case of rain.
That summer there were record rains. We spent entire days inside that tent. At the beginning of the summer we brought a small zoo along with us. I brought my turtle, Five Dollar Bill (his cost), my hamster (which ate all of its young and would readily attack even me), and a cat. Unlike the humans of our family, including my less than one year old sister who was learning to crawl on the forest floor, the animal family members quickly realized that there was no benefit to living with a family outdoors.
As unlikely as it seems, Five Dollar Bill was the first to escape. Our campsite was half a mile from a healthy river and the noise of rushing water could be heard during the night. On a night early in June, Five Dollar Bill slowly and purposefully walked out on me, right into that river.
The cat occasionally still came for food but had become even more aloof until one day it altogether stopped showing up. Most likely it replaced us with another family, a family with a house.
On warm, dry nights we slept in the teepee and took full advantage of the extra space. We kept some of our belongings in the tent, mostly books and things that had to stay dry. Among those things was the hamster's cage and in it the hamster. So on this night my sister and I were already asleep when my parents heard something rattling the cage. I must stress that this hamster was a terrible creature. Even at an age where I loved all living things and refused to eat meat, I knew this animal would never love me. It stood on its hind legs and hissed at me, barring its petite fangs whenever I tried to feed it.
So upon hearing this rattling, my mom says "Gee, it really sounds like something is trying to get into the hamster's cage.. Don't you hear it honey?"
"I don't think I hear anything."
"Are you sure? I sure wouldn't want anything to happen to her."
And as my parents feigned concern my last pet, although it was a poor terrible creature, was eaten alive by a raccoon.
Sep 29, 2009
Hope comes in the strangest forms
I've been mulling over doing what I really want to accomplish with my life and as usual have reached the standard conclusion: dedicating myself to writing. I'm very tired so this will probably be short. One of the concerns I naturally have about writing is that most people don't read and that the novel isn't a modern vehicle.
I don't mean to imply that I think that our other options are superior but that society as a whole spends most of its leisure time doing things other than reading. I'm sure this comes as a revelation. The whole issue of medium is sort of moot for me. I have no interest in writing something that I think is great only to see a lousy director or cast turn it into a radically different story. There are great TV series and great movies but when I think of the stories I want to tell I don't see them in pictures or as seasons, I see it as a book. I'm sure this partially has to do with the obscene amount of reading I did as a child and it being a much much better distraction from my at the time unpleasant reality than a movie or tv show could have ever been.
Much better writers than I have spent a great deal of energy explaining the advantages of the novel, and more talented (but also less hopeful) writers have felt heart-wrenching hopelessness for their literary endeavors(Jonathan Franzen for example)... I apologize I was looking for a nice quote from Franzen and started to get sucked into the abyss of an essay that is "Why Bother." He makes valid points and is very convincing about the death of the novel as our primary means of conversation, but he also easily captures the primary difference between a book and these other forms of media. The plot of a book takes place within the reader's imagination, there is nothing separating him or her from it.
Plus, I'm not entirely sure that there are less people reading today. We certainly spend less time reading but there are many more people today, what was a best seller in the 1940s would not be a best seller today. Regardless, yesterday I woke up in a sort of bleak mood. I had a couple realizations about lies I had been telling myself and wasn't quite sure where to go from there. I did my best to cut those pipe dreams off but I didn't account for them being my supports. The night before I had gone through quite a bit of old e-mails and old bits of writing. I was struck by how angry I was and also by how blind to guidance I could be. I read very direct e-mails with very clear advice to me that I completely ignored. I was younger but I'm still a bit shocked to see a fossil-record of my arrogance. I was completely cut off from my feelings and could easily ignore anyone whose flaws were apparent. I idealized everyone else.
I woke up feeling pretty uncertain about what I should be doing. Beneath my regret I saw some choice phrases and felt proud of myself too. One line I really liked was: "That simple night was worth the money it cost me, and the cold crying nights I spent alone in broken houses." Amongst these old e-mails was a list of residency programs from my friend Rick. Some of the deadlines are in two days, but others aren't until January. I am going to write something and submit it to as many January deadline residencies as I can find. I decided that, then as I looked over each programs' list of immensely talented authors. Well, I considered it, but I was still doubting this whole idea. I don't think that doubt is going anywhere. Deciding that you have something important enough to say is a pretty bold act on its own, but then you've got to dedicate years into refining and polishing whatever that is into some sort of cohesive narrative. It's impossibly daunting. Add to that the possibility or reality that most people just don't care and I think you have a good idea of what I was feeling at that moment.
So I drove to get my oil changed and brought the Brothers Karamazov with me. The man who set my appointment is there and he asks "What are you reading?"
"Oh, The Brothers Karamazov. I'm finishing it this time."
"It can be challenging but it is really worth it. I prefer it to Crime and Punishment."
He continued to tell me how the book was better in Russian but that he thought Pevear and Volokhonsky did the best English translation, and how happy he was to see a young person reading. I sat down in the empty business section, as far from the daytime soap opera playing on the television and happily opened the book while daydreaming about really writing a novel.
I am not a person who believes in fate but that day that man had a huge impact on me and his simple, polite question pushed me towards something that has been a desire I've been reluctant to acknowledge let alone grasp.
Earlier today an old friend linked me to this poem by our mutual friend's father who is a brilliant and successful musician. Dt had a brain tumor in the early nineties but it was removed and his skull was sealed shut with a metal plate. He continues to make amazing music and function at a level far beyond most people. Here's what he has to say:
very brief,
against the impossible
spun & spinning depths
of aeons & aeons & aeons of time.
play hard; play well; play forthrightly;
play as if it's the last chance
to chirrup like the smallest cricket
does for a single moment,
its particle of song
winking in, winking out,
the bulb just pops once
on this less-than-a-summer's-night
in our horizonless valley of cloud.
professional, student, teacher, hobbyist, whatever:
not one of us is guaranteed another tomorrow,
& every yesterday becomes
shadowier, unrealer
as it dissolves with & merges into
the intangibility of no-history,
no-traces.
play forthrightly; play well; play hard.
and,
enjoy the visit as ya can.
Good night.
I don't mean to imply that I think that our other options are superior but that society as a whole spends most of its leisure time doing things other than reading. I'm sure this comes as a revelation. The whole issue of medium is sort of moot for me. I have no interest in writing something that I think is great only to see a lousy director or cast turn it into a radically different story. There are great TV series and great movies but when I think of the stories I want to tell I don't see them in pictures or as seasons, I see it as a book. I'm sure this partially has to do with the obscene amount of reading I did as a child and it being a much much better distraction from my at the time unpleasant reality than a movie or tv show could have ever been.
Much better writers than I have spent a great deal of energy explaining the advantages of the novel, and more talented (but also less hopeful) writers have felt heart-wrenching hopelessness for their literary endeavors(Jonathan Franzen for example)... I apologize I was looking for a nice quote from Franzen and started to get sucked into the abyss of an essay that is "Why Bother." He makes valid points and is very convincing about the death of the novel as our primary means of conversation, but he also easily captures the primary difference between a book and these other forms of media. The plot of a book takes place within the reader's imagination, there is nothing separating him or her from it.
Plus, I'm not entirely sure that there are less people reading today. We certainly spend less time reading but there are many more people today, what was a best seller in the 1940s would not be a best seller today. Regardless, yesterday I woke up in a sort of bleak mood. I had a couple realizations about lies I had been telling myself and wasn't quite sure where to go from there. I did my best to cut those pipe dreams off but I didn't account for them being my supports. The night before I had gone through quite a bit of old e-mails and old bits of writing. I was struck by how angry I was and also by how blind to guidance I could be. I read very direct e-mails with very clear advice to me that I completely ignored. I was younger but I'm still a bit shocked to see a fossil-record of my arrogance. I was completely cut off from my feelings and could easily ignore anyone whose flaws were apparent. I idealized everyone else.
I woke up feeling pretty uncertain about what I should be doing. Beneath my regret I saw some choice phrases and felt proud of myself too. One line I really liked was: "That simple night was worth the money it cost me, and the cold crying nights I spent alone in broken houses." Amongst these old e-mails was a list of residency programs from my friend Rick. Some of the deadlines are in two days, but others aren't until January. I am going to write something and submit it to as many January deadline residencies as I can find. I decided that, then as I looked over each programs' list of immensely talented authors. Well, I considered it, but I was still doubting this whole idea. I don't think that doubt is going anywhere. Deciding that you have something important enough to say is a pretty bold act on its own, but then you've got to dedicate years into refining and polishing whatever that is into some sort of cohesive narrative. It's impossibly daunting. Add to that the possibility or reality that most people just don't care and I think you have a good idea of what I was feeling at that moment.
So I drove to get my oil changed and brought the Brothers Karamazov with me. The man who set my appointment is there and he asks "What are you reading?"
"Oh, The Brothers Karamazov. I'm finishing it this time."
"It can be challenging but it is really worth it. I prefer it to Crime and Punishment."
He continued to tell me how the book was better in Russian but that he thought Pevear and Volokhonsky did the best English translation, and how happy he was to see a young person reading. I sat down in the empty business section, as far from the daytime soap opera playing on the television and happily opened the book while daydreaming about really writing a novel.
I am not a person who believes in fate but that day that man had a huge impact on me and his simple, polite question pushed me towards something that has been a desire I've been reluctant to acknowledge let alone grasp.
Earlier today an old friend linked me to this poem by our mutual friend's father who is a brilliant and successful musician. Dt had a brain tumor in the early nineties but it was removed and his skull was sealed shut with a metal plate. He continues to make amazing music and function at a level far beyond most people. Here's what he has to say:
very brief,
against the impossible
spun & spinning depths
of aeons & aeons & aeons of time.
play hard; play well; play forthrightly;
play as if it's the last chance
to chirrup like the smallest cricket
does for a single moment,
its particle of song
winking in, winking out,
the bulb just pops once
on this less-than-a-summer's-night
in our horizonless valley of cloud.
professional, student, teacher, hobbyist, whatever:
not one of us is guaranteed another tomorrow,
& every yesterday becomes
shadowier, unrealer
as it dissolves with & merges into
the intangibility of no-history,
no-traces.
play forthrightly; play well; play hard.
and,
enjoy the visit as ya can.
Good night.
Sep 28, 2009
What living in Poughkeepsie was like during bird season
In my first year of college I lived across the river from New Paltz in Poughkeepsie. Poughkeepsie once had the highest GDP in New York. It also has more recently had the highest murder rate. After IBM downsized majorly the city sort of fell apart. There are parts that are really nice but it isn't exactly somewhere you would want to raise a family. This being the situation rent is cheap and I moved into a nice studio with hardwood floors. I lived a couple blocks away from my good friend. We were probably the only white people in the neighborhood by choice.
My friend Dan lived across the street from a corner store. Due to the convenience we'd often stop by for food. It took the owner awhile to realize that Dan in fact lived there, but as soon as he did the owner said "You know to lock your doors right? Don't walk around outside a lot okay? This is a bad neighborhood." This was a bit shocking because we're fairly certain the business was used to launder money. The owner drove to work in a new Mercedes but the store was almost always empty.
A couple months later I stopped by that store while Dan was finishing a paper. A young thug was buying cigarettes at the counter while I tried to choose between Cheese Doodlez and Cape Cod chips. I hear a loud "What up son?" and turn around to see another man come in pulling out a pistol and saying "Bang bang you dead motherfucker."
Neither the store clerk or the customer react. The young thug says "Nah, dawg I got my vest," and pulls his hoodie up to show that in fact he is wearing a bullet-proof vest. Welcome to the neighborhood.
Most of the area was pretty urban but there were trees scattered through the cityscape. I unfortunately lived near several tall oak trees. At first you might think that would be desirable but you would be terribly mistaken. I'm not sure where the birds came from but they decided that for a couple wonderful weeks they would be my new neighbors. I shared my street with people who had no qualms about putting a car on blocks and taking the wheels, but these new neighbors were a much bigger problem.
My car was parked outside in a small lot for the apartment building. The tree branches hung above every possible parking space. This wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for two to three hundred birds living in those trees. The birds were sources of two unpleasant things, noise and shit. Every morning they would wake up at 6 and fight as loud as possible. This went on for two or three days until one morning while I rustled around in my bed attempting and failing to fall back asleep I heard, "Yo you bitches need to shut up. I ain't playing no more."
Like a good Irish boy I looked out my window and saw one of my neighbors pull a pistol out and shoot into the air. A couple seconds later a bird fell to the ground. The others grew quiet and I went right back to sleep. The next day they acted as if nothing had happened and I think my neighbor realized his strategy wasn't cost-effective.
Speaking of cost-effective strategies I needed to find one for the bird shit. Everyday I spent ten minutes scraping off my windows so I could safely drive. Initially I thought I could wait them out, but the shit accumulated too quickly. The roof was the worst but somehow they would always manage to hit my door handles and windows. There was a lot a couple blocks away that I could park in and did occasionally but given the neighborhood I thought it was worth the car-washes and extra time spent with an ice-scraper. The first car wash I purchased was wasted quickly, before the day was over I could hardly tell the difference so I started to shop around for the best car wash deal in Poughkeepsie.
I'm not a clean freak or anything but I maintain a certain standard of cleanliness and this battle with the birds became a bit of an obsession for me. I found a car wash on the commercial strip of Poughkeepsie that had an unlimited car wash policy. The idea was that if your car got really dirty the same day they washed it they would wash it again for free. I have no idea who came up with this concept, maybe they thought I would be purchasing snacks every time I washed my car. I'm not sure. The worst part of the car washing was that I knew every guy who had any part of washing my god-forsaken car would be miserable. If it weren't for my defeated expression I would expect them to think I was pulling some sort of prank on them, but I wasn't, this was my life for a couple of special weeks in October.
The first time I went to the perfect car wash place for my needs with its unlimited washes per day guarantee the man washing my car looked at me with a look of horror but managed not to say anything as he struggled to reveal the true color of my car. When I came back that afternoon he was no longer quite as patient. As he saw me drive up he said, "What the fuck? What the fuck is happening to your car? Where are you parking, who is doing this to you?"
He sounded like he was about to lose his mind. I could tell since I was half-way there. "I'm sorry man. It's these birds. They're outside and they won't leave. All they do is shit all day and fight. I can't take it anymore." He nodded and started cleaning my car again. I imagine that morning he had thought, well after this car everything is going to be downhill, no other car is going to be as filthy as this, and in a sense he was right. I doubt anyone else came in with a dirtier car, but he didn't account for the possibility of me coming back that very day. At least he got paid the first time!
Eventually the birds left and allowed me to start sleeping regularly but more importantly I could finally stop getting my car washed 3-4 times a week. I'm really happy that guy shot one of them though.
My friend Dan lived across the street from a corner store. Due to the convenience we'd often stop by for food. It took the owner awhile to realize that Dan in fact lived there, but as soon as he did the owner said "You know to lock your doors right? Don't walk around outside a lot okay? This is a bad neighborhood." This was a bit shocking because we're fairly certain the business was used to launder money. The owner drove to work in a new Mercedes but the store was almost always empty.
A couple months later I stopped by that store while Dan was finishing a paper. A young thug was buying cigarettes at the counter while I tried to choose between Cheese Doodlez and Cape Cod chips. I hear a loud "What up son?" and turn around to see another man come in pulling out a pistol and saying "Bang bang you dead motherfucker."
Neither the store clerk or the customer react. The young thug says "Nah, dawg I got my vest," and pulls his hoodie up to show that in fact he is wearing a bullet-proof vest. Welcome to the neighborhood.
Most of the area was pretty urban but there were trees scattered through the cityscape. I unfortunately lived near several tall oak trees. At first you might think that would be desirable but you would be terribly mistaken. I'm not sure where the birds came from but they decided that for a couple wonderful weeks they would be my new neighbors. I shared my street with people who had no qualms about putting a car on blocks and taking the wheels, but these new neighbors were a much bigger problem.
My car was parked outside in a small lot for the apartment building. The tree branches hung above every possible parking space. This wouldn't be a problem if it weren't for two to three hundred birds living in those trees. The birds were sources of two unpleasant things, noise and shit. Every morning they would wake up at 6 and fight as loud as possible. This went on for two or three days until one morning while I rustled around in my bed attempting and failing to fall back asleep I heard, "Yo you bitches need to shut up. I ain't playing no more."
Like a good Irish boy I looked out my window and saw one of my neighbors pull a pistol out and shoot into the air. A couple seconds later a bird fell to the ground. The others grew quiet and I went right back to sleep. The next day they acted as if nothing had happened and I think my neighbor realized his strategy wasn't cost-effective.
Speaking of cost-effective strategies I needed to find one for the bird shit. Everyday I spent ten minutes scraping off my windows so I could safely drive. Initially I thought I could wait them out, but the shit accumulated too quickly. The roof was the worst but somehow they would always manage to hit my door handles and windows. There was a lot a couple blocks away that I could park in and did occasionally but given the neighborhood I thought it was worth the car-washes and extra time spent with an ice-scraper. The first car wash I purchased was wasted quickly, before the day was over I could hardly tell the difference so I started to shop around for the best car wash deal in Poughkeepsie.
I'm not a clean freak or anything but I maintain a certain standard of cleanliness and this battle with the birds became a bit of an obsession for me. I found a car wash on the commercial strip of Poughkeepsie that had an unlimited car wash policy. The idea was that if your car got really dirty the same day they washed it they would wash it again for free. I have no idea who came up with this concept, maybe they thought I would be purchasing snacks every time I washed my car. I'm not sure. The worst part of the car washing was that I knew every guy who had any part of washing my god-forsaken car would be miserable. If it weren't for my defeated expression I would expect them to think I was pulling some sort of prank on them, but I wasn't, this was my life for a couple of special weeks in October.
The first time I went to the perfect car wash place for my needs with its unlimited washes per day guarantee the man washing my car looked at me with a look of horror but managed not to say anything as he struggled to reveal the true color of my car. When I came back that afternoon he was no longer quite as patient. As he saw me drive up he said, "What the fuck? What the fuck is happening to your car? Where are you parking, who is doing this to you?"
He sounded like he was about to lose his mind. I could tell since I was half-way there. "I'm sorry man. It's these birds. They're outside and they won't leave. All they do is shit all day and fight. I can't take it anymore." He nodded and started cleaning my car again. I imagine that morning he had thought, well after this car everything is going to be downhill, no other car is going to be as filthy as this, and in a sense he was right. I doubt anyone else came in with a dirtier car, but he didn't account for the possibility of me coming back that very day. At least he got paid the first time!
Eventually the birds left and allowed me to start sleeping regularly but more importantly I could finally stop getting my car washed 3-4 times a week. I'm really happy that guy shot one of them though.
Sep 27, 2009
The Milstream
All my life whenever something really has troubled me or upset me I've gone to the same place. Somewhat deep in the woods behind a house I lived in a long time ago there is a stream. Its in Woodstock, past the Cuomo property and a couple miles upriver. We lived in that house when I was five after we had moved out of the tipi. I met Ayman and Aliya who were my best friends there, they lived below us and we spent hours of our lives playing Castlevania or Wizards and Warriors. Many snow days spent entirely staring at a television and mashing our thumbs frantically. When there wasn't snow on the ground we cut down saplings and made make-believe swords engraved with our initials.
Anytime I've peaked into the backyard of that house I am struck by how small everything is. As a young boy that backyard and the small thicket of woods behind it was a rich exciting world. Today I can see far past where I was allowed to explore as a kid. I remember walking along the frozen ice of the small stream in the winter. Anyways, back to where I go and why. Behind that small patch of woods there is a huge field, that extends far past our neighborhood to a place we called sled hill. I spent days in that field throwing boomerangs or wandering around looking up at the bright stars with my dad. Anytime there was a decent snowfall sled hill would be packed with everyone from the town.
Behind that large field was a soccer field where I started and finished my soccer career. At the age of six I was completely disgusted by parents yelling and screaming at us to kick a black and white ball in opposite directions on a field. I remember walking off in the middle of a game. I just didn't see the point. We had no idea what we were doing and the adults cared more than anyone on that field. Bordering the edges of that field was a thick forest. Paths led deeper into the woods toward the stream, along the way there were massive uprooted trees - which makes me think of my family covering ourselves with clay and posing in front of a massive tree's roots and my mom taking photographs. Eventually the path reaches the water but there is a steep drop and no safe way to get down to the rocks bordering the stream, there it splits in two and one can travel either to the right, upstream, or to the left, downstream. To find the particular place I prefer you take a right.
The forest floor is perennially covered in old pine needles. The path mostly follows the stream but draws closer and further from it occasionally. After awhile there is a tree that fell across the pathway. Someone cut a large section out of the middle and made each end of the tree into chairs for people to rest in. These makeshift seats are covered in carved initials of ancient young couples. The chair on the right side of the path is broken, its right armrest is missing. This landmark signals that soon it will be time to head to the riverbed. The river or stream itself is about twenty to thirty feet wide but not very deep. This of course depends on the rainfall. Sometimes I have visited only to find water dribbling between rocks. The stream itself is ancient. There are beautiful portions of the rock where the water has carved out pathways that run along the surface of these elevated portions of the riverbed. Small waterfalls appear here and there, or whirlpools where the water circles briefly before passing further downstream.
Generally here I would make my way further upstream balancing on rocks or walking along the trunk of fallen trees. I love the feeling of focus and calm as I try to jump from small rock to larger stone to the pebbles of the other side of the river. Sometimes I have to double back, but it reminds me of my fascination with mazes and labyrinths that I also had as a child. I would spend days navigating through the most complex labyrinths and then hours designing as intricate and massive a maze as I could painstakingly create. I think the reassuring thing about mazes is we know there is a way out.
I usually make my way upstream by crossing to the side most conducive for travel and keep my path on the stones of the river. The sound and smell of the water are really important to me. Moving water has always soothed me. After some time I reach where I think our swimming hole was. When I was young my parents made a small dam to trap water in a deeper portion of the river where the water ran slower. We would build rock sculptures and swim in the hot summer days. It always felt like my family was okay there. The water is cool and slightly green from the moss covering the stones underneath it. It is on the far side of the stream. I'm never positive if I've found the right spot but I don't fixate on it too much. A lot has changed over time, but the water is the same for the most part, and I walked on these very rocks long ago to find wherever our swimming hole might have been.
In my mental map of the river further up and on the side close to the path is where we released my father's ashes into the stream. I'm not sure if it was my mom or aunt's idea to bring him here but whoever thought of it, their reasoning was that this was somewhere that David (my father) had always been happy. Nature always seemed to help him fight his addiction. So after his funeral we had made our way here together, my sister, my mom, my dad's sister Robin and her husband Roger. The funeral was terrible. None of my father's true friends said a word about him. Everyone who was left had been stolen from and betrayed too many times to trust themselves to say only good. I had been estranged from him for three years when I found out he had overdosed and died. I thought about saying something but I couldn't. I didn't know what to say. I hated him for what he had done, and I hated him for leaving without fixing it. So instead of eulogies from people who knew him we had anecdotes from people who knew him as some sort of town character. I listened to how my dad had apparently always been reading and riding his bike through town with a smile on his face. Or how he was such a kind man. The truth was these people had no idea who my father was or what he was capable of. In all likelihood he didn't even like them.
My dad was always great with one or two people but anytime there was a party he was off alone. Maybe it was because he couldn't drink since my mom was watching but he never was gregarious. It also seemed very unlikely that all of these people had only seen my father do good things. He was an angry, violent drunk. He also was a heroin addict. The funeral was either an outright lie or a bunch of mindless strangers talking about someone they had made an acquaintance of. Being there was terrifying for me. I wondered what my funeral would look like and whether anyone would really be able to say anything true and wonderful about me, or if I would be alone with silent lost friends and vocal strangers. Or would anyone even be there? I didn't cry or feel like anything was resolved. There wasn't any release. I watched his girlfriend cry without any sympathy. She knew why we left him and yet she chose to love someone who was killing themselves.
Back to the ashes. I don't remember what we said but Emma, my Mom, Robin, Roger, and I all said something about my dad. For the first time in a long time I cried about him and felt relief. I was surprised by how much ash there was. It was stuck together and sealed in large plastic bags. We spread his ashes and left. All of the anger and disappointment I felt at his funeral was washed away. I felt like we had done exactly what he would have wanted and that for once we didn't have to worry about him.
I came back to that stream when I found out my girlfriend had cheated on me, I came back when I felt like I had failed and had no idea where to go, and every time I left feeling a bit better. Its a really special place to me but I have never shared it with anyone. I've had people who I technically could have shared it with but I've never brought anyone there. Maybe it is trust, but I also have felt an urge to bring someone important there, almost as though visiting this place would reveal something about me.
Anytime I've peaked into the backyard of that house I am struck by how small everything is. As a young boy that backyard and the small thicket of woods behind it was a rich exciting world. Today I can see far past where I was allowed to explore as a kid. I remember walking along the frozen ice of the small stream in the winter. Anyways, back to where I go and why. Behind that small patch of woods there is a huge field, that extends far past our neighborhood to a place we called sled hill. I spent days in that field throwing boomerangs or wandering around looking up at the bright stars with my dad. Anytime there was a decent snowfall sled hill would be packed with everyone from the town.
Behind that large field was a soccer field where I started and finished my soccer career. At the age of six I was completely disgusted by parents yelling and screaming at us to kick a black and white ball in opposite directions on a field. I remember walking off in the middle of a game. I just didn't see the point. We had no idea what we were doing and the adults cared more than anyone on that field. Bordering the edges of that field was a thick forest. Paths led deeper into the woods toward the stream, along the way there were massive uprooted trees - which makes me think of my family covering ourselves with clay and posing in front of a massive tree's roots and my mom taking photographs. Eventually the path reaches the water but there is a steep drop and no safe way to get down to the rocks bordering the stream, there it splits in two and one can travel either to the right, upstream, or to the left, downstream. To find the particular place I prefer you take a right.
The forest floor is perennially covered in old pine needles. The path mostly follows the stream but draws closer and further from it occasionally. After awhile there is a tree that fell across the pathway. Someone cut a large section out of the middle and made each end of the tree into chairs for people to rest in. These makeshift seats are covered in carved initials of ancient young couples. The chair on the right side of the path is broken, its right armrest is missing. This landmark signals that soon it will be time to head to the riverbed. The river or stream itself is about twenty to thirty feet wide but not very deep. This of course depends on the rainfall. Sometimes I have visited only to find water dribbling between rocks. The stream itself is ancient. There are beautiful portions of the rock where the water has carved out pathways that run along the surface of these elevated portions of the riverbed. Small waterfalls appear here and there, or whirlpools where the water circles briefly before passing further downstream.
Generally here I would make my way further upstream balancing on rocks or walking along the trunk of fallen trees. I love the feeling of focus and calm as I try to jump from small rock to larger stone to the pebbles of the other side of the river. Sometimes I have to double back, but it reminds me of my fascination with mazes and labyrinths that I also had as a child. I would spend days navigating through the most complex labyrinths and then hours designing as intricate and massive a maze as I could painstakingly create. I think the reassuring thing about mazes is we know there is a way out.
I usually make my way upstream by crossing to the side most conducive for travel and keep my path on the stones of the river. The sound and smell of the water are really important to me. Moving water has always soothed me. After some time I reach where I think our swimming hole was. When I was young my parents made a small dam to trap water in a deeper portion of the river where the water ran slower. We would build rock sculptures and swim in the hot summer days. It always felt like my family was okay there. The water is cool and slightly green from the moss covering the stones underneath it. It is on the far side of the stream. I'm never positive if I've found the right spot but I don't fixate on it too much. A lot has changed over time, but the water is the same for the most part, and I walked on these very rocks long ago to find wherever our swimming hole might have been.
In my mental map of the river further up and on the side close to the path is where we released my father's ashes into the stream. I'm not sure if it was my mom or aunt's idea to bring him here but whoever thought of it, their reasoning was that this was somewhere that David (my father) had always been happy. Nature always seemed to help him fight his addiction. So after his funeral we had made our way here together, my sister, my mom, my dad's sister Robin and her husband Roger. The funeral was terrible. None of my father's true friends said a word about him. Everyone who was left had been stolen from and betrayed too many times to trust themselves to say only good. I had been estranged from him for three years when I found out he had overdosed and died. I thought about saying something but I couldn't. I didn't know what to say. I hated him for what he had done, and I hated him for leaving without fixing it. So instead of eulogies from people who knew him we had anecdotes from people who knew him as some sort of town character. I listened to how my dad had apparently always been reading and riding his bike through town with a smile on his face. Or how he was such a kind man. The truth was these people had no idea who my father was or what he was capable of. In all likelihood he didn't even like them.
My dad was always great with one or two people but anytime there was a party he was off alone. Maybe it was because he couldn't drink since my mom was watching but he never was gregarious. It also seemed very unlikely that all of these people had only seen my father do good things. He was an angry, violent drunk. He also was a heroin addict. The funeral was either an outright lie or a bunch of mindless strangers talking about someone they had made an acquaintance of. Being there was terrifying for me. I wondered what my funeral would look like and whether anyone would really be able to say anything true and wonderful about me, or if I would be alone with silent lost friends and vocal strangers. Or would anyone even be there? I didn't cry or feel like anything was resolved. There wasn't any release. I watched his girlfriend cry without any sympathy. She knew why we left him and yet she chose to love someone who was killing themselves.
Back to the ashes. I don't remember what we said but Emma, my Mom, Robin, Roger, and I all said something about my dad. For the first time in a long time I cried about him and felt relief. I was surprised by how much ash there was. It was stuck together and sealed in large plastic bags. We spread his ashes and left. All of the anger and disappointment I felt at his funeral was washed away. I felt like we had done exactly what he would have wanted and that for once we didn't have to worry about him.
I came back to that stream when I found out my girlfriend had cheated on me, I came back when I felt like I had failed and had no idea where to go, and every time I left feeling a bit better. Its a really special place to me but I have never shared it with anyone. I've had people who I technically could have shared it with but I've never brought anyone there. Maybe it is trust, but I also have felt an urge to bring someone important there, almost as though visiting this place would reveal something about me.
Four or Five years ago
I wrote this.. Has some interesting snippets from my life and it was informative to see how I used to write.
My father and I are playing Frisbee. It’s the only “sport” he’ll play with me. He loves it. His eyes light up while they focus upon the Frisbee as it nears his hands. He encourages me as I make a somewhat impressive catch. We’re playing in front of the library in Woodstock. The grass has been cut recently, spring is just starting. He’s almost fully absorbed by our game of Frisbee. A regular father would probably be somewhat distracted by the bills, or possibly whatever work he has to do tomorrow. My father isn’t pre-occupied with such bullshit. He knows what’s important; he’s planning for his next fix. He’s an addict. To the untrained eye, Dad appears to be the best father a boy could have. He loves the hell out of me. He always pays attention to me. He’s actually cool. He doesn’t sit around complaining about this “new” music, instead he sits down and enjoys it. He loves Frisbee, me, my mother, my sister, movies, books, music, and drums. I forgot one thing. Heroin. He over-dosed twice in my presence, at twelve and then fourteen. I think in total he overdosed at least ten times—eventually dying when I was nineteen. I hadn’t had any real contact with him since I was fourteen. I couldn’t see the point. I mean he loved me, but we didn’t have him, something else did. People were surprised by my cold reaction to his death. I cried sure, but that was only because I could finally express my love for him—it was safe finally. Before he died, if I loved him I thought that would mean that I would make him a part of my life. So instead I hated him. It was the only practical solution. Strangers would tell me “I am so sorry for your loss.”
And I would think, “What loss? I never even had him.” So for the first time in my life I am coping with real loss.
Aside from my relationship with my mother only one girlfriend of mine has ever shown me that sort of love. I had her. I don’t mean in the possession sort of way, I mean she loved me. Completely. She and I are in my car, a Buick Park Avenue with blood red interior, at the gas station. It’s our typical meeting place. We live about an hour apart, and we share the burden as equitably as possible—since her old Saab is theoretically incapable of such a great distance of travel. It’s raining: water pouring out of the sky, pouring like god is trying to drown us, again. She lights up another cigarette and complains about the broken passenger window. Her first puff of smoke is always so practiced and precise, just totally fake. It looks like an actress in an old black and white, those elegant women couldn’t pull it off and here time and time again she tries to do it, tries to look cultured right after she has complained about the stupid fucking piece of shit or some other equally charming description. Plus I haven’t eaten yet. When I’m hungry smoke nauseates me, otherwise it’s not a problem. So I get out of the car and walk under the canopy, safe from the rain, into the gas station. The fluorescent lighting is blindingly white, holy heroin colored, I pay the attendant quickly, slightly disturbed by the sterilized environment and walk back out to my car. She’s looking at me sweetly as I open the door. Then she has that look. No, not that look, it’s the, I have to talk to you about something look. We share everything like best friends, so if something isn’t shared it’s usually a bad idea. Only one seat belt plug works in the front of my car, so as we’re automatically jury-rigging ourselves into our seat belts she says as smoke escapes leisurely from her mouth, “I think I’m going to do mushrooms again with Rachel and Marissa.”
I respond quickly, lying, “Yeah, I have to do heroin at least once before I die.” The plan is innocent enough. I’m a selfish man. If instead of challenging her about it I escalate the situation then perhaps she’ll rethink her plan. I look at her and her eyes are shimmering with tears, her eyebrows are raised, and her mouth is half open. It’s a dopey, hurt, questioning look.
“Why would you want to do that?”
“To prove that I’m better than him.”
“But you know you’re better than him. I do.”
“So I know what could be more important than me to my father.”
She looks at me, like a pet just betrayed by it’s owner, and I cave. “I promise you I won’t do it.”
She says, “Don’t do it for me, do it for you.”
“Okay, whatever.”
And we drive off in the rain, her satisfied and enjoying her cigarette, me contemplating heroin use. It was a cheap trick but it worked. I couldn’t help it. I was worried about her. She is a dreamer, I guess like all girls. Girls used to impress me with their ability to dream in detail. To dream the color of their true loves eyes, tone of skin, brightness of smile. It’s a pretty standard dream but for a time it impressed me. Girls are taught to dream about these things. I don’t think boys are. I think we’re taught to nurture dreams of success or a job or something. I don’t know, it’s not like I *had* a dad. She dreamt about falling in love, and it working out. You know, love for real. Dreams are a vital component for addiction. Someplace better has to be imagined in order for a person to become so thoroughly dissatisfied with here. The true dreamer creates their own world, but the casual dreamer remains somewhere in-between and therefore vulnerable to addiction. I wasn’t aware that she was infected with other pre-made dreams. Dreams about college that I’m sure accelerated my loss.
I didn’t think she was dissatisfied with me, but the world was surely a source of dissatisfaction for her. She hated it, and I loved her for it. She didn’t ground me, she encouraged me to run with my madness. Since she was unhappy with the world I worried about her and drugs. She had a bad history with alcohol, her dad died driving drunk, and she drank habitually throughout what would now be called middleschool. I must emphasize my dangerous attraction to unhappy people. I wrongly associate an unhappy disposition with a person who sees the world as I do. I see so much potential squandered, and it drives me crazy. It’s not about my personal situation it’s about the way things are—but for some people nothing is enough.
Some people might say, “What if your family loved your father more?” Or maybe “What if you loved her more?” In my loneliness and solitude I am plagued by post-midnight anxiety and insecurities leaving me vulnerable to these kinds of questions that haunt me—but during the light of day, which warms my soul and summons my senses I know better. I know how little a difference more love would’ve made, such an awful truth. With my father it might have meant a couple more years of pain. With my lover it might have meant a couple more months of tip-toeing around. In neither case would a great change take place. I’m starting to think maybe I didn’t have her after all. For both of them nothing was ever enough. I still hope for her, but I’m through saving people. “Jesus Christ tried to save everyone, look what they did to him. They killed the poor bastard.”—Henry Miller, The Rosy Crucifixion. Sometimes I get caught up in worrying about the world, bogged down in it, but then I rediscover the beauty of the world, the enormity of sensation as my lips touch lips or skin or much desired food, the overwhelming beauty of the landscape assaulting my eyes, the texture of it all—and I forget about her. I stop second-guessing myself about her beauty and charm and realize that I was for once seeing clearly—and now I need to see everything clearly, not just her. Once I do that I won’t miss her so much.
My father and I are playing Frisbee. It’s the only “sport” he’ll play with me. He loves it. His eyes light up while they focus upon the Frisbee as it nears his hands. He encourages me as I make a somewhat impressive catch. We’re playing in front of the library in Woodstock. The grass has been cut recently, spring is just starting. He’s almost fully absorbed by our game of Frisbee. A regular father would probably be somewhat distracted by the bills, or possibly whatever work he has to do tomorrow. My father isn’t pre-occupied with such bullshit. He knows what’s important; he’s planning for his next fix. He’s an addict. To the untrained eye, Dad appears to be the best father a boy could have. He loves the hell out of me. He always pays attention to me. He’s actually cool. He doesn’t sit around complaining about this “new” music, instead he sits down and enjoys it. He loves Frisbee, me, my mother, my sister, movies, books, music, and drums. I forgot one thing. Heroin. He over-dosed twice in my presence, at twelve and then fourteen. I think in total he overdosed at least ten times—eventually dying when I was nineteen. I hadn’t had any real contact with him since I was fourteen. I couldn’t see the point. I mean he loved me, but we didn’t have him, something else did. People were surprised by my cold reaction to his death. I cried sure, but that was only because I could finally express my love for him—it was safe finally. Before he died, if I loved him I thought that would mean that I would make him a part of my life. So instead I hated him. It was the only practical solution. Strangers would tell me “I am so sorry for your loss.”
And I would think, “What loss? I never even had him.” So for the first time in my life I am coping with real loss.
Aside from my relationship with my mother only one girlfriend of mine has ever shown me that sort of love. I had her. I don’t mean in the possession sort of way, I mean she loved me. Completely. She and I are in my car, a Buick Park Avenue with blood red interior, at the gas station. It’s our typical meeting place. We live about an hour apart, and we share the burden as equitably as possible—since her old Saab is theoretically incapable of such a great distance of travel. It’s raining: water pouring out of the sky, pouring like god is trying to drown us, again. She lights up another cigarette and complains about the broken passenger window. Her first puff of smoke is always so practiced and precise, just totally fake. It looks like an actress in an old black and white, those elegant women couldn’t pull it off and here time and time again she tries to do it, tries to look cultured right after she has complained about the stupid fucking piece of shit or some other equally charming description. Plus I haven’t eaten yet. When I’m hungry smoke nauseates me, otherwise it’s not a problem. So I get out of the car and walk under the canopy, safe from the rain, into the gas station. The fluorescent lighting is blindingly white, holy heroin colored, I pay the attendant quickly, slightly disturbed by the sterilized environment and walk back out to my car. She’s looking at me sweetly as I open the door. Then she has that look. No, not that look, it’s the, I have to talk to you about something look. We share everything like best friends, so if something isn’t shared it’s usually a bad idea. Only one seat belt plug works in the front of my car, so as we’re automatically jury-rigging ourselves into our seat belts she says as smoke escapes leisurely from her mouth, “I think I’m going to do mushrooms again with Rachel and Marissa.”
I respond quickly, lying, “Yeah, I have to do heroin at least once before I die.” The plan is innocent enough. I’m a selfish man. If instead of challenging her about it I escalate the situation then perhaps she’ll rethink her plan. I look at her and her eyes are shimmering with tears, her eyebrows are raised, and her mouth is half open. It’s a dopey, hurt, questioning look.
“Why would you want to do that?”
“To prove that I’m better than him.”
“But you know you’re better than him. I do.”
“So I know what could be more important than me to my father.”
She looks at me, like a pet just betrayed by it’s owner, and I cave. “I promise you I won’t do it.”
She says, “Don’t do it for me, do it for you.”
“Okay, whatever.”
And we drive off in the rain, her satisfied and enjoying her cigarette, me contemplating heroin use. It was a cheap trick but it worked. I couldn’t help it. I was worried about her. She is a dreamer, I guess like all girls. Girls used to impress me with their ability to dream in detail. To dream the color of their true loves eyes, tone of skin, brightness of smile. It’s a pretty standard dream but for a time it impressed me. Girls are taught to dream about these things. I don’t think boys are. I think we’re taught to nurture dreams of success or a job or something. I don’t know, it’s not like I *had* a dad. She dreamt about falling in love, and it working out. You know, love for real. Dreams are a vital component for addiction. Someplace better has to be imagined in order for a person to become so thoroughly dissatisfied with here. The true dreamer creates their own world, but the casual dreamer remains somewhere in-between and therefore vulnerable to addiction. I wasn’t aware that she was infected with other pre-made dreams. Dreams about college that I’m sure accelerated my loss.
I didn’t think she was dissatisfied with me, but the world was surely a source of dissatisfaction for her. She hated it, and I loved her for it. She didn’t ground me, she encouraged me to run with my madness. Since she was unhappy with the world I worried about her and drugs. She had a bad history with alcohol, her dad died driving drunk, and she drank habitually throughout what would now be called middleschool. I must emphasize my dangerous attraction to unhappy people. I wrongly associate an unhappy disposition with a person who sees the world as I do. I see so much potential squandered, and it drives me crazy. It’s not about my personal situation it’s about the way things are—but for some people nothing is enough.
Some people might say, “What if your family loved your father more?” Or maybe “What if you loved her more?” In my loneliness and solitude I am plagued by post-midnight anxiety and insecurities leaving me vulnerable to these kinds of questions that haunt me—but during the light of day, which warms my soul and summons my senses I know better. I know how little a difference more love would’ve made, such an awful truth. With my father it might have meant a couple more years of pain. With my lover it might have meant a couple more months of tip-toeing around. In neither case would a great change take place. I’m starting to think maybe I didn’t have her after all. For both of them nothing was ever enough. I still hope for her, but I’m through saving people. “Jesus Christ tried to save everyone, look what they did to him. They killed the poor bastard.”—Henry Miller, The Rosy Crucifixion. Sometimes I get caught up in worrying about the world, bogged down in it, but then I rediscover the beauty of the world, the enormity of sensation as my lips touch lips or skin or much desired food, the overwhelming beauty of the landscape assaulting my eyes, the texture of it all—and I forget about her. I stop second-guessing myself about her beauty and charm and realize that I was for once seeing clearly—and now I need to see everything clearly, not just her. Once I do that I won’t miss her so much.
Sep 23, 2009
Family
“The important thing to remember when meeting someone like Haley is that everyone has an agenda. Haley cannot be trusted simply because she laughs on cue, or listens to every word. She wants something; whether that is, simply to be admired or something darker only time will reveal. Don’t get comfortable,” were Shepherd’s last words before I boarded my flight to Los Angeles.
When I first met Haley I thought she was gorgeous. She was waiting at the airport with a small sign for me. She was tall, thin and insubstantial. Her blond hair hung loosely over her narrow shoulders. Even from afar her eyes were focused and bright blue. I wondered why Shepherd had warned me.
We hugged comfortably, “Oh it is so good to finally meet you, I’ve heard so much from Shepherd about you.”
“Shepherd and you talk? I thought he’d have told Rob.”
“They’re brother’s, I don’t think there is much to be said anymore. He calls but usually he and I talk longer. We’re really happy you’re here.”
She drove me to their large home in a nice neighborhood, did everything she could to make me comfortable and I lay down, listened to Iron & Wine for a bit and then fell asleep.
I woke up the next morning to the smell of eggs and coffee. Haley was making Rob breakfast. Rob is I guess my uncle too by association. He’d been working late last night so now was the first I saw him. He had whisps of silver in his stubble and bags under his eyes, but his smile was genuine and bright when he saw me and gave me a huge hug.
“I’m really glad you’re here.”
“Thanks for having me. It’s good to see you too.”
Haley quietly set the table and served Rob and I breakfast. She refused to join us, insisting it was her pleasure. “So will I be starting work today?”
“No, honey you have to recover from your jetlag. I’ll open up and Rob will go see about a couple of old books we might take on consignment. You’ll have the place to yourself.”
This was a dedicated, brilliant, intelligent woman – of course Shepherd was intimidated and wary. I suppose he was right to warn me, even with his warning I felt an inkling of the infatuation I had growing for her.
Shepherd sent me to make sure everything was being run properly at his father’s business. He is sort of my uncle, and with me having nothing to do this summer it seemed like a good idea for me to visit California and learn something about business. Los Angeles is a strange place for a rare bookstore, but they also carry original Hollywood posters and memorabilia, which I imagine is where most of their profits come from.
When I first met Haley I thought she was gorgeous. She was waiting at the airport with a small sign for me. She was tall, thin and insubstantial. Her blond hair hung loosely over her narrow shoulders. Even from afar her eyes were focused and bright blue. I wondered why Shepherd had warned me.
We hugged comfortably, “Oh it is so good to finally meet you, I’ve heard so much from Shepherd about you.”
“Shepherd and you talk? I thought he’d have told Rob.”
“They’re brother’s, I don’t think there is much to be said anymore. He calls but usually he and I talk longer. We’re really happy you’re here.”
She drove me to their large home in a nice neighborhood, did everything she could to make me comfortable and I lay down, listened to Iron & Wine for a bit and then fell asleep.
I woke up the next morning to the smell of eggs and coffee. Haley was making Rob breakfast. Rob is I guess my uncle too by association. He’d been working late last night so now was the first I saw him. He had whisps of silver in his stubble and bags under his eyes, but his smile was genuine and bright when he saw me and gave me a huge hug.
“I’m really glad you’re here.”
“Thanks for having me. It’s good to see you too.”
Haley quietly set the table and served Rob and I breakfast. She refused to join us, insisting it was her pleasure. “So will I be starting work today?”
“No, honey you have to recover from your jetlag. I’ll open up and Rob will go see about a couple of old books we might take on consignment. You’ll have the place to yourself.”
This was a dedicated, brilliant, intelligent woman – of course Shepherd was intimidated and wary. I suppose he was right to warn me, even with his warning I felt an inkling of the infatuation I had growing for her.
Shepherd sent me to make sure everything was being run properly at his father’s business. He is sort of my uncle, and with me having nothing to do this summer it seemed like a good idea for me to visit California and learn something about business. Los Angeles is a strange place for a rare bookstore, but they also carry original Hollywood posters and memorabilia, which I imagine is where most of their profits come from.
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