Tupelo

I’ve always been so drawn to the breakdown of systems. Those moments when everything seems to fall apart or come undone or when stress and tension envelope a moment like a typhoon. Those moments when nature seems to flip over on its head and see its stars ringing around like a cartoon halo. I’ve always lived for these feelings of chaos and tension. These energies have fueled so much of my joy and disaster. I can’t imagine a life without them.

My first memory of being so utterly enraptured and excited by this feeling was in first grade. We were all getting ready to go to lunch which meant for many of us, who weren’t sent to school with the dollar or likely well less that would buy a cafeteria meal, that we’d march to the back of the room and retrieve our little lunch boxes. Sometimes I’d have one and I think it was a metal Partridge Family one. I was way into The Partridge Family in first grade. As a matter of fact, my Mom and my Grandmother took me to my very first concert a year later to see David Cassidy at the Baltimore Civic Center. I’m sure I was mesmerized but by second grade my musical tastes were definitely being challenged.

              So those of us with fancy lunch boxes would walk back to the large rolling coatracks that in the morning, we’d put all of our coats and bags and lunchboxes in. At some point, I suppose by the teacher or a selected little cadre of helpers, they’d be rolled around as their backs were precious space to hang screwy kid’s drawings or maybe posters of the food pyramid or maybe just a big glossy newt. Could have been anything. At lunch, they’d be rolled back around, and we’d scramble to get our boxes and get in line for the cafeteria march.

              One day, a little girl, and who could possibly remember her, for some reason opened her box while getting in line and started all but crying and certainly gaining the teacher’s interest. The next thing I distinctly remember was all of us back at our desks, dead quiet and hearing the teacher very sternly say, “No one is leaving this room until I find out who did this!”

              Boom! There it was. My first taste or at least my first memory of complete stress and tension within a group of scared and confused people. I distinctly remember feeling thrilled and completely engaged in the buzz of fear in the room. Now, mind you this was surely because whatever the source of the disruption I knew it wasn’t me. I’ve been in other similar situations in my life where I was actually the culprit in a group-wide standoff and I never liked those sorts of stress. But I was innocent and so I just felt riveted.

              It turned out that at some point during the morning, someone had put one of those little round metal cans of ant poison in the crying girl’s lunch. If you’re of a certain age maybe, you remember them. They were about two inches wide and maybe a half-an-inch tall, little red cans with little holes in the side. They were ubiquitously placed but almost never noticed in almost every corner of every room under pieces of furniture or such, discreetly out of view. Well, someone noticed one and decided to put it in the lunchbox of one of the little girls. At that age, I’m sure it was a sign of having a crush on her or maybe the early signs of psychopathy. Funny how a lot of the early acts are so similar. And so, the teacher, upon seeing the tears gently fall from my little schoolmate’s face and onto the little red can nestled next to a wax paper-wrapped sandwich and banana became apoplectic. And so here we sat. And we sat. No one seemed to be rising to claim guilt. It truly was a delicious standoff. I can’t remember how long it lasted. I seem to remember the lockdown produced a scared and guilty little immemorable boy sitting on the other side of the room. Perhaps he wasn’t wired like me, and the stress drove him to tears and thus being found out. Maybe someone else, also not like me, buckled under the pressure, and told on him. All I know is that I’m not still in that room and I hold that memory as precious.

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I’ve told you about the kids who lived next door to my grandmother’s house where I spent so much of my youth. I’ve told you about Scott and Doodz, or Doodj or, again, who knows how to spell such a nickname? They were the first true older delinquent kids I ever met and I idolized them. They weren’t too old to not want me hanging around but they seemed much, much older than me. They were probably around 13 and 14 to my 7 or 9. I try to find markers and it’s hard to tell. I know that because of them, my uncle Dicky bought me Deep Purple’s “Who do We Think We Are?” album for Christmas when I was in second grade as the brothers had already introduced me to “Machine Head” and I was hooked. So, by whatever ever age second grade is, I was hanging out with the older kids who smoked, blew up things and showed me porn. Such magical things for a little boy at that age. And they were kind to me. They never fucked with me beyond the normal screwing around all kids do. I certainly felt safe with them. They were at the core of a much larger but similarly aged and behaving group of boys. I don’t remember any girls and I think I’d remember them if only because of the magazines I’d been shown exposing me to the magic of a naked female body, but they don’t appear in these memories. I wish they did.

My Uncle Dicky who gave me my first real rock record was my Dad’s younger brother. At the time I suppose he was in his mid to late twenties or so. In some of these movies, I’m seeing he still lives with my grandparents and in some, he’s gone but nearby and is often at the house anyway. In any case, he was the other cool uncle in my life. Whenever I was with him, I felt like he was the one adult who, while certainly seeing me as a child, wasn’t in any way afraid to be exactly who he was around me. He didn’t talk as much as my Dad, which is an unfair comparison since my Dad would and did talk with anyone in his field of view, happily and openly. Uncle Dicky was much more reserved, but he also felt completely confident and in control of his world. God knows what he was actually feeling but as a little boy he was just some sort of regal stoic who allowed me to be me and never felt the need or responsibility to edit himself around me. He was certainly happy, he seemed; his nature was not one of depression or shyness. He just seemed like someone who spoke and laughed in exactly the correct amount. He was the shepherd in some ways of this little band of neighborhood delinquents it seemed. I’m not sure how that came to be, but I suppose it had to do with Scott and Doodz growing up next to him as he was a teen becoming a man. I suppose they looked up to him like I did to them. Along with them their friends eventually came. I think his main activity with all of them likely came from playing sports with them as kids and being a sort of defacto coach. I have many memories of playing catch with him in my grandmom’s backyard. Another memory is with him and my aunt Eileen’s new husband Uncle Lou.

Uncle Lou was from Greece. It seemed as though he arrived in America and married my aunt within days. I’m sure that’s not the case but he was fully From Greece. I had a really hard time understanding him with his very broken English. I don’t really know and certainly didn’t at that age know what a typical old-school Greek guy was like, but I definitely knew and was fascinated by how different he was from everyone. He was from another planet it seemed to me. And I say that with all the love in the world. I was so joyously baffled by his beyond-thick accent. And he made food that I’d never seen before, and it was mysterious and wonderful. At any family gathering, he’d make huge Greek salads topped with mounds of some new mana called feta. He’d make massive piles of dolmades, these perfect little rolls of grape leaves rolled around some filling of meat and rice and spices that had never hit my tongue before or certainly not in that combination. Grape leaves! Who ever even considered that grapes had leaves? And, like almost everyone else in the family except my parents, he smoked continuously. Uncle Lou was most certainly a wild and welcome addition to my little world as far as I was concerned. And he loved football, as he oddly called it. The day came when I found out what he meant by football.

Uncle Dicky and Uncle Lou took me out back one day to teach me football. I was a baseball purist, but I certainly knew football. If you grew up anywhere near Baltimore, you grew up with the Colts. The Baltimore Colts were as much a religion as were the Orioles. Of course, that is until the shameful day when their cocksucker of an owner, and literally under cover of darkness, sold and moved the team to Indianapolis. But that’s a whole other story. And so, when they told me they were going to teach me football I was somewhat nonplussed; what more could I know? And then I saw the soccer ball and Uncle Lou told me that this was a real football, and that soccer was some bastardized term for something the entire world knew about except us backward Americans. We started kicking the ball around growing gradually farther and farther apart. At first, it was just standing and waiting for the ball to come my way and then stopping it and kicking it back to one of my Uncles. And then it started morphing into some other thing. Something that involved sort of running along together kicking the ball to each other as we ran. Uncle Lou tapping the ball over to me as we sped up.  And then it became trying to keep Uncle Lou from stealing the ball away from my little feet. Gentle at first but all the time running. And then it shifted into broken English commands telling me to try and get the ball away from him. And all the while still running now using the next-door neighbor’s yard which gracefully merged into my Grandmom’s yard. A long flat field of beautiful green grass on a magically warm and bright summer day. A long flat field of pain. We kept running. I was trying to keep up with Uncle Lou, urged on by his Greek-accented commands to “Come! Come and get it from me!” or something like that. I kept running. I was no closer to stealing this football as he called it than I was to getting high on the dark side of the moon with Melinda. But I had to keep running, from one side of the two backyards to the next. I remember Uncle Dicky standing and smoking from the far corner of my Grandmoms yard. Just sort of watching, both of them thinking I was having a ball. I was in some sort of little boy hell. I kept running because I kept being told to by someone who was clearly doing it out of love. I could feel that from Uncle Lou. He was trying to share something he loved with me. He was trying to teach me, and it hurt. I remember my sides hurting and just wanting to collapse. I had never run so much. There’s none of this nonsense in baseball. Just short little bursts of sometimes heroic loping or usually defeated ninety feet sprints. But I kept going, nowhere near this teasing white ball. “Come! Come use your feet and take it!” I was near passing out. I remember the feeling so distinctly of, for the first time almost blacking out. It was a new sensation I had no name for but later in my life, I’d do things that would put me in this near-death state, and I’d link it back to this initial taste. And I just kept trying to run but the camera-me pulls back and sees a little kid stumbling along, body lurched forward, head down, panting with arms flailing and… I just stopped. I just collapsed, completely out of breath. I remember feeling utterly defeated and almost ashamed, but I was at my fat little boy limit. They were both kind. I hated soccer ever since.

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My baseball practice went better with Uncle Dicky. I don’t know if it was before or after the soccer day; all my memories of that age at my Grandmom’s house seem to have happened on the same day. All except for the day when Brian died. At some point during that years-long day, I came to on a baseball field near my Grandmom’s house.

I just looked at Google Maps. Jesus! There it is. Middle River Middle School. We were there on one of the baseball diamonds. Google Earth says all fields are “temporarily closed.” What does that mean? Well, you can play baseball just fine on fields the world says should be temporarily closed.

In my memory which is as precious as is it shimmering behind a veil of a lifetime of other memories, I’m in left field. I have no idea how it formed or how all of us got here but I’m playing a game of baseball with all the older, magical soon-to-be-broken boys of my Grandmom’s neighborhood. I just know without any way to know that all of them wound up somewhere near where I did with my life. Even at that age, I could tell they were the BAD KIDS, and I was hooked. There’s always some fright when we first get caught up in some version of a beautiful disaster we’re drawn to. It was the confusion and the scary unknown factor of these boys I was so pulled to. They were chaos made flesh.

There must have been at least a dozen or so of us. We weren’t playing a game. Uncle Dicky was just pitching and there were always about four kids taking turns batting. I just remember being in left field and watching everyone. They were all yelling and joking and cursing. They were cursing around a grownup! And it was fine. Uncle Dicky didn’t stop them, and everyone knew he wouldn’t and they were free to just be teenage boys having fun and laughing about fucking girls. I distinctly remember the kid at shortstop yelling to some other kid, “You can’t fuck her. Her pussy’s too loose!” Jesus! Everyone was laughing and Uncle Dicky was kind of smirking too and just kept pitching. These kids had no other adult who’d just let them be fucking teenage kids without trying to coral them or edit them or shut them down. Yet, in his way, I think Uncle Dicky thought that just letting them be them was in some way saving them from some small part of what lie ahead of them. He cared. And I was truly in awe.

I remember all of this and in the movie I see, I’m in left field for maybe a half hour just taking all of this in. And then I feel a drop of water on my arm. I look up and notice the bright summer day sky has grown angry and dark. Maybe we saw it coming but I want to remember it as something that just came upon us. Within minutes we were in a deluge. A very typical Maryland summer thunderstorm. Nature flipping on its head. And it wasn’t that there was a sudden storm of what I want to be of biblical proportions. No. That’s perfectly natural. The chaos was that we just kept playing. We just kept going joyously, and with yells and laughter just kept playing in the downpour. In all my young life nothing was as sure as rain meant no baseball. And on this day Uncle Dicky just said, “fuck the rain!” and just kept pitching. I’d never felt the joy of doing something so forbidden and with such a crowd of wildings. We just kept going as if we were waiting for the rain and playing without it was just the warm-up.

I don’t know how long we kept playing but I know for sure that the normal reaction to a storm when you’re on a baseball diamond did not happen. It felt different from the first-grade, ant poison lockdown. It felt different from the moment I clocked Jimmy Humphry, but it was all of the same world. The world of things just going wrong. Beautifully and epiphanically wrong. And that’s all I ever wanted. Uncle Dicky gave that to me that day and allowed me and all the kids to revel in it. I know they all wound up like me because I could tell they all were wrapping themselves around the chaos as well. Yelling about pussy and fucking and playing even harder. And lots of rain-drenched laughter sometimes muted by the thunder and lightning. Fuck. Will there ever be a day like that again? What I wouldn’t give.