Harmony

I was just such a little kid. Maybe I was 8 or 9. Maybe I was more or less. None of it matters as I was in this room with this person and nothing about me is important. He sits at the far end of a weathered and well-used kitchen table. His back presses lightly against a chair that rests contently below a window, letting in summer Maryland sunlight. He sits there and beckons me with his silent hands.

My Mom's father sits in this chair with a feeding tube in his throat. I've asked my Mom what he was actually suffering from, and she tells me it was throat cancer. He couldn't speak. He could rasp some labored syllables and gesture tiredly towards me, the little grandson who stood somewhat afraid and awed at the other end of the table. I can sense other adults like my Mom and Grandmom behind me in this flickering memory. This was a presentation. My Mom offered me this to her father; he was trying so hard to express love despite his condition. I walked over to him.

The memory fades, but I know I embraced him. I know I did that. Without any memory to prove it and where the hell did that go? I know I walked six feet along the edge of the sunlit table, stood before him, and felt him wrap his dying arms around me and, oh my God, please allow me to have hugged him back. But I don't remember. I can only see this frail and wrinkled man urging me to come and accept his love. In the perfect movie of my life, the actual documentary, that's what we see. On the huge Arclight screen, if they only still existed, you'd see me hugging my grandfather, who sat in the sunlight day after day, waiting for someone to touch him and clear his feeding tube.

                                                                                   ***

After all of this, things in the family shifted. They morphed into other worries. My grandad wasn't forgotten but another layer laid upon our family, or at least my Mom's family's pile of worry. My uncle Charley, my Mom's younger brother and the cherished baby of the family, wound up in Viet Nam. I didn't know what that meant at the time, but I knew it was bad. All of the most formative years included nightly reports of THE WAR. My father watched the news religiously. I watched as well but always wished it would end. Not the war but just the news. Even as a little kid, I hated THE NEWS. It never seemed to bring any sort of happiness or even relief into our house. It was just a constant stream of bad things injected into the right arm of our family. I watched because my dad did, but I did so with an unknown reticence. I was just a little kid. Not yet molested. Not yet a junky. I was just this little thing taking all of it in and knew my uncle Charley was in the middle of it.

Uncle Charley wrote lots of letters while he was there in Cu Chi, Vietnam. Cu Chi was, as he's told me, a place of relentless daily marches into madness, death and time-stopping boredom. And so he wrote letters to my Mom and my Grandmom. Maybe he wrote to others, but these two are what concern me. He wrote my grandmother soft generalized depictions of his year there meant to keep her safe. Safe from the truth of what he was up against. To my Mom, he wrote entirely different letters, she's told me. She got the truth, or at least as much of it as he was willing to share. I suspect even my Mom got some sort of edited but still direct version of his life. And it wore on here.

I don't remember her ever talking to me about what she knew was happening to her baby brother in green jungles; at times turned pink with the complete disintegration of a human body as it stepped on a hidden landmine. She kept these to herself, but I remember the sheen of worry that I had no words for whenever Charley came up by name in my house. I just remember feeling some sort of confused fear.

Eventually, he came home. He made it, as so many of his friends were left behind, only to return home in mass-produced caskets. He made it home, and I see him walk into my Grandmom's front door. I was there with my mother. It was a surprise. My Grandmom had no idea,  just twelve months of worry to lead her to this moment. I stood there in the dining room. My grandfather is not a part of this, and I don't know if he'd gone by them or maybe still sitting in that sun-drenched kitchen chair. I see my uncle Charley walk in, dressed in his formal military uniform and smiling so broadly, and wrap his arms around my completely flummoxed and crying, grandmother. She was reduced to a single pool of joyful tears as she tried to open her eyes to take him in. He engulfed her and held her tight for minutes. I see the sun on the walls. I see my mother crying. I see his polished shoes. I see the end to something everyone hated. I see him home.

                                                                     ***

In time I became what would become me. I became a quiet kid but in no way introverted. My impulse was to gather people around me, but I started to suspect that not everyone was interested in the things I thought were precious. That's something that's haunted and attacked me for most of my life. I so often wanted to share things I was passionate about or maybe things I found incredibly funny, and once let loose from my little mouth under big brown eyes, I'd be met with, "you're weird" or something similar. Something completely dismissive. The lack of connection when sharing something epiphanic killed me. And so I learned to look inward and be more careful. I certainly never figured it out completely and have so often experienced these moments of denigration and words meant to devalue me; I tried, but my passion at times would break through, and I'd share. And so often it was just…. Not always, but I can't even remember times when my loves were embraced. Surely they were at times, but they didn't puncture the prefrontal cortex. I don't remember them. I only remember the times I felt a knife slide into my heart. But still, I kept going all in on things I thought were magical. I've never stopped that.

In the swirling mist of memory, I'm young. Very young. But old enough to be obsessed with y second or third music idol. At first, it was the Partridge Family and David Cassidy. Just such a little kid grooving and forming around TV show Gods singing to my little sofa-laid body. I was enthralled. Next was either Deep Purple or Elton John. I know where Deep Purple and Machine Head came from, but I have no idea where Elton John entered my life. During one early summer, I went to Ocean City, MD, with my friend Stu Raynor and his family. We all went there. It's where everyone went for that one sparking and wet summer week. Vacation, they called it. When I arrived home, I found that my bedroom was covered in white shag carpeting, chrome and geometric patterned wallpaper, and the rest was painted purple. My Mom did that for me because she loved me. And this is what she thought Elton John meant to me. Maybe one of the most beautiful and loving things anyone's done for me.

I sit in front of the huge wood console that has a turntable and speakers behind a pattern of quilted fabric. I sit before the stereos of the time. I remember sitting there with a record cover in my hands. Maybe Goodbye Yellowbrick Road and maybe something else entirely. But I think it was the former, and I was listening to Harmony. The first song I ever cried to. "Gee, I really love you, and I want to love you forever" It all formed then. My love of love. My unknown attachment to her and how much power that involved. Harmony. Jesus.

I'm very little. Maybe even young enough to be before The Thing. I turn, and my uncle Charley is standing on the other side of the room as if he's just walked in from the garage door that leads into the laundry room and, with a quick turn, brings him into the family room. I see him and my Mom and dad. Looking at me. He's wearing one of those brown suede jackets with fringes. In time I'd get one to parade my love of Neil Young, but it never fit right, and the joy I expected slowly dwindled. I wasn't worth it.

He looked at me happily and just asked, "Do you have any Pink Floyd?" No adult had ever engaged with me on such an intimate level. And while I was years away from being fully consumed by Pink Floyd, at that moment, I could only say "no," but I remember the thrill of an adult asking me something as an equal. That's what lands. An adult in an absurd hippy jacket simply asking me if maybe I had some music he was into. Me, at maybe 8 or 9 years old.

                                                                     ***

Uncle Charley was always on the periphery of our lives but so incredibly loved. He lived in Aspen for years, skiing and making stained glass lamps and silver belt buckles. He'd been through more than any of us and just wanted to live. God knows I'm sure he had his own demons, but he was like some shining angel to me and such a rare occurrence. He'd appear as if by magic over the years at various half-assed family reunions, my family on both my Mom's and my dad's side anemic and all but unknown. Never a simple reference from my parents to their own grandparents. It was as if our families appeared out of the ether with my grandparents, and it all ended with me. The last of the Coulters.

In time I grew, he remained the "cool" uncle on my Mom's side. He married Bobby, who is still with him. A beautiful woman who pulses joy and movement. A movement to love and new experiences. By high school, they were married and lived near us, above the state line and into Pennsylvania. They lived on a beautiful farm with acres of dog-running land and old wooden structures containing wood-burning stoves. In high school, I wanted to live there. They talked about Neil Young and Pink Floyd and other people my parents and no adults ever talked about. In time they moved to California long before me. But they were there when I needed them.

                                                                     ***

Uncle Charley would do anything if asked. And the day came when my Mom, I suppose, asked him to check in on me. I was well into the depths of junkydom and living in a studio flat in Los Feliz. Here is where my love for Denise happened, and the first moves into loving Stephanie awkwardly coalesced. He drove from Long Beach to talk to me and take me to some rehabs to see if I could get into one. The heroin addiction floated above us unsaid for the entire day. It was the only reason we drove together that day in his car, but it was too horrible and heavy to speak about. I think I simply told him I'd be sick soon. At the end of the day, I went to his house to wait and kick until I could get into someplace. I found stuff.

The next morning I remember finding Vicodin or maybe Tylenol 3s. Whatever they were, I ate all of them straight from the medicine cabinet. I took a shower, something I really did and still loathe. Fuck, I hate being wet. I emerged from the shower, put on my pants, and walked into the kitchen, where the guest bathroom opened. Booby was there. She was overwhelmed by how emaciated I was. I still felt fat. She saw me as a concentration camp prisoner. I wish I could see myself like that. I can't. I'm always a fat 10-year-old. And so we went forward. I got into some rehab and did the deal. It ended. I stayed sober for a while, and then I shot dope. But Uncle Charley was there for me, and so was Bobbie. They've always been there for me, and I don't connect with them like I should. They're only about 20 miles away, yet I treat it like a galaxy.

                                                                     ***

When I was in school to get my Master's and become a therapist, I had to take a military trauma class. What worse trauma is there? My final project was to interview a vet. I asked Charley if he'd be willing to do it. I expected a loving "no." But he said sure. And so the day came when I wound up in a little room off of his garage with my love Linda sitting behind me, and he told me everything. Jesus. He told me everything.

Charley's a fucking hero to me. In so many ways. Surely the Vietnam stuff is enough, but more it's about his willingness and drive to reach out and love people. Anyone. Everyone. That's what makes him my hero.

And God knows I've been listening to Pink Floyd ever since.