The Passenger

I always seem to get things backward. Not everything but stuff you'd just assume you'd get right. Like, I've always hidden the parts of me that ultimately, once exposed, attracted people to me. I got that backward always. The other seemingly obvious thing that a guy like me wouldn't get backward is how I approached the Lifter years. The years of being signed to Interscope, making the record, and touring relentlessly for a year were almost done purely in sobriety. You just wouldn't think that's how it would go considering my equation of junky plus music equals success. And there were certainly a few little relapses thrown in that period for good measure, but for the most part, I was just totally sober throughout all of it. I think you need a pretty hefty backup machine to remain strung out on the road. You need hangers-on and roadies and all that stuff. A lone junky on the road is generally just going to be a sick junky.

 I was strung out as I was about to sign to the label, and I reached out to a well-known AA guy named Bob Timmons. A lot of people didn't like Bob because he was one of the first hired sobriety coaches or whatever they were called. But he didn't know me from Adam, and he got Interscope to put me through rehab before they even signed us. He just straight up called Jimmy Iovine. He ran the label, and God only knows what he said, but the next thing I know is I'm in Exodus rehab, and Interscope is paying for it. They had no reason on earth to do that. Hell, most labels would just say to hell with the whole deal. We don't need to be taking on another junky-led band, but Bob got them to do it, and I got sober, and he never asked for anything of me. I loved that guy. He passed away some time later, but I'll forever be in his debt for how he went to bat for me then.

Once I got out of rehab, which was the classic 28-day experience, we signed the deal. It was truly like nothing and everything I'd always dreamed about. Before Nirvana, bands like mine simply didn't get signed. But Nirvana blew that wide open, and all of a sudden, every label wanted the next Nirvana or at least an actual rock band that wasn't hair-farming heavy metal. There was a bidding war for us which was surreal. It seemed like we'd be taken out to the best restaurants in LA every night by a different label A&R guy. A&R stands for artist and repertoire. These are your point people at the label. They're your champions. The value of having a truly good A&R guy can not be exaggerated. We loved it and swore to milk this experience for all we could. Not in any greedy way but more in the sense that we knew the odds of becoming actual rockstars were microscopically thin, so we just wanted to enjoy the ride for as long as possible. We're the passengers, and we ride, and we ride.

              Everything changed. We got what seemed like a fortune to sign. We hadn't really accounted for how much of it went to so many places besides our pockets, but it sure seemed like a lot. And then we signed a publishing deal for another whole bunch of money. We all quit working. We bought all new gear, and they bought us a van to tour in. When all was said and done, we each lived off of 800 dollars a month. We probably should have kept those jobs a little longer, as it turned out. But fuck! We were so excited. It was so surreal to be a band on a true major label. Boy, were we naïve.

              When you're signed to a label, some sort of memo goes out telling everyone to love you. If you see them in the building, tell them how great they are. If they happen to make it into the office, shower them with CDs and talk about how much the radio stations are waiting for their first single. Just love the FUCK out of them. I don't think it's all nefarious; I just think the entire music industry fuels itself with glad-handing and phony praise. Christ, you'd think we were the fucking Beatles the way everyone treated us. And, of course, it felt GREAT; at the moment, you just get swept up in all of it and bask in the praise and the future imagining of platinum records and thousand-dollar whores every hour. At least, that's what I heard them utter.

              A record can be made for a few thousand dollars these days. Maybe a couple of tens of thousands if it's some wildly epic concept piece. But in those days, a simple rock record could cost the band somewhere between 2 to 5 hundred thousand once all the producers, mixers, and mastering were paid for. In those days, the people who made the records, the people who actually pushed the buttons, made a fortune, and they got points on the record, too, should it hit. It was a crazy world of almost limitless money being thrown at bands with practically zero chance of ever making it back. But everyone got paid, and the labels used it as a tax write-off, and the bands owed them back all this money. God only knows how many records we would have needed to sell to break even. Are there even that many CD players north of the equator? But we were dazzled by praise and imaginary money, and so we just kept going. The dinners kept happening, and the pats on the back from everyone there who had their own phone line kept coming. We were hooked. Boy,  were we hooked.

              If you ever need a quick ego boost, just walk into the offices of any label you might find yourself signed to. You'll be swarmed by countless people telling you how much they love your demos and how great the record is gonna be and how it's going to surely be a hit, and we're really putting all of our muscle behind this one. And surely some of those people were honest. Some were truly into us, and we had made a great demo and a few singles. I mean, we didn't get signed for nothing. But the level of just constant praise and validation is simply intoxicating. You believe it all. You see this whole new life ahead of you filled with models and cars and houses and drugs and ever-lasting adoration. It felt fucking good.

              But, you know, it rarely comes true. When you sign to a label, at least a major label, you sit down and literally sign on all the little flagged pages of this tome of a contract. I remember it being like 2 inches thick. It probably wasn't, but it was definitely substantial. And what it is is the end result of months of negotiations between your lawyer and the label's lawyer. Just back and forth and change this and change that. But the truth is that there's really nothing to negotiate for a small new band. These lawyers could have met for coffee at a Starbucks and hammered this thing out before their coffee was cold. It was just a very standard 7 record deal that included tons of standard pages that hadn't even been considered by anyone for decades. For instance, the contract had some clause stating that the band did or did not have to pay for the lacquer masters of the vinyl record release. I can't remember the details, but the point is that records didn't even exist then. They've made a comeback, but there was never, ever going to be a Lifter vinyl.

              Oh, and the 7 record deal. That's a gem too. A 7 record deal was pretty much standard fair for any new band. It was always described in terms of how many of the 7 records were guaranteed and how many were options. Ours was a 2 and 5 deal. So what that meant was that we and the label had agreed that Lifter would be able to make and they'd promote two records. Depending on how those records did, the next 5 were optional. I don't even know if both the label and the band or just the label held the power of decision, but it hardly mattered. Ultimately we made one record, and it flopped, and the second guaranteed record was just forgotten about. I'm sure if we had wanted to fight them based on the contract and assuming we'd win, they'd simply let us make a cheap record and then just shelve it. Done and dusted. But we didn't even get to that part. The point is that all those months and months of pretending to craft this unique document meant to protect our rights as artists was just a pile of shitty copy machine paper with a couple excited and lied-to smears of ink here and there.

              And just like that, we were a major label band. We had a great A&R guy. Brian Huttenhauer was his name. He was new to Interscope and was considered a wunderkind. He'd been responsible for all of Soundgarden's success before he left A&M and came to Interscope. We really liked him, and we could tell he really believed in us. We knew because he was critical at times. He wasn't all just pats on the back. He wanted us to make the best record we could. He'd signed our friends' band, The Campfire Girls, and another friend's band, Low and Sweet Orchestra. So now it began. We had a record to make. Which meant we needed to find a producer, and that would basically dictate where we'd record. Jeff and I flew out to NY to interview a bunch of different producers. I'm not sure why Johnny didn't go, but he couldn't have been happy about it. I know I was back to using by then because I remember shooting a speedball in the hotel room and almost falling out right before we were meant to go meet one of these guys. I got sober again before making the record. Eventually, we settled on Sean Slade and Paul Kolderie. They were hot at the moment from doing the first Radiohead album and creating that iconic Kchunk! Hook in Creep. I think they'd done the first Hole record by then as well. If you Google them and their discography, you will not see Lifter mentioned anywhere, but you will see Suddenly Tammy!

              These guys worked in their studio called Fort Apache in Boston. So after a couple months of fairly low-intensity rehearsals but a lot of shows (we played A LOT of shows), we rented a house in the middle of winter a couple blocks from the studio, and we got to work.

              Fucking Hell, it was cold! Wicked cold as they say there. Hell, half of the time, we'd take a cab the four blocks just to not have to walk in the subzero air. The feeling of being able to do something at this level was incredible. I mean, we were actually recording a real album for a real label with real producers at a real studio in an entirely different city. Now, it feels like all of this is being paid for by the label, so it feels even more magical. But, of course, that's not how it works. We had to pay it all back.

              Basically, this is how record deals work and how incredibly fucked most bands get. They sign a huge deal. Huge to them, at least. They get a huge advance that they usually blow on new gear, or maybe they're kinda smart, and they put some away and keep their little job, but then they have to pay a percentage to the lawyer. And then the managers get a cut. And of course, you have to have an accountant because, well, you just do evidently, and they take a cut. But you still feel pretty special because at least now you're actually making a living from doing this thing you love. But what about all the recording costs? How do you pay them back? We're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars here. Well, the basic math is that most new bands sign a deal that gives them somewhere between 10 and 13 percent on each record sold. These are called mechanical royalties. I have fine artist friends who bitch and moan about galleries that take a 50% cut on any art sold. Well, when you're a little band, the label gets roughly an 88% cut. So before you see a fucking penny, you need to sell enough records to pay them back all those hundreds of thousands of dollars based on your percentage. So let's say you get a deal for 150 thousand advance and spend 250 thousand on recording. You're now on the hook for 400 thousand dollars. And the way you pay that back is based on record sales. So let's say the CD costs ten dollars. You're cut is $1.20. That's if it's a normal 12% deal. The record company keeps that and subtracts it from the 400k you owe, so, doing the math at a dollar twenty per record sold, you need to sell roughly 333 thousand records before you start seeing any money coming back to you, and all those same cuts to the lawyers and the managers and the accountants still apply. So basically, you need to sell fucking millions of records before you're anywhere near being anything near rich or an actual rockstar.

              Now, if you have a hit and you'd better have a couple if you plan on selling all those records well, then you start making money from the publishing angle and the radio airplay. That's an entirely different world and has absolutely nothing to do with the label.

              The bottom line is that major labels make their fortunes on the backs of dumb, excited young bands who have just had their dreams handed to them. Almost no band ever pays that money back, and it's not like they come after you for it, but it just gets written off as a tax dodge by the label. That's almost just as good for them.

              But here's the kicker. After all of that. After all the contracts and all the cuts and all the minuscule sales, which amount to nothing but debt and tax write-offs and even if a band hits and that money does get paid back, guess what? The record belongs to the label. The band does not even own their own music anymore, at least not those recorded versions.

              The entire enterprise is an inverted pyramid with the artists, the bands at the very bottom. They get fed last after everyone above them gets their cut from music that they had absolutely nothing to do with. We just give our music away.

              Thank God a lot of this has changed with the advent of the internet and bands being able to out their own material, but there are still ways to fuck them. Spotify, for instance. Don't even get me started.

              But you know what? We knew all this. And while some of it came as a shock when we'd learn certain details, we still knew our chances of becoming actual rockstars were paper thin despite all the flattery and pats of the back. We just wanted to enjoy every moment of this ride, however long it lasted. And I just was driven by the idea that I refused to wake up one day at age 40 or whatever and feel the soul-crushing regret that I didn't try and give it my all. And I succeeded.

              We made a great record. A true hell of a great record. To this day, I'll get random messages on Facebook from someone who loved our record as a kid or teenager, and they'll go to great lengths telling me what it meant to them and fuck, that makes all of it perfectly fine with me. I never became a rockstar, but there are a few thousand people out there whose souls I truly touched, and that means everything to me. Our record was titled Melinda (Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt). I borrowed the phrase from Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Melinda was the Melinda I've written about. Every song was about her and our breakup. Sappy? Maybe. But you what? Hearts actually do get broken, and I don't give a fuck if it's sentimental to sing about it. I needed it. There were plenty of shows with me crying as I sang certain songs. That's a weird feeling. Crying in front of a huge audience while producing ear-splitting walls of sound and singing songs that you'd rather not have ever had to write. But, as Kurt Vonnegut would say, "so it goes."

              And then we had to go on tour. So let’s take a ride and see what’s mine.

Wah-Wah

 George Harrison wrote ‘Wah-Wah’ hours after quitting the Beatles. As the story goes, the documentary seems to make clear that he just stood up and said, “I’m out of this band,” and went home. Sometime that evening, as the story is told, he wrote “Wah Wah.” Paul McCartney had given him a wah-wah pedal, a new and wild thing at the time, and evidently suggested he try it on whatever they were working on during the “Get Back” rehearsals. But the diminishment he felt from Paul, and I guess John, reached a point where he just said, “Fuck it. I’m out of here.” Imagine a situation where things got so fucked up that some group endeavor would lose someone like George Harrison. How bad does it need to get? How can you let someone that precious feel unwanted? And yet that moment came. Look, I know almost nothing about the Beatles, and I’ve written about how that doc and my emergence into more Beatles and particularly George Harrison music has done such a number one me, but I can’t still help wondering how things between friends get to this point.

            Things got to this point with Jeff and me in Lifter. It was always us against the world. And we were rabid and vicious and snarling in our outlook. Especially Jeff and me. Johhny was always the calm, cool one who, with a rare word, would bring us down to safety or at least something approximating sanity. Johnny was the glue. Johnny was the anchor. Johnny was our Ringo. He talked so much less than Jeff and I did, who were full of proclamations and opinions and the complete dissolution of the grey area. Johnny would say a couple perfect words, and we’d settle down. Trying to hold these two super ego maniacs together seemed his calling. And clearly, or maybe not so clearly, I’m not saying that Lifter was of the same caliber or force of kill per round that the Beatles were, but we were a band, and we were friends, and for a few years, we were each other’s entire worlds. We did everything together. Those years were the most powerful I ever felt because I lived them within a team. A tribe.

            At some point, as it’s prone to do, heroin fucked everything up. It didn’t take long. I’ve told you that virtually all of the Lifter years I experienced completely sober, but there were relapses where I’d use and get strung out for a couple of weeks or maybe a month before some tour. And Jeff would too

            I met Jeff at Impact recovery house. Same time and place that I met Melinda, who this entire part of my life revolves around like a cold asteroid clinging to the gravity of a star. He was already a counselor there. He’d done his time. He’d been trained, and in I walked full of tears and broken promises (all of them made to myself more than anyone). He truly helped piece me together. He was a few years younger than me but was my assigned counselor. God only knows what we talked about. My only memories are of walking into his office and feeling happy that I had some time with him. Finding time to talk to counselors there was a big deal. It was a chore. You had to talk to all of them, and it was such a struggle to book a half hour here and there, given the hundreds of people there. So I just remember smiling and closing the door and sitting in the chair and watching him put down his pen and turn to look at me. All memory fades to black after that.

            At some point of which I’ve written about I came to choose going out and finding a job rather than being trained as a counselor which was how Impact operated and so I went forth and have told you about finding a job and hiding my complete destruction of some task which was meant to result in acrylic fish tanks, my failure such a monumental fear that I just bailed and walked out and vanished and as such I had to leave Impact and it’s here where the life I’m writing about started and it sprang forth with such uncertainty but also such wild hopes for the future including loving Melinda or making music or some such vaporous faith that I’d be ok no matter what happened and as I left and started this period of sleeping on friend’s couches and occasionally having sex with some of them and going to AA meetings and eventually finding the series of apartments that I was constantly moving in and out of and collecting the things we do in such a life like the lime green couch from the thrift store which I toted around like a talisman for years and was sleeping on the day my manager called me, by way of a pleading warning to stop getting high, that Kurt Cobain had died and all of these things merged into what became the life that I sit here and write about and I don’t think it’s special or even particularly rare but it is MY life and it all really seemed to start with walking away from Impact and leaving Jeff behind with no sense of how quickly and deeply we’d become intertwined.

            And so I trudged forward. I started working back on videos and, soon, TV commercials, the things which would be my source of income and community for decades despite the brief disappearance during the Lifter years. I went through the Melinda phase, and at some point, I knew it was time to really take a shot at making music. Making a record. Becoming a rock star (it never happened). So at some point, as I was living underneath Melinda, listening to her having sex with other guys and playing Helmet as loud as I could in the hopes of drowning out the sound of her bedsprings and moans and also just filling my head with an overwhelming field of sound to try and stupefy myself (being sober was not helping me here or maybe it was saving me from untold moments of regret) Jeff left Impact and needed somewhere to stay. We’d become very close friends by this point. These are where all the Lifter record songs sprang forth. He moved in, and we set up a makeshift bedroom in my kitchen. I can’t remember how long he lived there or when it changed. At some point, I just had to get out and away from Melinda because it was destroying me. Every bedspring squeak I heard cut another little Exacto knife carving into my chest and stomach in some runic language that, when finished, would say, “You’re unwanted.” I had to get out before the figure, the trench, the gouging was complete. And it wasn’t like she was fucking an army of different guys every night. It was actually rare, but when it happened, it was torture, and I’d set about carving myself up. I found an apartment in Echo Park and asked my Dad for some money to move in. I think it was 1800. It was the first of many times my parents subsidized my wayward life. And so I left and lived in some Melinda-free environment but never felt free of her. Whole weeks would pass where I’d be like a statue in bed, just smoking and drinking coffee and watching People’s Court wondering what she was doing. But, I started writing songs. And these songs were visceral and contained the fucking maudlin pain of the moment. Why are we so ashamed to feel pain? God. I know I did. I’d write these songs and feel so good about them but alternately feel like such a pussy for not being immune to this pain. We kill ourselves over our non-immunity to pain. At least I did. But this is where all the Lifter record songs sprang into being. In the little sunny living room of my apartment in Echo Park

            By then, I had taught Jeff bass. Taught is surely a convenience for describing what happened. I just wanted him in a band with Johnny and me. And so I gave him Birthday Party and Gang of Four records and just said figure this out. These two, Tracy Pew from the Birthday Party and Dave Allen from The Gang of Four, are the Northern star of bass players. Figure them out and how they’ve learned when NOT to play, and you’ll do fine. We started rehearsing and playing shows like madmen. We’d play anywhere. We were driven and, like I said, rabid towards everyone around us. We, or at least I, felt feral. I felt like a wolf slaughtering bunnies in summer fields and rearing up in triumph. I felt safe. And while the Melinda malaise surely continued, it lessened and, in time, just became this thing I sang about rather than the thing that kept me sleepless for months.

              At some point, Jeff and I moved into an apartment upstairs within this Echo Park courtyard two-story apartment building. It was a two-bedroom. I toted the lime green coach up there and whatever bed I had at the moment. And, of course, my guitar and amp. Those formative years of Lifter and the heady swarm of praise that started enveloping us as we pushed forward anchored us and also led us astray to perceived new freedoms which we’d been promised but surely hadn’t received yet. We’d signed a publishing deal for what seemed an ungodly amount of money, and we were somewhere on the side of signing with Interscope, but we really had very little money. We were always putting off the kindly old man landlord with promises that we have a check coming in.” At the time, I had, still do, a great friend and great writer named Allen MacDonell. At the time, he was the executive editor for all of Larry Flynt’s world. He’d send me a huge box of every porn mag they published each month. Like this crazy care package of sex and glossy photos of pussy, and they’d just languish about the place and fill up the stairs. It seemed so cool to get the thing, but maybe you’d look at one magazine and jerk off, and then it went into this pile of porn that grew each month like some single-celled being. I know it was there when we finally left.

            Jeff and I were always in various straights of using and strung out. When I first started writing about Lifter, I wrote that it was all done mainly in sobriety, but now I’m deluged by so many instances that we’d give up the ghost and just get high for days or weeks. Often together, very ritualistically but often in secret from one another. An animosity started gently building that I’m not sure we ever contained.

            But like I said, it was gentle and slow and almost imperceptible for so long. And we were still being buoyed by these tsunamis of praise and promises. And yet we sat there, the record written, and we dutifully played every show we were asked to play, and we waited. We waited to record, which kept seeming to be delayed. We lived in that sunny little Echo Park apartment surrounded by porn, half-written songs, drugs, occasional friends, and my meeting and consummating my love for Stephanie as the Melinda power finally abated.

            We waited. We waited for the call to just up and move to Boston for the winter. I know that that call came after I vanished from this apartment to go to rehab, which Interscope paid for. When I got out, I moved in with Stephanie.

            The green couch stayed. I never saw it again. I never saw any trace of that life again short of some clothes I’d taken to rehab and my guitar, amp and pedals, which I assume were kept safe by our manager Scotty. That chapter just slammed shut, and then things were never really the same with Jeff and I. We still had years of us against the world ahead of us, but the little fractures you can’t ever really repair had started, and you couldn’t put a finger on it. It felt like two huge statues that had somehow been connected and split and were slowly drifting away from each other in the mud. Glacially. Slowly. Unstoppable.

Let It Flow

When you've found yourself in the seemingly endless loop of patches of sobriety and then relapses and rehabs, you tend to spend a lot of time on your own. The people that love you and whose hearts you keep filling with hope and then shattering at some point start drifting away. I'm sure this doesn't come as a surprise to anyone, but, of course, it happens regularly when you're a junkie or drunk or aficionado of any sort of self-destruction. I suspect that there are people out there, friends, who at one point loved me, and my habits turned that off in them. No one's ever told me, "I don't love you anymore as a friend because of your insane relationship with something that is undoubtedly killing you." Generally, when people get to this point, and again, I'm talking about friends, they just vanish. We wear them down. People can only take so much heartbreak and being lied to. So I'm not sure if any friends stopped loving me, but they had to do it from a very safe distance and get on with their lives. They have to heal. It's quite a feeling as I write this and think of it in this manner. Certainly, I'm very clear on how much collateral damage my firing for effect caused, but I've never considered that I'd become a health issue for them. Simply being my friend at times was, for them, an affliction that would ultimately require them to leave and heal. I became something to be cured out of the people who loved me. I'd become something you could catch.

              When I was sober, and I've been sober well more than I've been strung out, I'm an ok guy, I think. This is the issue tho. It draws them in or back in again, given enough time. I'd get sober after a relapse, most of which seemed to last a couple months; I don't think I've ever used straight through for a year. Then I'd usually wind up in rehab, or maybe not, and I'd go back to AA and get my life back on track. And the next thing you know, my friends are all back around and hoping that this'll be the one. This is when he's gonna make it stick. Or perhaps they think, well, I hope he can keep it together at least longer than the last time. But they're back, and their guard has been lowered at least a little bit. And then, at some point, I just give in and revert to type, and the shrapnel of my selfish choice hits anyone close enough.

              If there's some sort of demented and sad Hall of Fame for relapsing yet always coming back, I'd have to be in it. I wouldn't bet my life right now on this figure, but at one point, I'd counted at least 15 periods of at least one year of sobriety only to relapse again. I've had five years at one point. There have been a few 2 or so year stretches. This, of course, also leads to countless rehabs and detoxes. It feels bad writing this. There's nothing remotely within any of this that I take even some sort of twisted pride in. I wasted a whole lot of my life and hurt a whole lot of people with this cycle of selfishness and greed. The greed for comfort and escape. These things that are generally meant to be earned, they aren't meant to be immediately available to someone so fast and easy. It's an abomination.

              I'd reached one of these periods in the near Melinda years. I just know it was during the time that we either lived together on one side of Silver Lake Blvd or when we walked across the street one day and moved into separate apartments in the same building. So this memory that has remained with me all these years seems to have been untethered from a dated timeline, but it happened. I was strung out again. I'm pretty sure Lifter had formed its nascent version, and I feel like we had already hooked up with Scott and Jake, our managers. A little about Scotty Cybala and Jake Ottman. We were the first band they'd ever managed, and as we did so many times in Lifter, we just excitedly said yes to anything offered. Scotty lived in LA, so he was generally a daily presence, but Jake lived in New York. They and Lifter were truly learning this whole thing together. I suspect things would have been different for us at Interscope had we gone with an actual high-powered manager, but we liked these guys. And they did their best. But Going up against a behemoth like Interscope and fighting for a newly signed, relatively unknown band was easygoing for them. In any case, we loved this odd couple of a management team. Scotty was a chain-smoking, cynical bastard at times who was very direct with good or bad news. Dispassionate almost. Not that he didn't care, far from it, actually, but his style was to just drop a bomb on you and figure out what to do next.

              On the other hand, Jake was the seemingly happiest guy on Earth. He always seemed to be in a state of perpetual childlike glee, and he'd tell us basically yes to anything we'd ask about. At times it was preposterous how much he claimed we had coming to us. This guy just was not wired to give bad news. We used to joke that if we were going to NY and asked Jake if he could arrange for us to pitch an inning of a Yankee game (I surely would have pitched for whoever they were playing. Fuck the Yankees), his immediate response would be "Oh, dude, of course. No problem, I can definitely make that happen." Ultimately as I look back, I'm truly grateful we gave these guys a chance and really, the chances of my life ending up wildly different than it is had we got some bigshot manager are pretty slim. I'd much rather have made 2 friends with two pretty good guys.

              So I'm back at the point where I've relapsed again and just in full shame and guilt mode. I can't believe I've done this again. Jesus, if I only knew how relentless it would become. I've written elsewhere that virtually all of my drug use has been during periods of relapse after having connected with and become tight with some very good friends while going to AA. That's a really horrible place to be getting high in. Sure, you get high but have this ever-present shrowd of self-loathing and always hoping you don't run into anyone from AA, and if you do, they have the same "conversation" that happens every time. They know you're loaded, and so they ask, "hey man, how's it going? How've you been." It's asked with the barest of curiosity because they know exactly how you're doing. They know you're fucked and putting yourself through the wringer. And so now it's your turn, and you always say the same thing, as you break eye contact and look down at your shoes, "I'm good, man, thanks. I'll hopefully see you tonight at Tropical," or Atwater or whatever meeting the tribe is going to that night. And they wrap it up by saying, "Cool man, I hope I see you there." Of course, you're not even remotely planning on going. Not only do you have to keep getting high, but even if you went high, and surely that happens, the dread and fear of enduring walking into a roomful of friends who are literally plagued by your constant letting them down, even if it's just in your own imagination and seeing the looks in their eyes is torture. And I just kept doing it over and over. Eventually, I'd go back and endure the shrowd of shame and stand up as a newcomer…again. But it was fucking tough. These words we use to describe the self-loathing we feel are many and varied, but they drive us to stay high just to try and get some sort of container around them like a spilled box of cockroaches on the dead pet store of your soul.

              People had stopped calling. I still spoke with Scotty, but even those conversations were empty and perfunctory. I'd see Johhny and Jeff, and they surely weren't charged up upon the return, again, of the prodigal son junky. Everyone had had with me. Perfectly understandable. I never once resented anyone for drifting away when I'd relapse. I've done it with friends as well. But there was one guy who never floated away, and Jesus, there were times when he felt like my only true friend in the world.

              Jerry Stahl is a great writer, and we became friends through LA in those early 90 days. I really looked up to him. He felt almost like a celebrity to me. He wrote the book Permanent Midnight which basically chronicled his own heroin addiction while frantically trying to keep a family and a daughter and a very successful television writing career. I think he even wrote for that show, Alf. My details are very foggy about the book since it's been so long since I read it. I do know I read it before I met him, so I was already primed to look up to him. And he was easily the most classically cool guy in AA. Now that's a bit of a sideways compliment. The truth is he'd have been the coolest guy in any world he found himself in. Tall guy always wore black. I have no memory of ever seeing a stitch of color or white on him. Ha! I imagine him walking in here right now dressed in those horrible too-many-pockets shorts with a fanny pack and an Affliction shirt. Hell, we'll give him Tevas and socks to round it out. That guy knew how to dress despite its monotone color character. To imagine him breaking every rule of how men should dress all at once kills me. Anyway, we became friends.

              One day, and in my memory, I'm still living in Silverlake; he calls me up and asks me if I need anything or, better yet, want to meet for lunch. Now at this point, it had been quite a while since I'd gotten such a pure call and invite to hang out with a friend. And well, that's not quite right because I remember him calling a short time earlier one day asking me if I was eating and did I want him to take me grocery shopping. I was almost surely not eating and could have used a trip and allowed a friend to stock up the fridge a little, but I couldn't do it. It was too much. So I thanked him, and he said, "Ok, man, we'll talk soon” or such. Because he knew exactly what was going on with me, and while he cared about me, he didn't give a fuck that I was a junky. Two very different things. And so, while I couldn't endure a charity grocery shopping trip, I could handle going to lunch. At the time, there was a restaurant called Nettie's at the end of my block. Right across where Spaceland would eventually come to life. It was catercorner to the 7-11. It looked like a shack. I hated the place. I'd been maybe once or twice earlier, and while I don't remember the food, I just remember that there seemed to be an unkindness about the place, and it also felt like it had some acetate overlay of "Penis Equals War" feminism oozing from every bored and kinda angry waitress. I probably just projected my stuff onto a restaurant, but when he suggested it, I, of course, just said, "Wow! Absolutely! Thanks, and I'll see you in 20 minutes."        

              I remember we sat outside; I'm fully convinced you could say it had no true indoors. It just seemed like a big mean circus tent to me. But here we sat. Jerry, all in black and in shape and me in whatever clothes that I very likely hadn't removed from my body for a week or so.

              Ok, I just Googled, and I see that Permanent Midnight came out in 1995. So I'm very off base with my timeline. Man, memories just loop and lurch and sliver all around the miasma of our minds. So let's get straight what we actually do know to be true. I became friends with Jerry at some point. I now remember reading his book before it was published. I know I read it in its manuscript form on my bed in the upstairs apartment in Echo Park. I definitely remember feeling incredibly special and honored that he gave me the manuscript to read. Like I'd been given some Golden Ticket to see behind the scenes, and my way in was this talisman, this manuscript. I know he offered to buy me groceries, and at some point, we wound up sitting at a little table next to the hate tent. And we just talked like friends. He never went in with the whole serious talk about getting sober and all that. Those conversations with people who love you and are very afraid for you are intrinsically beautiful because they come from love. But there's really nothing you can do with them while you're in one except avoid eye contact and just endure the shame. I've had a million of those concerned pep talks, and I always almost religiously would graciously listen and in no way defend myself. It always felt like an atonement to me, and I think that appealed to me, or a least I figured I deserved nothing better. So to all of you who took it upon yourself to confront me with these sorts of talks, I love you.

              Jerry never ever went anywhere near that stuff with me unless I brought it up. He was just a friend who knew precisely how I was feeling, and his idea of helping and showing love was to just treat me with basic human kindness and generosity. I also have this weird fragment of memory of him giving a baseball glove at that lunch table. I know we talked about baseball. But I can't fully commit to the mitt memory. I've always had a fairly good mental handle on all the gloves I've had, and I don't remember an odd one. But Jesus, I think by now it's clear that my memory missed a whole lot of life.

              It seems for a while during that period that, we'd talk fairly regularly, and I was always so fucking grateful to have at least one person in my life who wasn't in "Save Mike Mode." Although the fact is he probably had a lot more to do with me eventually getting sober for another go at it than either of us know.

              Eventually, I did get sober again. I always do. It's truly shocking all the real and metaphorical bullets I've dodged in my life with all this lunacy. At some point, Permanent Midnight was published. I think I went to a reading of it when it came out. I can't imagine not going, but it's a fairly ephemeral memory. The book did well, and eventually, it was picked up and turned into a film starring Ben Stiller. At some point, Jerry asked me if I wanted to go to dinner with him and Ben. I don't know if it was like meeting up with Ben after a meeting that Jerry and I might have gone to. There's another idea banging around in there that maybe the night started watching some band at Spaceland. Who knows? It's not important. But on some evening of this life, I wound up at House of Pies in Loz Feliz with Jerry and Ben. I don't know if the film had been released yet, but they'd clearly become friends working on it together. So just three guys eating at a diner in LA. I can almost guarantee that none of us got any pie. I'm not, and they don't strike me as pie guys. We're just talking. And I want to tell Ben something. But you know, I'm human, I'm a little nervous and star-struck, but I used to be a fan of this late-night comedy show, and there was some skit or something which I thought was one of the funniest things I'd ever seen. I can't even begin to remember what it was, but it was still very fresh at that point. So in an effort to connect with Ben and graciously show appreciation for something he's created and I launch into this whole thing, "Man! I really loved your show.", "Oh, thanks, man I appreciate that." I continue: " there was this one skit where you…" and I just continue with a very detailed description of this thing, and I'm laughing while I'm describing. And I'm feeling like, yeah, Ben and I are having a moment! He dutifully sits, listens, takes it all in, waits for a beat, and says, "Um, yeah, that wasn't my show." I'm stunned. I actually ask him if he's sure. "Yeah, I'm very sure. It wasn’t my show." "Oh, well, sorry." I say and then add, "Well, it's really funny." The table was very quiet. No one came close to sorta easing the tension by pointing out the absurdity of the moment. It felt like I had definitely fucked something up. Oh well, we finished dinner, and I never saw Ben again. I hope he's well (and there's still a part of me that thinks that thing actually was on show.)

              At some point, Jerry and I just drifted apart. I just kept relapsing, and he just didn't, and eventually, we got to the point where we'd cross paths and maybe say high at Arty and Naomi's yearly Christmas feast of the seven fishes. Just two acquaintances. It's been years since I've laid eyes on him. Man, I hope he's well. That guy did a real number on me. He was there exactly how I needed him when I needed it the most. Kind. Generous. Absolute zero judgment.

Failure

"It was like Lord of the Flies in a van." John Berry said that after being on tour with Lifter for about 6 weeks. John was a good friend of ours and my first real AA sponsor. John's no longer with us, and I really miss that weird fucker. There was no one I've met like him. I could and should write a whole chapter just about John. But suffice it to say, his experience as our "roadie" wasn't a pleasant one for him. We got through it but going on tour with us wasn't a good thing for anyone we took with us.

              Lifter, the three of us, Jeff Sebelia, Johnny Rozas, who was, by the way, John Penny from our first music endeavors in Sleep when I first moved here, and I were very tight. From the beginning, we had really developed an attitude of us against the world. We weren't really part of the burgeoning Silverlake scene despite playing all kinds of shows there in those glory days. And it wasn't as if we weren't friends with other bands. But we were unabashed that we wanted to be rock stars. We had no interest in being another 16th note flurry of indy rock. We wanted money, girls, and drugs, and we dared to play guitar solos. Well, I dared, which adequately describes my guitar-playing prowess. I don't think we were dicks to people, but we were clearly a very arrogant and confident band. Despite what history may say, we knew we were the best of the bunch.

              After we finished the record, we came back, and it was decided that it needed to be remixed. Brian, our A&R guy, didn't like Sean and Paul's mix. Pretty common, so we then hired this big-time guy Andy Wallace to remix it for us. He had done all kinds of huge records. He was this very conservative, almost stately older gentleman. So we went to New York, plopped down another 150k and got our record remixed. Imagine that. One Hundred and Fifty thousand dollars to remix a record. Not that he didn't do a great job and not that his fees were out of line with what was standard those days but Jesus! Those days are gone forever! The money these guys made, especially relative to the actual bands, was just astounding.

              So now we had a record and a reason to tour. But things got a little sidetracked. And for once, it involved drugs, but it wasn't me taking them. When we were in Boston recording, Brian came out to check out how things were going. I sort of figured we'd see a lot of him, but as it turned out, he showed up one night, had his cab wait for him, and he hung out for what seemed like maybe half an hour. We played him some tracks; he said they sounded great, and then he left. Seemed kind of odd, but what did we know?

              At some point, Brian had gotten into the crack jar. I've always been almost embarrassed that I never picked up on it, given my expertise in such matters. And evidently, this had been going on for a while. I'm not really sure how long it was after we finally finished the record, but Brian just went wildly off the rails. He disappeared for a few days and then emerged by frantically calling the Interscope lawyer, claiming that I, me, was lurking around his house and had already stolen all of his TVs. I think that was partly formed by a night before all this when he visited me in my little hovel of a studio apartment in Los Feliz and saw that I had some shitty old TV. "You need a new TV!" he exclaimed. "Let's go get you one." I was a bit taken aback. I'm sure I reflexively demurred at first, but he was adamant, and so we got into his brand-new Lotus supercar and sped to Circuit City. He was hitting 120 between red lights on Vine, and while it was terrifying, it also had that weird feeling of comfort when you realize you might very well die, but it won't be your fault. I've only ever feared death when I thought I could get blamed for it. I just remember laughing the laugh of terrified and excited adrenaline. Nothing like it except for bombs; that's why I was into making bombs. Same deal. Although blowing myself up with a homemade bomb would surely be something I'd get blamed for so, I stopped all of that when a piece of pipe shrapnel whizzed past my ear, actually flicking my hair back. One inch to the left, and I'd be quite dead and in a lot of trouble.

And so he bought me a nice new TV, and I was very grateful and maybe just still a bit embarrassed, but I accepted it. He was almost little-kid excited to buy it for me. I really loved Brian as a friend. As it turned out, we never got to be around each other much from then on, as he disappeared after a few months of working with him. I've tried over the years to find him, but I never have. I hope he's somewhere out there, safe and happy. Maybe he'll read this someday for some weird reason, and if so, know this, Brian: I still love you.

              Unfortunately, the paranoid delusions from the crack just kept escalating. While most of the psychosis and accusations focussed on me as the culprit, they started to extend to other key Interscope people and then it just stopped. And no one that I know of has ever heard from him since. It's horribly sad, this feeling of someone you love just vanishing into the ether. The saddest thing is that I think we'd know if he had died. But it seems he's out there in some Cambodian prison of the mind with only his punji sticks and crackpipe to keep him company. Very sad.

              What all of this meant for us was basically catastrophe. A band is really only served by a label to the extent that their A&R guy fights for them. We were assigned a new guy who was the head of A&R, which you'd think would be a good deal, but it was the exact opposite. Tom Whalley was his name. Nice enough guy and certainly third in command of the whole label, but his regular bands were Nine Inch Nails and No Doubt and Dr. Dre and basically all of Interscope's actual stars. We didn't get much of his attention, which is the kindest way to put it.

              We sorta just landed in the autopilot bin of the labels promotional department. They got us a van, they made a bunch of posters to send out to various regional label marketing people, and we booked a tour with our booking agency. I don't even remember who they were, but I'm sure we somehow had to give them some money.

              Our first tour was just the three of us. I imagine it was a west coast tour. I really can't remember. But I know it was a headlining tour which meant that it was us and several local acts every night. But our record was months from being released, so there was zero reason for anyone to even consider coming out to see us. When you get out of the major cities, you'll generally pull in random people who just like live music and are grateful that anyone's willing to come to their small town. Still, generally, these were pretty empty rooms, and the local bands might be anything from reggae to rock to Red Hot Chili Pepper knock-offs. But hell, we loved it! We just drove all day, loaded in our gear and maybe soundchecked, and waited to play; we always gave it our all and then we'd get whatever small guarantee we were owed and go to the nearest Motel 6 or such. Then we'd do it all again the next day. When you're a kid, and you find yourself in this situation, it takes a lot to make it anything but fun. 

              We'd take turns driving. I hated it, so I'd try to dodge it as much as possible. I liked laying down in one of the back seats, eating Jolly Ranchers and reading. But, whoever was driving got to choose the lion's share of the music we constantly played. Man, so many records flood back as memories of those tour soundtracks. The first Codeine record, lots of SWANS, especially the song "Failure.", which was a favorite and almost religious experience for Johnny and me. Jeff played a lot of Flaming Lips, which I just wasn't really into yet. Surely lots of The Birthday Party and Nick Cave and later year Einsturzende Neubauten. But we just never didn't have music playing. It was inconceivable to have the engine running with no music playing.

              One day we were driving through the barrens of some state like North Dakota or Wyoming. One of those massive open vista areas with nothing but straight blacktop for miles and miles and another car maybe once every 10 or 15 minutes. Next thing you know, there are flashing lights and a siren behind us. We're being pulled over. Johnny was driving and was evidently speeding, which seems impossible in such a massive flat place. So the cop comes to the window, and he's what you'd expect. He's a young Adonis, very straight-laced state trooper. We turned the music down, but it was still playing. Johnny rolls down the window, and the cop starts with the ubiquitous, "Can I please see your license and regis….hey! Is that Einsturzende Neubauten you're listening to?" I said, "yes! You know these guys??" He got so excited. He starts going on about how he loves this kind of music. He sees some other CDS laying around, and he's, "Oh man! The Birthday Party, and Jeez, you guys have SWANS!" I mean, this is a moment that just doesn't happen in any sort of uncharmed life. One of us had to have been living one. I think it was me, but whatever. He goes on about how there are no record shops that sell this sort of stuff for hundreds of miles, so he has to order everything through mail catalogs. He was so excited. We talked music for about 15 minutes. It truly made his day. He was turned into this giddy little kid asking to check our various CD covers. It was great.

              And then he gave us a ticket and left. We definitely didn't see that coming. I remember Johnny saying after he had walked away, and we were all in stunned silence, "Son of a Bitch. After all that, he still gives me a ticket."

              It seemed like we were always getting curveballs like that thrown at us. Our record release date kept getting delayed. First, it was the vanishing of Brian. That definitely pushed it back. Then, the Seagrams company or some such behemoth bought a bunch of labels, including Interscope, which threw a wrench into the machine with all sorts of restructuring and whatnot. Finally, it looked like we had a firm date in a few months. So, at that point, the label sends out promo copies of the record to radio stations all over the country. These aren't really meant for airplay, but I'm not sure what the actual protocol was. In any case, a station in Seattle started playing one of the songs from the record.

The song was "402." That's the address of the house I grew up in. We always figured this would be our best shot at an actual hit. And this radio station, The Edge, I think it was called, was the big station in Seattle. It was their go-to radio station. And so they started playing "402," and it just fucking exploded. It was the most requested song for that entire summer. You couldn't have done better focus group testing and come up with better results. It was a bonafide hit. We'd drive up to play in Seattle like once a month and play packed halls way the hell bigger than we'd ever played, and everyone would sing along with the song. They knew all the lyrics. We felt like, fuck! This is it! We actually did it!

              It was a wild time. Going to Seattle each month and being interviewed on that station and playing sold-out shows was so, again, intoxicating.

              And the Interscope told them to stop.

              Interscope had decided that we should be more in the weird genre of rock radio instead of indy, and I don't even know if I'm getting the terms right, but they decided that another song from our record should be the single, and it fit an entirely different format. A format where we might follow Motley Crue and lead into Marylyn Manson. The whole thing just collapsed

              And so it all just died on the vine like every love I've ever had. Everything dies on the vine. You either pick your fruit before it's ripe and hope the counter sunlight does the trick, or you just walk away and let death smile upon your back.

              There was almost nothing we could do. You couldn't fight them. Not at our level. You just expressed your dismay and banged your head against a closed door, or you just shut up and hoped this whole thing was some bad dream. One day you have a hit single, and the next day your label demands they stop playing it.

              And so we just kept touring. The touring in and of itself was fun. We toured with our friends Possum Dixon for three months. They headlined. But three months is a long time in a van. We'd fuck with each other on the road to kill time as we had a lot of that, often six or so hours between little half-emptied bars and clubs. Which is to say, I'd torment them. Once, we both stopped at a gas station market kind of place. We needed gas and such. I bought a 2-liter bottle of coke and a big box of instant mashed potatoes. My mind was constantly creating new ways to make them all but crash. We left and continued down the highway. Johnny was driving. I told him to get in the fast lane and get about two van lengths in front of them. Their van was to our right. I rolled down the window and squeezed all the soda out of the bottle, which immediately covered their windshield and then I quickly dumped the entire package of potato flakes out the window and wham! Instant whiteout! Their windshield turned pure opaque white in a split second. Sure, people could die. But rock is war. And war is supposed to be fun.

              You just keep driving, hauling in amps, tuning guitars, and making setlists with sharpies and torn-out notebook paper. You just keep playing the songs you wrote in the Echo Park apartment with tears streaming down your face, and you try to conjure that feeling each night in front of maybe ten or twenty slightly flummoxed but grateful kids. You just keep trying.

              We tried for a year. We went everywhere, and I carried the thoughts of her, Melinda, throughout all of it, never knowing who she might be fucking as I carried in Mesa Boogie half-stacks and anvil cases of pedals. Where was she? Why couldn't I trade all of this in for her?

              At some point, we reached Los Angeles, which was, as no one knew, was our last stop into our past lives that were careening up with bullet speed upon us. It took us months to realize it was over.

              When Lifter started, I had one simple goal, I just refused to wake up on one morning at age forty or fifty and regret that I didn't give it my all. That sort of regret calls for the revolver. And so I didn't. I gave it everything I had, heroin non-withstanding. We tried. And some people were touched by us, our music, and my songs. And that makes it all ok.

              When I was a little kid, all I ever wanted was to be a baseball player or a rock star. Despite my not making the JV team because of my wise-ass nature and long hair, that dream was almost assuredly out of reach. It's much easier to become a rockstar. And, well. That never happened, either. But I tried.

              Every so often, I'll get a Facebook message or an email from someone who heard our record at a magical time in their life. And they tell me it meant everything to them. It changed them and maybe kept them from so much of the damage I did to myself. When these moments happen, they fill me with the light of Heaven and the sound of angels. It makes me feel like I matter to someone. I guess I did. It's not in my nature to admit or even acknowledge such things, but these messages make it impossible to deny. I mattered. I tried so hard to nullify my life, and yet some light shone through. And I thank you, you who took the time to write me these little paragraphs. When someone makes you feel like you matter, you better listen. If you don't, you do so at your own peril. And so Lifter and Melinda ended. And I moved onto other ways of feeling. I moved on to baseball.

I Watched The Film The Song Remains The Same

George Saunders is one of my favorite writers. His work borders on absurdity but always manages to hold together, barely, by its grasp on that thing that makes us all actually human. It's the fear and the weakness I read in his books and stories and essays, but they aren't actually as we usually have them presented, certainly not in the way I can't seem to help but serve them, which is with the hope of the reader feeling the pain and sorrow of the writer or character. He manages a sort of kindness in his preposterous stories about inevitable failure and endings. And so I love something he wrote a few years ago for a commencement speech at Syracuse University. These are the last few lines of his speech. Maybe you've seen them before, but they bear repeating, especially in the context of this song and how it's latched onto me with such an almost sewn-to-my-heart grip. These are what he wrote:

              So here's something I know to be true, although it's a little corny, and I don't quite know what to do with it:

What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.

Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

              I have such a vague memory of being a very little kid and a little girl who lived next door to me for what seems like a very short time. Most of the houses in the neighborhood never changed hands. Rarely did neighbors move away. And yet I lived right next door to the one house that seemed to turnover almost every year it seemed until finally after I left for college, a big happy family bought the house and as far as I know, they're still there minus some of the kids.

              My memory of this little girl is so vague she's almost a ghost. In fact, the whole memory seems to take place in a fog, real fog, as if it was a foggy fall day. I was standing where both homes' yards met, and no one had fences where I grew up. I still think a fenced-in front yard is one of the weirdest things we get up to as a species. I know she was a friend of sorts. That much I can feel within the wrap of the memory around my shoulders. We couldn't have been more than 5 or six, and I think she was likely a year or two younger. So we were friends the way two shy little neighbor kids are friends, which is to say not fully connected or in any way intimate, but I can feel it in my chest that we liked each other. I've had this memory all my life. It's one of a few select moments which make what Saunders resonate so deeply in me.

We both had basic cement backyard patios. Ours had an awning, and while her house never did, it did have a basketball hoop which we used a lot as kids regardless of who was living in the house at the time. Often no kids lived there, and yet we just claimed it for our own. I don't remember ever being asked to leave or anything like that;  it was just as if, at some point early in my life, the kids of the neighborhood just won a war of attrition and forever held title to this maybe 16 by 16 square of cement with a basketball hoop at its edge, centered perfectly. In this ephemeral memory, she is wearing a light blue little formless and featureless dress, and maybe it was still the nightgown she'd worn the night before. But it's what she's holding that everything swirls around and has driven me to tears so many times over my life. I don't know what it is. I can never see it. She's standing a few feet in front of and facing the backboard pole with her little body. Whatever she's holding, she's holding it in two cup hands and bending up her little arms as well as bending her head down to get as close as possible to this object. And all I've ever known for sure is that it's precious to her. I sometimes watch her from a little farther up towards the back of our yards, so I can see a little more of her face as she looks at it in a mix of sadness and wonder. At other times as I've tried to remember more of what this memory contains, I'm a bit farther behind her, and her face is obscured by the hair on the side of her head.

And so it seems we just stand there locked in each other's presence but stuck where we stand, and we are as close together as we're evidently going to get. Something prevents me from walking over to her to find out what she's holding. Sometimes I think it's a baby bird or rabbit. We always had lots of little rabbits in our yard. They'd dig little holes, have their kids, and do whatever it is rabbit parents do. It was always in the summer, making mowing the lawn terrifying for me because I could always imagine running a little baby rabbit over as I unknowingly pushed the slashing blade of the lawnmower over their little houses. Such a horrifying thought. I don't think it ever happened. God, I hope not.

Suddenly and yet almost in slow motion, she drops the thing and tries to grab it before it hits the cement, but she misses it and hit hits and shatters. I can just see pieces of whatever it is all around her feet, and still, sometimes I see it as a baby bird, but they don't split into little chips and fracture. At first, she just stares down with her little arms hanging at the side of her little blue dress. And then she starts crying but unmovably so. I can just hear her if it's the version where I'm a statue slightly behind her, but when located a few yards up the yard, I can see her face.

I don't do or say anything. I don't offer her any sort of help or comfort or whatever a little kid would reflexively do when they see a friend suddenly turn to pain and tears. I just remember standing there, and in a few minutes, she looks up at me and then, still crying, walked into the back door of her house.

But the regret isn't so much that I did nothing to help her that day, but she just vanished. It was as if her family had just left. I'm sure it's almost nothing like the timeline I imagine, and maybe the entire memory is all screwed up and halfway a dream, but it doesn't matter because all I have to work with is my accounting of what happened. And so, as far as I'll ever know, I stood there meek and dumb while a friend felt some great loss, and I never got a chance to ever see or say anything to her again. And where did she go? Sometimes I almost swoon at the idea that people can just waft in and out of each other's lives, have very intense shared moments, and then they just are yanked back into the ether, and it's as if they never existed in the first place. But they did, which is what makes me crazy, wondering what became of her, where she wound up, and what was the thing she loved and cherished and somehow accidentally shattered it into a billion little pieces. All of those questions walk over me lightly at night if I can't sleep, and there are so many others as well. So many friends who were just up and lifted out of my life like a cat being picked up where it sleeps and deposited into some other whole room. And entirely new life.

                                                                     ***

In the song "I Watched The Fim The Song Remains The Same," which this story is entirely wrapped around, the singer Mark Kozelek seems to focus on these same sorts of little soft slivers of memory and how we seem to carry them forever often letting them fall by accident, and we don't have all the pieces when we try and glue these tiny loving cups back together. He mentions a fight he gets goaded into in some elementary playground and with a punch that catches the other little boy off balance and knocks him down, glasses broken and the crowd cheers as he walks away ashamed and feeling that feeling, THAT FEELING of being unkind to some other person and witnessing their humiliation and broken glasses (and the sickness that these feelings swim in) and as he tells us he was "never a schoolyard bully" this moment has been chewing on parts of him all of his life and that wherever his version of the little friend I had in her pale blue dress is he's sorry.

Mrs. Roberts taught third grade at Wakefield elementary school. It occurs to me how nice it is to finally be writing about a memory that's firmly grounded in a recorded, measurable moment of time. I was in third grade. Mrs. Roberts was surely the grand old dame of the entire school. If we were a bit older and could conceive of such things, she'd be the teacher all the kids would hope never to be assigned to and whispered voices would tell of horrible things she did to kids behind that heavy wooden door in which the window was placed high enough so that only an adult could see in.

She loved me. I'm not sure if I was old enough to even understand the concept of a teacher's pet, and I don't seem to recall any obvious perks to my status. I know she's the person who pointed out that I stuck my tongue out and to the left when I was concentrating, and as teacher's pet, my desk sat right in front of hers so as to give her the closest access to my magical aura; to tell the truth, I'd always wished I sat more dissolved into the middle of the class, but it really wasn't too bad. Our conjoined desks sat cattycorner to the door, the typical four or five rows of desks between us and there. I would guess the class size was around 25 or so. Jimmy Humphrey sat at the end of this labyrinth of little scribbled-on wooden desks with scraped blue bent steel tube legs. Jimmy sat at the desk, the very closest to the door he would never be able to see out of, given how high the windows were. It has never occurred to me until just now what a clever design and control method those window placements were like an elementary school panopticon.

When the various moments throughout the day required us to leave the room, such as lunch or gym or simply going home, there was a very strict lineup that Mrs. Roberts had designed and to which she was fiercely loyal. Students would form a line to the same side of all their desks, thus designing a serpentine and thus more easily pulled and led and governed by Mrs. Roberts as she stood at the door and watched us all slowly make our way up and down the spaces between our little desks. So, Jimmy Humphrey was always the first out, and I, given my perch of honor at the far end of the room, last. When these moments arrived, there was some unspoken but very adhered to rule that the students were to pretend, silently, as if they were completely unaware of what these exact moments experienced day in and day out meant. When the clock reached noon, for instance, and we were to be marched to the cafeteria, Mrs.Roberts would arise and graciously walk to her spot next to the closed door with the unusually high window. As such, and given that she was an adult, she could then see the movements and ushering out of all the classrooms farther down the hallway. Each classroom seemed to follow her system at the group level. When she took her last step into her place of reconnaissance, the children were able to take that as a visual cue to act as if this event had never happened before and within this feigned (and not particularly well-executed) excitement stand and form the snake that would soon be slithering out once the coast was clear. We were meant to be quiet, of course, but invariably someone or more than one would incur a gentle bark to be quiet and still from Mrs. Roberts. There was a military precision to it. And good Lord, this has all made an entirely unthought of memory come splashing against mind!

Every afternoon the USA and the Maryland flags were taken down from their respective flag poles in the front yard, of sorts, of the school. Somehow, Mr.s Roberts had arranged (demanded? And maybe this is where the matriarchal power she held over the entire school came from. Maybe she had simply seized power)that two chosen students of only her class would have the honor of walking out of the tall windowed door about 30 minutes before the end of the day and dutifully march outside (after rigorous training oh which I can't remember but can also not imagine not happening) and retrieved the two flags very respectfully and secured the ropes in just such the way that they were taught and bring the flags, untouched by earth back to our room. At this point, as every single day ended, we began the "Flag Ceremony." The participants changed routinely to either give everyone a turn at the various apparatus of an almost funereal flag ceremony or maybe to simply deprive the experience to those Mrs. Roberts had a bone to pick with. We had been taught how to stretch each flag by its four corners, and then each end pair would walk towards each other, holding the flag aloft, and the designated one would then hold the corners of a flag now folded in have. The non-holders, the initial pullers and walkers of the corners, were then done and banished from the spectacle to watch from their desks. At this point, the flag was folded in half again, which could barely be but usually well done by the fully outstretched arms of two little third-graders. There may have been another fold, but at some point, the flag, now roughly 18 inches wide and 20 feet or so long, was held tightly and stretched horizontally from both ends. Maybe on cue or maybe by instinct (mind you, while all of this is happening, a record on a portable but sturdy record player played various patriotic marching band songs), one student, long practiced would start, while keeping tension walking toward their distant partner and slowly folding the flag into its familiar twenty-one gun salute sort of affair triangle fold. Slowly the two ends would meet, and if everything had gone right (and it almost had to because it's the basic geometry of folding a rectangle of any size or material), the final triangle of the flag was tucked neatly under itself and held on two outstretched little hands as if on offer to a sad widow. Again, two others were sent to watch. This entire operation was then repeated for the Maryland flag. Now, this may seem like quite a bit of pageantry to end every schoolday for a third-grade class, but the finale was just about to begin. "Flag Ceremony" ended each day with the memorized recitation of the Gettysburg Address by one student. Perhaps that was just a weekly climax, or we all took turns and had multiple days in the sun. It was quite an affair, and we did this at the end of every single school day.

So, it's not unthinkable that, at times, some of the kids would grow weary and impatient and find their little less than patriotic minds wandering and on one particular day, I suppose this happened to Jimmy Humphrey. I can't remember where the flags wound up each day, but I remember on this day, as the ceremony ended and Mrs.Roberts took her spot to stand vigil at the absurdly high windowed door, and the snake was formed, Jimmy was acting up. I was standing at the far end of the snake. I was the rattler, so I really can't remember knowing exactly what was happening, but I just heard Mrs. Roberts command Jimmy to "the back of the line." What was a teacher's pet perk for me was evidently punishment for Jimmy. I seem to remember him having blonde hair, and I can see him walk towards the front of the room and then turn, still smirking, towards me. Finally, he's standing next to me, and I just remember a tension in the air, which I always loved, and it felt like something big was going to happen. Something dramatic. I lived for these moments of tension in groups. I still do! And then I remember Mrs. Roberts sternly saying, "Michael, take care of him!." And without thinking. Without emotion. With no memory of animosity, I just reflexively turned and cold-cocked him in the face, tumbling over a desk, knocking it over and landing on an upturned chair. I was more stunned than he was, I think. All the air got sucked out of the room, and all that love of tension faded as now I was the one who was surely the target of derision. I only love group tension as an observer, never the cause. I was still stunned by what I had done but was also now very scared. I was in for it. And then Mrs. Roberts simply said, "Thank you, Michael," and opened the door, and the snake, completely flummoxed by what they'd just witnessed, slowly started slithering out and away from me and Jimmy, who by now had got up and looked humiliated. And I felt horrible.

I can't honestly remember feeling shame or really any depth of emotion. I just remember standing there looking at him in that pile of overturned little kids' furniture, hurting and knowing I'd done something horribly wrong. I also remember feeling so confused as to how doing something like that would be rewarded by a teacher. Surely Mrs.Roberts couldn't have meant for me to sock him in the face when she said, "take care of him," but what else could she have meant short of something physical? I don't remember my emotions immediately after hitting the poor kid very well at all, but I do know that I've told that story in my life many times, and regardless of the absurd laughter it usually elicits, and what is surely what I'm fishing for, I always tell it with a twinge of shame.

These little things we see or do or even imagine as we go through life, the ones that get caught on a crag of our soul and wave there and fester, are the little fires that light our way out of the cave. Or at least it makes me feel a little better to think of them like that. The memories of our failure and shame and ugliness keep us on track with so much a brighter light than all the things we've done right. Unfortunately, I guess that's just how we're wired. We only learn through pain.

Third grade came and went. I remember no interactions, good or bad, with Jimmy Humphries after that day. It was as if the whole room, including Mrs.Roberts, all signed a social contract to agree that the moment never happened.

In fourth grade, we moved to Wakefield Elementary School, which was just down the hill from Wakefield and housed the fourth thru sixth graders. I was exactly the opposite of the teacher's pet in fourth grade. I can't remember my teacher's name, but by then, I was beginning to hone the art of being the class clown and general pain in the ass for whatever teacher had me (Except for sixth grade when Ms. Titleman became the first teacher who I had very strong, very vivid and to this day very definite sexual fantasies about. God, what I wouldn't do to her on one of those little wooden desks with the scraped blue bent steel tube legs) I spent much of fourth grade in the "isolation booth," which was a desk in the corner of the room facing away from the class with a folding partition around it. I sat in there a lot. I also stood out in the hall a lot which made me prey for any passing principal or such, which would usually lead to an escalation of punishment and which on one occasion earned me a paddling on my ass, pants down, underwear up and bent over a chair with the ornate wooden paddle with holes drilled in it the principal kept in his office for such occasions. It was so rare that the kids it happened to were almost lionized.

One day we were all outside for some reason. I don't really remember being outside for anything the whole three years there, but for whatever reason, I was out there with what seemed like several classes of fourth graders, very unorganized, just sort of wandering around as if a very lax fire drill had occurred. I remember standing and looking at the building and turning slightly just to catch sight of Jimmy Humphries sucker punching me straight on the side of the head and just going down. That's all I remember. That's all I need to remember. Wherever you are, Jimmy, good for you, man. I love you.

My Sweet Lord

I never really knew what Pojo looked like. At times I imagined him being some sort of animal-human hybrid, that is to say, he had fur in places. His head was always human and always looking down as he was perpetually in the middle of what seemed like some important task as he scanned the weed-covered ground outside his little house. In other moments I’d see him as fully human, always in the same state of concentrated movement as he glided in and out of the little shack in which he lived not quite underneath but down there in the marsh the little bridge went over. I never really got to see him but I’d look down at his house almost every day and hope to get a glimpse of him. I’d always yell out, “Pojo’s house!” when we’d drive over the little one-lane bridge that led into the neighborhood somewhere in the Baltimore suburb of Whitemarsh.

 My Grandparent’s neighborhood was all post-war one-story houses, except for a couple of the fancier people who had second stories. One of these tall houses was right next to my grandparents. The Longs lived there. The two Long boys, a few years older than me were named Scott, the oldest and Pete, his little brother of a couple of years. Both were older enough than me for me to be wildly fascinated with them but not old enough to not allow me to tag along in their never-ending quest for all manner of delinquency. Surely the first fireworks, the first porn, the first cigarette I ever encountered came from them. They also ignited my second-grade obsession with Deep Purple. I was overwhelmed by the sound of “Machine Head” and all its massive sonic deluge of “Smoke on the Water” and the flat-out rush of “Space Truckin’” I still am if you want to know the truth.

I went to my grandparents’ house pretty much every weekday while school was on until I was about 9 or 10. Both my parents worked full-time so when I’d get off the bus that spilled us all out at the corner of Idlewild and Shamrock, my Grandfather, “Pop-Pop” would be waiting in his car which is always an early 70’s slightly weathered four-door Chevrolet of a slightly tan color. He’s always in that car no matter where in my life I gather a memory of him and surely he had other cars. But that’s how I remember Pop Pop on those little kid, not old enough to be home alone just yet schooldays. I’d walk straight to his car and hop in, my feet not touching the floor anymore. I don’t remember but I doubt there was any call for seatbelts. God, I hope not. I prefer to think that we just threw caution to the wind and drove! He’s perpetually smoking Raleigh cigarettes. No filter. He’s still smoking them in heaven because, well because he loves them. The radio would always be on and while he wasn’t much of a talker beyond basic greetings I always felt very warm and comfortable around him. I wish I could see and feel more of those moments, those 45-minute drives back to their house but they’re gone, those memories have abandoned me and I just have little flashes of second-person shaky camera stills and a few early public access quality video clips left to look at.

The drive back to their house took us through lots of two-lane country roads except for one last great push as we turned onto Pulaski Highway. It was about a ten-minute drive towards Baltimore but felt like an epic journey as all of a sudden, the rural nature of my world became filled with traffic and truck stops and liquor stores and little landmarks like the weird little motel that sat down in a hollow of grass and tall domed trees forming what looked like an oasis. I’d always crane my neck to see just what the hell was going on down there. I can’t recall the name but it shined from a neon sign that lit the lawn and little pond that the motel wrapped around, the trees creating a canopy that held in the light, even at midday and made everything glow iridescently, beautifully, magically with reds and greens. Well into my young adult life when it was me driving past on my way to Baltimore or maybe even my Grandparent’s house, I’d still find myself captured by that improbable little glowing depression. But I never thought to drive down there and I like to think I’d already learned to let magic stay magic. Once it becomes known it loses its splendor.

After our jaunt along Pulaski Highway or “route forty” as almost everyone referred to it,  we turned right and back into an almost prehistoric world. It slammed you in the gut it was such a sudden change of environment. One moment we’d be on this 6-lane highway with all manner of concrete and glass and steel concerns and after a short wait at a red light Pop Pop would turn the wheel right and we were engulfed by green. Tall green. Wild green. Unruly and wholly menacingly beautiful green. And as long as it took us to become completely swallowed whole by this sudden leviathan of living Baltimore jungle we’d hit the little bridge. We’d have to come to an almost full stop in order to see if anyone else was coming towards us and had already claimed the one lane the tiny rickety bridge supported. I remember the sound the car made as it rolled over the bridge. The sound of the tires navigating each plank or crack or whatever the bridge was made from. It didn’t seem made for a car but yet, here we were every school day rolling over this little trusty, maybe 50 foot long bridge and on into Nottingham Village neighborhood where my grandparents lived and my Dad had grown up.

One day as I remember it we were in the middle of the bridge when I became intently aware of what was on the radio. It was always tuned to some Baltimore AM pop music station. Not necessarily rock music because I doubt that was Pop Pop’s scene but just generic pop with news and traffic reports interspersed. I remember this snaky guitar sound and the groove. I didn’t use words like that back then but I know that’s what grabbed me. And I know that we could only have been on the bridge for seconds it was so short but in my memory, the entire song plays as Pop Pop and I sit in the car with him staring forward, a cigarette in his mouth and me frozen on my little knees on the bench seat my arms wrapped around the back of the seat for balance as I’m turned into a statue of an excited little boy looking for his friend in the ether and hearing “My Sweet Lord” for the very first time. I had no idea who George Harrison was or what I was even hearing; I was just hearing sound but it was like nothing I’d ever heard before and at that point most things were. I knew he was singing about God. For whatever reason that confused me but in an almost happy way. It just wasn’t what my limited experience with music had prepared me for. But the song is just pure joy that even a little boy in a car full of cigarette smoke and a silent grandfather can feel it. My aunt Eileen, my Dad’s younger sister was, I’d come to find out utterly enraptured by the Beatles as was the wont of her age at that time. In years to come, I’d buy her a  Beatles record for every Christmas. She always acted so happy and surprised. It never occurred to me until many, many years later that she surely already had all of these records I so excitedly wrapped and couldn’t wait to give her. She always played along. She never came close to ruining it. I was so loved as a little boy. Nobody did anything wrong and everything that happened was perfect.

Once we rolled off the bridge I’d pop up and look intently across Pop Pop’s or whoever was driving and peer down into the little valley to the left of us. Valley is likely too grand a term for what it was. It was more like a gulley, all weed choked and tangled and green, so much green and in the middle of this forgotten little depression of weeds and saplings there was a little run-down shack. It seemed like it was still standing as an act of defiance against the elements. Even as a little kid I could tell this was a long-ago place. But it was where Pojo lived. It was Pojo’s house. “Pojo!” I’d yelp and whoever was driving would know to respond in some sort of happy assurance and ask me if I saw him. Camera me sees me squinch up my face and waiting until the house is fully obscured behind the trees and somewhat sadly but not too sadly, “Nope. Not today.” I never saw him. He was always inside I guess. I still wonder what he did in there but I know it was kind and beautiful.

Once we landed at the house I’d rush in to see Mimi, my grandmother. I loved Mimi as much as I loved anyone. As a little kid I just always wanted to be around her as much as possible. Not that I’d shadow her but I just wanted to be near her, just in the same house. I was her only grandkid and she adored me. If I could have somehow used that love as a model for what I thought love was and the extent to which I thought I was lovable I suspect things might have gone very differently for me. And not that I’d actually choose to not have the life I’ve had and not that my mother didn’t love me as intensely but suffice it to say you can’t love a kid into loving himself. God knows they tried.

I’d spend those afternoons watching TV, eating dinner and playing outside sometimes alone and sometimes with Pete and Scott. No one called Pete Pete tho. He was known as Doodz and that’s merely a best guess at how one might spell the simple monosyllabic utterance which comprised his nickname. No one ever called him Pete except maybe his parents, but they were scarcely around. He was just Doodz or Doodge or Doozh. God only knows. In the middle of the backyard there stood a massive swing that Pop Pop had made for his kids. It towered over me as a little kid and was made of green painted thick tube steel with a single wooden seat hanging from two long lengths of chain. I could go crazy on that thing forever always trying desperately to get to horizontal and then jumping off to fly over the lawn and land after quite a height tumbling and rolling and gathering scrapes and bruises and fits of ecstatic laughter. And then I’d brush myself off, maybe, and do it all over again. If there was someone there to push me I could go higher and jump from an even greater height and land even heavier and laugh even harder.

One day I remember being on the swing just sort of swinging in the breeze. I liked to end each swing of the pendulum with my feet as straight in the air above me with my body as flat as possible so I was as close to upside down as possible. When I’d stop for just a second I felt weightless and then would start falling back to the other side and feel my stomach glide blissfully up my throat. I’d always giggle. Even as a little boy I was forever looking for things that made me feel something different. Something intense.

On this day I was waiting for my Mom to come pick me up. It was daytime so I can’t imagine why I was there already. Maybe I’d spent the night, but I know it was a school day and I was there on the swing. I saw my mom and Mimi walk around the side of the house together coming towards me. I’m sure I reflexively smiled as I saw the two people, I loved more than anyone suddenly appear. And I remember seeing the looks on their faces. I could tell they’d been crying and they looked intently at me and seemed worried. I got scared.

                                                                     ***

I loved fire as a kid. I was forever playing with matches and starting little fires and watching them get bigger and threaten to grow beyond my control. That was the best part. The feeling of knowing it might beat me and I’d unleashed a catastrophe. I always pulled it back. I had no desire to actually burn anything down or destroy anything. I was just fascinated with flame and how dangerous it could be if I didn’t reign it in. One day I was alone in the tall weed field across the street from my house. It was actually two doors down and in time that field would become more of the neighborhood and the O’Connell’s would move into the corner house built exactly where I was playing with matches and a little pile of dried weeds. The O’Connells were a big Irish family and had four boys and a younger sister. I loved them all right away, but Jimmy was my guy. He was a year older, and anyone could tell we were both headed for trouble at some point. But before they moved here from New York it was just me and my matches and the clear void of the absence of my best friend who wasn’t there with me like usual. Brian Tolley lived across the street and had a similar big family like Jimmy did. Brian was a year older than me, but we were each other’s first best friends. We shared a deep interest in absolutely everything we were told to avoid. Besides fire, we had a pile of waterlogged Playboys and other such things hidden in the weeds and rocks of the little creek that still ran through what remained of the fields and woods the whole neighborhood had slowly engulfed. We did everything together.

And on that day alone in the field, I remember thinking of him and wishing he had been there. It felt odd to be doing this alone. The little fire which was surrounded by acres and acres of very high, very dry, and densely packed weeds started to grow a little. And I just watched it. I watched it slowly start to spread and wrap around other taller blades of dry grass. And I just watched it. For the first time, I didn’t want to reign it in. And I remember not feeling any sort of giddiness or excitement. I just watched it spread until it became a conflagration and started to spread far, far beyond my little hollowed-out hiding space in the weeds. I watched and then I just ran. I ran home and looked back to see a pillar of smoke and flame. I ran to my house and heard my mother in the basement. I think I expected angry bangs on the front door at any moment because I was sure I’d been seen. My mom was ironing and so I just began talking to her and trying to interest her in things, I don’t remember what, but things that would keep her downstairs and not upstairs where something very bad was happening in the neighborhood. Very soon I heard the approach and scream of fire engines. In my memory, I can see Mr. Tolley run out of his house and directly towards the fire with some idea of putting it out but it was well beyond that point. But I also think I must be imagining this as I only remember running home and hiding in the basement and desperately trying to divert my Mom’s attention. I have no memory of anything else happening. It’s as if the whole thing was a dream which simply changed scenes into some other thread of the squiggly stuff of our minds. But I know it happened. It became a neighborhood story. But I have no memory of getting in trouble for it. My mom certainly must have noticed how odd I was acting and so inexplicably interested in how to iron clothes and she surely heard the fire engines right outside our house and that sound of all sounds she would connect with me. But nothing happened. The fire just went away like Brian did.

                                                                      ***

I never heard any of the details and if I did, I don’t remember. My mom and grandmom and later my Dad went into a mode of keeping me safe and being very worried for me. Worried for me and heartbroken for the Tolleys. And even the poor guy driving the city trash truck. Even he had people feeling bad for him. There was evidently no way he could have known. I don’t know.

And so, as they got closer to the swing my mom just said “Mike, let’s go inside.” I was led to the huge family room which was the heart of my grandparent’s house. The room of so many Christmases and late nights watching Star Trek and other late-night TV as Pop Pop slept in his chair and I dozed in and out of sleep all night with the TV on. I loved these nights in this room. But on this day, everything was different. I sat on the couch with my mom sitting next to me but on the edge and turned towards me. Mimi stood in front of me. I knew something awful was about to be given me. My mom started crying and just said, “Mike, Brian’s gone. He had an accident.” Or something like that. The memory always ends with the sight of one of the coffee table feet which were ornately carved from some dark wood and they always looked like hooves to me. As the memory fades I’m just locked on that little wooden hoof doing its best to help hold up the huge round marble coffee table. And it just slowly turns black as I sit in silence and hear my mom crying as she holds me.

Perfect Day

The ’75 Red sox made me a baseball fan. The Cincinnati Reds won in seven games. Game six was Carlton’s game, my idol, and his seemingly willing-it-fair wave of his hands as his 12th inning, game-winning homerun just cleared the left-field foul pole. I was still an Orioles fan in my heart but for whatever reason, Carlton Fisk, the Boston catcher had become my model for how an eleven-year-old little catcher should play and stand in to face other little boys trying their damndest to “just throw a strike!” And so, with that one swing of the bat from his straight upright stance complete with his compulsive thrusting back of his elbows to stretch his chest before even stepping into the batter’s box, he tied the series and gave that little version of me so much hope. At that age I don’t even think it was hope; it was something more like God had simply assured me. I knew the Sox would win and how could anyone see this late, school night homerun and feel anything different?

              God shouldn’t promise little boys things he can’t deliver.

The next night it ended. Everything seemed to end. I was destroyed for the first time in my life. It hurt so much more than The Thing and in fact, it was as if all the years of torment I’d endured had been condensed into a single moment of disappointment. At eleven years old I cried for, as I remember it and see it floating like some sort of little, flickering cloud in my mind, for days. I’m sure it was likely more something like the rest of the evening when The Reds won game seven. But I know I was heartbroken. That was my first experience with heartbreak. And so, when Melinda left me or Nery told me she dreamed about other men proposing to her and that she’d be happy if they did, I was very familiar with that sort of stomach-churning, panic-inducing pain. Part of me yearned for it. Be careful what you wish for. And then I think that maybe we only feel what we’re waiting to feel and heartbreak and all the romantic and poetic trappings that come with it, at least after it’s over, is something I’ve reached for. I’ve lept towards it. The little boy inside me who was so trampled by that World Series loss is the same little boy who then grew up to love sad songs and movies that made me cry and girls who broke my heart. Maybe I’m a masochist. And maybe that’s where the heroin fits in. Punishment and reward.

                                                                     ***

              At some point, after a few years of making demos, and A&R guys leaving and being swapped around in the Westside offices of Interscope Records, we just gave up. Lifter ended. I don’t think at that moment, in those days we’d accepted it was actually over; I’m sure we had lofty, scared and fragile goals about what we could eventually do but it nothing else ever happenned. Lifter was done.

              That was a period of ephemeral guessing and wondering and questioning. I really had no idea if there was any money left and although I was sober at the time and lived in a cheap Los Feliz one-room hovel which still had the TV Brian had bought me sitting on top of a large cardboard box, I really had no idea what to do. I try so hard to pull back memories of that time and I remember clearly sitting with Tony, who’d replaced Johnny as he was the first one to see the writing on the Interscope walls and just said farewell. I’m sitting in the little office of Cole rehearsal, where we’d spent days and weeks and months for the last year or so, working on new demos for our never-to-be-made second record. I see myself from a vantage point hovering above us, just looking down at the floor and, with a pause and an exhaled breath, saying, “Ok, let’s just call them and tell them we want out.” I see myself, head down, realizing that it meant the end of the one dream I’d been able to cultivate. I can’t really see in my archives anything after until life just went back to what it was before Lifter. Just normal life, working on TV commercials and looking for her. Whoever she was.

                                                                                  ***

              I was still very much into baseball. Baseball has been a throughline holding together all of the life I’m writing about until Nery left. Now I can hardly watch an inning and I don’t dare look at any sort of standings, or box scores and I try so hard to filter out anyone’s excitement about the Dodgers or whatever team they might be attached to and still route for regardless of geography. You keep your first team. You don’t move from Michigan to Denver and suddenly drop the Tigers and become a Rockies fan. That is unforgivable. And so, I remained and still do an Orioles fan but even that undying love, despite them being one of the perennial worst teams in baseball, has retreated to some far-away place in me. I’ve lost baseball. It feels worse than almost anything. It was Nery’s complete support and willingness to understand the levels to which I loved baseball that went with her when she left. Who could imagine such a thing? She didn’t take it; I pinned it to her, and it followed her to New Mexico like a little ball of lint.

                                                                                  ***

              One day, I called my friend John Albert, or he called me, and one of us said, “let’s go to the batting cages.” John had gone to Impact and stayed sober well before I got there. Somehow, we met and became friends in those early days in which so many junkies moved from Hollywood Narcotics Anonymous to the much larger, and brighter and prettier AA. It was fun to go to this little space on Colorado Blvd. in Glendale, long gone, and pay a few bucks to stand in and laugh at our failures or be injected with dopamine if we actually connected against machines well too fast for our skill level. I wasn’t the 13-year-old All-Star anymore. That kid would have done fine against these 75 mph yellow plastic baseballs. But the me who showed up that day floundered. But we had Starbucks, and nothing really mattered, and we poked fun at each other and called one another pussies for stepping out and we had fun. There were two other guys taking pitches in the fast lane. And they were hitting more than they were missing. Both wearing shorts and what I assume to be some sort of Jimmy Buffet T-shirts or something similar. I just sat there while John alternately failed and triumphantly fouled a ball off and I called him a pussy with a laugh. Or maybe a “fag.” Some sort of juvenile epithet.

              I sat there on that little wooden bench, I suppose designed to harken to the benches in a dugout or maybe just a simple bus stop and listened to these guys talking. They were talking about playing baseball. I could tell they were both playing together on some team as they mentioned other players and other opponents who they, likewise, called pussies and I was flummoxed. Were they actually playing baseball somewhere? Actual hardball? Until that moment, that very moment, I’d just assumed that there was some unwritten and certainly unspoken rule that said once you were 18, or hell, maybe even 16, and unless you were on your way to winding up in The Show, you just had to play softball for the rest of your life. The very idea, and I was sure I was hearing it wrong, that an adult could play actual baseball, which is wildly different from softball was magical. That 11-year-old kid, crying in his bed after Pete Rose and his miserable teammates dashed all my hopes, came alive. That dead kid awoke in me, and I walked over to them and said, “Hey, do you guys play actual baseball?”

              And so, it began. They were, um, less than embracing but they answered. I’m sure my sub-athletic visage complete with what I imagine was a Birthday Party t-shirt, dyed purple-black hair and long black pants made them feel like maybe this question was a setup but I waited and finally they answered, “Yeah, we play in the LA Municipal Sports League.” They gave me just enough information that I was able to go home and fight my way through the second wave of the internet and find a website for the league. Son of a bitch! I can play baseball!

              It took a year or so.

              The first thing I learned when I found out the location of the various fields this league played on and what was closest to me was that I had a long time to wait. Crystal Springs or Pote field was and is a beautiful baseball diamond in Griffith Park. Griffith Park is a sprawling area of hills and parks and home to the Griffith Park Observatory, home of the pendulum that knocks down the pins after mesmerizing you into almost unconsciousness. And within this park is Crystal Springs (we never called it Pote Field). I’d go there every Sunday for a while and watch guys play. I’d sit up in the stands and drink coffee and smoke and marvel that guys like me, and others were in full uniform and playing actual hardball. This meant fast pitch (or as fast as they could) and guys getting beaned and hard-hit Rawlings baseballs straight to lucky shortstops who had moments of glory after fielding and throwing out another crestfallen guy at first base, their evenings and wives and beds accounted for, and the pain when they’d lose and the contagious glory when they’d win. Everything softball lacks and why it never, ever seemed like a replacement for baseball.

              Sometimes, when the amount of coffee in me was right and I felt particularly courageous, I’d walk up to one of them and ask them about the league and how to get in and, if I was totally out of my mind, I’d ask if they needed any players. I was so far away from playing baseball at this level, this, almost 40-year-old fantasy camp level but still well beyond what my sedate and heroin and music-afflicted life had brought me to. But sometimes I’d still ask. Most of them were kind. Bored but kind and say “No, Your best bet is forming a team.” And in walked Michael Jordan.

              Over time, as I started going to these Sunday games fairly regularly for an hour or two each Sunday, I started to notice another guy kind of watching but also pretending to pitch against the right field fence. He’d sort of throw the ball so slow it defied gravity and softly bounce off the chain-link fence and he’d all but fist pump and convulse in triumph. Small triumph. As I stared at him across the diamond and through the fences, I saw someone sucking in the joy of baseball. He didn’t give a damn how he looked. And that mesmerized me. Just some other Los Angeles character in shorts and a Dodger’s jersey and a mitt and a pile of baseballs at his feet. I’d seen him a few times and finally got up the nerve to go talk to him.

              That changed everything.

                                                                                  ***

              On some sunny and hot Sunday morning on the Eagle Rock High School dirt baseball field which is now just three blocks from this little house I live in, I heard a gunshot, or what sounded like a gunshot and reflexively pulled my right arm into my stomach in a move to contract my muscles or whatever reflexives tell our body to do in such a moment. The ball I’d just thrown to the third baseman after taking a warmup cutoff from right field went wildly to the right by what seemed like the entire length of a base path, 90 feet. The gunshot sound coincided with this weirdly, errantly thrown ball and my mind flicked switches and the only thought in my mind, as I stood there at deep second base was, “They’re going top have to give me painkillers.” I’d just broke my right arm.

              Everything stopped and everyone just looked as they’d all heard it. Turns out when you snap your humerus clean in half it makes quite a sound and after their initial moment of confusion, everyone ran up to me. I’m not proud of this but I just went into leader mode and told everyone what to do because I had no faith, in that moment, that anyone would have any idea how to help me. As if amplifying this thought, Dino, our feet-obsessed catcher reflexively reached out to grab my right shoulder and exclaim, “He’s just dislocated his shoulder” and as he touched me and started to push my shoulder inward the shock of pain was so electric it, I almost passed out. Instead, I just screamed, “Get me a cigarette! It’s not my fuckin’ shoulder.” I arranged my own triage. I told Chris, our drag-queen catcher to ask his Dad, who was in the stands, to drive me to the hospital. I turned over the lineup, between feverish inhales of many offered cigarettes, and I asked someone else to gather up my stuff and in my beautiful Griffith Parks Pirates uniform which was a call back to Roberto Clemente’s glory years and its sleeveless jersey and shining black and gold I got in the car with Chris’ father and went to LA Children’s Hospital in Los Feliz.

              I’d done what I’d had to do to play baseball. I met Mike Jordan. He was a weirdly obsessed baseball fan who was somewhere on the spectrum but Christ, he loved baseball. Together we cobbled a team from all the various people that orbited me. Mostly sober junkies and ex-convicts but a fair amount of “normal” people who “loved baseball! I was an All-Star in high school!” Or college. Or hell, the majors. The only ones who showed up on the dismal but so beautifully, magical first practice were the junkies and criminals and losers and ruined. The only ones who showed up had nothing to lose and we set about forming a baseball team.

              For those years, playing baseball with my cobbled-together group of friends, all trying to redeem themselves from years of drugs and jail and massive derailing, all trying to recapture the one thing that they’d loved as a kid before the skies went dark, was all that moved me forward. Playing baseball and waiting for Sunday to roll around and eventually Saturday too when we joined the wood bat league was all I cared about. Oh, I still got high when I’d falter and there were multiples of her whose love I’d do anything for until she’d leave me disintegrated. But knowing that I got to play baseball in a few days made all of what used to send me far, far downstream, bearable. It actually made it all seem pointless compared to baseball.

                                                                     ***

              We played in various configurations for about ten years. Or at least that’s how long I played. Some of the guys are still at it and it tugs at me. My arm healed all wrong and eventually, I had to have an operation which broke it again and screwed it together with a plate and which still makes airline detectors go off sometimes. I came back and pitched better than ever, sometimes. But for those ten years, baseball meant everything to me. Everything. I never touched a guitar or wrote a song. I rarely listened to music. I remember thinking about all the baseball time I’d lost wasting it on music. I came to hate music or more precisely, making music. I hated it like someone might hate an ex-girlfriend who cheats on you with your best friend and your Father, just dismantling you in the process. The Lifter experience had taken on all the trappings of a heartbroken failed relationship. Baseball was my new her. I still shot heroin on and off, but I think it was at its lowest ebb then. Although the last year I played, I was completely strung out from start to, almost, finish, eating my dog’s painkillers before, and inevitably winding up scoring and getting high in my baseball uniform to and from the games. A white guy in a clean 70’s era Pittsburgh Pirates uniform frantically rushing around Skid Row on a bright Sunday morning, looking for dope and an outfit is anything but subtle. Maybe Phil was right; I was as subtle as clubfoot. But damn if it didn’t help me! I led the league in batting that year, almost all my at-bats so completely engulfed with thoughts of copping or the shame of copping or the fear of running out that I never thought of the pitch. I just swung reflexively and drove ropes to right-center or down the third base line for a double. Thinking about hitting a pitched baseball is almost assuredly to miss a pitched baseball. It was as if I was finally a wizard. With two games left in the season, I kicked and got sober. I struck out all final eight times at bat.

                                                                                  ***

              I could write an entire book about these years, especially the first two in which we went from the most laughable, last-place team the league had seen to the champions in our second year, beating teams of wayward eighteen-year-olds and mustachioed cops. But that book has been written. My friend and our perennial right fielder, John Albert wrote it. “Wrecking Crew” All the joy and the loss and the sex and the drugs and the heartbreak, he’s already chronicled. Can you just stop writing about something and send the reader away to another book? Well, let’s see. I’m trying.

                                                                     ***

              One Sunday I woke up. Newly sober, I drove across town to the “Tar Pits” meeting on Melrose just west of Fairfax (which for a moment in the 60’s was almost going to be changed to “Koufax” but they lost their nerve and LA will forever be looking up from Hell for it). I’d told the guys I had to miss the game as I had to get to a meeting, or I’d use. Something like that. Half of them by that time were new guys who had no concept of what being a junkie was, but I spoke with Willy, my Cuban co-manager of sorts and likely the actual manager by that point and he’d been through it, so he knew and understood. I remember sitting there looking at the speaker from the podium and just realizing that baseball was over. It had been ten beautiful and often heartbreaking years and that’s the most I could hope for. I’d started to ramp up on my using and then trying to get sober and I knew I needed to move on and try anything different. Baseball wasn’t going to save me. Not even baseball could save me. And so, I decided to tell Willy I wouldn’t be coming back anymore. It wasn’t as hard as it seems it might be because so many of the original bunch had moved on and I was one of the few remaining. I got up after the meeting and walked outside and lit a cigarette and I felt sad but free.

I had nothing to do anymore but look for the next thing.

A Pair of Brown Eyes

It was like being in Middle Earth, that place of hobbits and elves and wizards, this little stone-walled cemetery sighing behind an even smaller stone church just outside Mullinahone, a tiny, often happy Irish town in County Tipperary. Fainche and I had come here for Christmas to bury her Mom’s ashes with the rest of her family and listen to stories of her and what a wild girl she was. A loved but wild girl. Fainche’s aunts and uncles gathered around us with their children and their loves, and we stood in the cold grey Irish winter while the priest said his thing. A beautiful thing but at times hard for me to understand. It wasn’t raining and that much felt like a gift. When it was over, we all walked slowly away and hugged and looked down at the ground and into the sky and into each other’s eyes, but only then for a second.

                                                                     ***

              Fainche and I and Calvin, our dog that we’d found running up and down Alvarado street one AA meeting Monday night found this house I’m typing in right now, on a busy feverish Saturday. We’d been together for a couple of years and were still in the West Hollywood bungalow apartment where decades earlier Pam had welcomed in Jim and his 20,000 microgram eyes. Out of those nights “LA Woman” emerged. We’d been looking to buy a house, something that seemed so wildly fantastic to me. Before Fainche, the very notion of ever owning a house was non-extant. But we met in Art Dept and when I first saw her, I exclaimed “I’m going to marry that girl” as she pulled out bags of set dressing from her black Ford Explorer. I gazed at her from out of the front window of the house in which we were cobbling together another TV commercial world. She was gorgeous. I fell in love immediately and while we never got married, I did buy her a ring in some Capetown diamond emporium, and we stuck it out for eight years. Today she’s a friend whom I don’t talk to enough but love with the fury of seven suns.

              Fainche had crooked front teeth. Perfectly crooked front teeth. I’d sometimes call her “snaggletooth.” I was able to call her this and make her laugh and sometimes kiss me because she knew I absolutely adored those perfectly, better than normal front teeth. Those teeth were the front door of her face and those beautiful eyes and little nose hung above them like Christmas lights over a front door. Perfect. Just beautifully perfect. And at times I did things to turn off the lights and I’d be without those beautiful teeth. Over those eight or so years I’d continued to struggle….” struggle”…such a word we use for utterly selfish, uncaring and wholly awful choices we make to feel comfort. She never made that choice. She endured. She felt. But I wasn’t given her strength and so I chose comfort in the form of heroin. Those perfect teeth were her armor I bet. I bet that’s where it came from.

              Eventually, I’d get sober again and we always decided to move forward. Jesus, what a risk she was taking. Buying a house with someone like me who was perfectly capable of burning everything down at the first sign of discomfort or of life itself. We carried on and then on one Saturday in 2003, we saw, after many, many other houses a little green house in Eagle Rock. We loved it although it was beyond our budget. And to add to that, we were told we’d have to offer substantially more if we really wanted it. We were well beyond our common sense line in the sand. And by Monday they had forty offers. Such was buying a house in Los Angeles in the early 2000s. And so, we said a prayer and I touched her teeth, and we pet Calvin and picked up the nearest cellphone and told the soul on the other end to offer $500,000.  The voice told us ok but that we should write letters to the owners telling them how much we wanted their house and how much we’d look after it. And so, we did. I mentioned the big backyard and how we wanted to rescue many dogs and that it was perfect for this future herd (and we did). Monday night came and that same phone rang, and we were told we had a house. Somehow Fainche and I had crossed paths and fell in love while we were both, or at least I was at my peak earning potential. Fainche’s star was still rising, and she had more heights to climb but everything aligned, and we pulled it off. We bought this house that I’ll probably and happily die in. A little craftsman bungalow with a huge flat front and backyard. We were mesmerized by the possibilities.

              The next few years we lived in this little house and the stars saw us go to Africa, saw me go to rehab, watched me shuffle off to friends’ couches after other moments of selfishness and we welcomed in a parade of dogs who’d been through the worst of what horrible humans are capable of and we loved them back. And they’d pass and we’d collapse, and we’d let another one in, and the cycle continued. This little green house contained it all.

                                                                     ***

              Fainche’s parents meant well as far as I can tell, and they surely loved her, but they orbited around their own suns. Fainche, an 18-year-old crackhead finally said enough and got sober at the age most people are just beginning to shoot towards destruction. Her Dad, who I still love even though it’s been years and years since I’ve heard his somewhat addled and confused Irish brogue, was a doctor and her Mom was just this beautiful wild spirit who somehow escaped her small village in Ireland and found herself to Fainche’s father’s lips in Canada, both of them emigres. Feeling the dread of life in Canada, they moved to California with Fainche and her younger brother and set out to wait for me. Or at least it’s nice to think that.

              By the time I’d seen Fainche through that front window struggling with all manner of Target and Bed Bath and Beyond sacks, her parents were split. At some point, and I can’t remember if it was before or after I’d come up with “snaggletooth” her Father moved to South Carolina with his new wife Cindy. Cindy is a book in and of herself and I want to put that book aside and write about Fainche’s mom Catherine, Kay for short.

              I don’t remember where Kay was when I first met her, but I remember the feeling. The feeling of being even somewhat, by virtue of loving her daughter, connected to her was overwhelming and exciting. We fit each other perfectly. Both of us were loud and with very few verbal filters and passionate about anything we loved. At least that’s how I remember her. She was passion-made flesh to the extent it virtually ruined her. She hadn’t made out well, as far as I could see, from the divorce to the doctor. But she was always happy or at least on fire angry. Both are beautiful. Passion and safety can not ride in the same car. She embodied this. I could be exactly who I was around her all scars and mistakes and improper thoughts laid bare and she didn’t care beyond a laugh. Eventually, she moved to the desert in Yucca Valley. Yucca Valley the place of a million LA getaway Air Band B vacation homes. I may be the only one of my tribe who doesn’t own a home there. But she lived in what in any other town would be called the “flats” or something like that. Her’s was a small, dusty, sand-encircled house with oppressive heat as a roommate and a million thrift store treasures strewn about the place. She smoked pot and made friends with the local speedfreaks who, despite their afflictions seemed to do their best to help her out. At least a couple of them did; the rest just flittered away to taken apart and unbuilt car engines baking in the hot sun after grams of methamphetamine were smoked.

              Fainche and I would make the drive, up past Palm springs and the outlet shops and Hadley’s fruit stand that for miles and miles yelled at us “Fruit!” via billboards only to find no fruit at all when we finally got there, just dried husks of what was once fresh fruit. And nuts. They had a lot of nuts. But never a piece of real fruit. I was always disappointed. We’d turn left at some point and drive up the mountain and into the speed-soaked Yucca Valley. Eventually, we’d turn left at the Sizzler (a really excellent Sizzler by the way!) and roll down the dusty road a few doors and pull left into Kay’s driveway.

              I’d be lying if I claimed I was always happy to make these trips. As much as I loved her, love has a hard time standing up to boredom. It was hot and the house was strewn with stuff. Just stuff. And we’d go to the thrift store and get more stuff, Fainche always paying. I’ll admit that at times I held resentment against how much money Fainche gave to her Mom to keep her afloat. I know we had arguments about it. I say this to be fully transparent about my capacity to be small and ugly. Don’t ever tell someone you love, or even hate, to not give their own mother money. You’ll regret it. I do.

                                                                                  ***

              We kept just moving forward in this little green house. We were slowly drifting apart. It was like no pain I’d ever experienced. To be this close to someone who you loved with all your heart and yet had less and less to talk about was a fresh hell which wrapped around me like a hot lead blanket. I was smothering myself. It’s truly something to love someone and yet have nothing to say to them. I kept gaining weight when I wasn’t shooting dope and everything was so wildly out of balance. I think our only common focal point was the little gaggle of dogs who we always had with us. Calvin and Koufax and Richard Parker and so many more throughout the years. We loved dogs. That much never changed.

              At some point, and I can’t remember when or how it came to be, but Kay got sick. Fainche got a call as far as I can remember, and we were in a car and driving towards Yucca Valley immediately. By the time we got there her mom was in the hospital. My memory is that she was asleep. I have no memory of any last words with her. We were told she was suffering from COPD, surely as a result of her smoking as it was almost shamefully told. I remember how empty the hospital was and how long and empty a walk it was to the payphone well down the hall where I’d go to keep Fainche’s family in Ireland apprised of what was going on. Maybe we were there an hour and maybe we were there for days, it hardly matters. At some point, we were told Fainche’s mom and my friend had passed away. Kay was gone and I was all alone with her daughter. It didn’t seem possible. It seemed like Kay would outlive all of us snuggled in secondhand clothes and knick knacks, getting high and making people laugh and smile. Something was wildly fucked up with this world.

              Fainche once told me that she was so enamored of how I took control and handled things after her mother passed and how she couldn’t have done it herself. I remember her saying that but I have no memory of doing anything other than crying and holding Fainche from behind while she bent to touch her forehead to her mother’s face and cried a delicate little cry. Just a little cry, a small sad thing.

                                                                                  ***

              I don’t think that Kay’s passing spelled the death knell for Fainche and I and to be honest, I get confused as to where her leaving us even lands on our own timeline of separation. We kept drifting apart. I’d be at work and while I’d always prayed to go home at 10 hours I now wished for the camera to roll through the night so I wouldn’t have to go home and have nothing to say to this beautiful woman whom I loved but felt such a chasm separating us. And I think she felt the same. We tried so hard to love each other. We really did.

              At the end of that year, it was decided that Fainche and I would go to Ireland for Christmas and take Kay’s ashes to have them interned? Buried? At the little stone Mullinahone church. That week cycled between heartbreak and Irish joy. We spent hours in various hotel lobbies which is where people gather in Ireland. Tales were told about Kay by family priests and drunk uncles. We visited all of Fainche’s relatives flung all over that little green island always driving on the wrong side of the road following directions that relied on shades of the moon as markers. At one point, with her cousin who was in the Guarda which here is the police and his lovely young wife we found ourselves in one of the few fine dining restaurants in Dublin. I watched a table of two well-dressed couples across from us; they looked like they were dressed for the theatre. They were served beautiful bowls of delicate pasta on par with Batali and aside each one was a separate bowl of French fries or chips as they call them. I was mesmerized. Where else on earth can you freely and confidently order pasta and French fries in a real restaurant? To this moment, Ireland is Heaven to me.

              We carried on, just a little side-step away from each other every day or so. We pretended to want to read each night instead of kissing. We pretended to be busy with work instead of doing things each other cherished. We arranged our days around each other’s absence. But we truly did try so hard to love each other. We truly did. No one can say we didn’t try. We spent the last couple of years just drowning in failed attempts to pull ourselves back together. And the hardest part was realizing that love alone can’t keep two people together. There’s so much more. So many other little sparks that need to be kept safe from the wind. Love alone can’t keep two people in love. If that’s all it took, I’d be touching Fainche’s crooked teeth with my tongue right now while we looked for dogs to rescue. But that’s just not the way things work. Things don’t work well.

              One day I walked out of the bedroom and into the family/dining room in this little green house and Fainche was sitting at the end of the Green and Green dining table we’d bought and had refinished. Calvin was outside as always, maintaining his distance from unwanted affection which had vexed us since finding him. We’d coax him into bed with us with treats just to enjoy ten minutes of his presence as we went to bed together. I imagine I said good morning or something like that. I remember stopping in the doorway to the little kitchen across from where Fainche sat. One of us, it doesn’t matter who, finally said it. We’re not happy. I think we should stop. Whoever said it, the other one was silent and just nodded. It was as if a bomb had gone off in the few feet distance between us and yet after it exploded and we’d cried and hugged we felt free.

              I’d kill someone for Fainche. Happily, and with a Gerber daisy in my mouth. I don’t love her any less than the first day I saw her. But I guess we were meant to be distant friends. After that moment we still lived together for another year, me on the couch and her in our bed in the room where the mouse once ate through the wall and popped his little head out to our glee. Kay was gone. Fainche was soon to go. Kay and Fainche. You should be so lucky to have two people like that in your life. And now they were gone, and I was on my own in this little green house. Just me and the dogs.

Eating

Do you want to know how many calories are in a slice of American cheese? The ten-year-old version of me will tell you it’s about one hundred, maybe a little more or less depending on the brand and the weight. By the time I was at that age, I knew how many calories almost everything I regularly ate had. I knew whether I was at dinner or lunch or in between, on my own. By that time, I’d bought into or, more to the point, succumbed to the unwritten and unspoken law of my home; only thin people are good people. My Mom never uttered these words. She never sat me down and talked about my weight. It’s hard to even voice this without feeling like I’m betraying her, but she was motivated by what she thought would make me the happiest and for her, it was being thin.

              And I was always a fat kid.

              I remember standing in front of the kitchen sink with a pack of hotdogs in my hand, trying to read the small print that would tell me how much sin, or calories each link contained. At that point, nutritional information on labels was limited. You couldn’t walk into a Mcdonald’s and be assaulted by the shame of what you might order just bombarding you. They wall-mounted menu just blared calories. Thousands of calories. Up there, as it is today, in the bright illuminated menu letting you know, faintly, that your choice is one of savages. Fat savages. Shame never stops working. Ultimately, it’s all we respond to. Shame or the escaping of shame. It all comes down to shame, and the shame of being a “husky” kid was intolerable. And yet, somehow, I got through it. I remained the “chubby” kid for almost all my childhood. You’d think that would have protected me from The Thing. But you know. It wasn’t my stomach he was after.

                                                                                  ***

              I’ll tell you now that this is the hardest part of all of this. Letting you in on all of the sex with a million, wildly differently gendered partners and prostitutes holds nothing to this. This is where it all lays and why I pray for golden rows of light to anoint me with the courage to speak it. Fuck, I was a fat kid and a fat adult.

                                                                                  ***

              I think it was about fourth grade or maybe earlier. I’d leave my house in Homestead Village via the front door with my bookbag or whatever talisman I routinely took to school and walk around my house and then across the back lawn of the Trennary’s house and wind up at the bus stop. This only happened for a brief period. But I’d stand there, all alone. At that point, all my allies lived elsewhere, and I just had to get to school where I was safe. Once there, I had friends. I had a group. I had a gang. The little boy me, overweight and such a target for other little boys just like me who had no idea of what they were doing. They tortured me at that bus stop. They were older kids. I never knew who they were. In my memory, they are just kids who magically appeared for a brief period as if their parents had split and they had to spend October with their Mom. Or maybe November. Or whatever. They were there and I didn’t know them. Everything felt so wholly obscure. Who were these kids? And then they targeted me.

              I was just one of the lone kids standing waiting for the bus. Just a little kid. All they picked up on was that I was undefended and “chunky” as I was sometimes called. And so, naturally, they struck. They told the smallest, youngest of them, and bear in mind that this bus stop handled kids from kindergarten to high school, the busses coming in a familiar rotation each morning. I’d see them huddle and eventually a very young boy, half paralyzed by fear: he had no skin in this game, would come out of the pile of tormentors with a stick, a twig, a thin branch and, with a clumsy jab of his arm, score a piece of wayward dogshit onto the end of his weapon. He’d nervously step toward me as I stood frozen and watched. They’d egg him on, and he’d finally get close enough for me to reach and very un-heroically knock the stick out of his hand. For a moment I remember us looking at each other and asking why, asking without words, how we’d become mixed up in this. Why us? And I’d tell him with those same eyes, whether he understood or not, “you’re the littlest kid and I’m the fattest. It’s all they know.”

              I only remember one moment of this. But it’s enough. It’s enough to make me know how many calories are in a poptart (it’s about 200). Eventually, I learned that if I left by the front door and as my natural path to the bus stop took me between mine and the Ternary’s house, I could wait there until the bus came and then dash the 50 yards and into the relative safety of its interior. Not fully safe but whatever happened to me there is gone. It’s flittered away like almost all of my life.

              One morning as I waited outside my house and in between the hedges that lined, as if by law, the Trennary’s and my house, my Father saw me through the window. Immediately he came outside and asked why I was standing in such an odd place. I suppose I spilled the beans. I have a limited but solid memory of, after confessing, him walking to the bus stop and its inhabitants of little kid creeps and just going to bat for me. He laid into them. I was mortified but I also knew it was over. My Dad rescued me in the most embarrassing way possible. He just lit them up with no regard for language. Fuck and Fuck and Fuck. Again, I was so wildly embarrassed, but I was also able to walk up there without any looks of revenge and from then on, I became me. My Dad did that for me.

              I never felt like a target again.

              In high school and beyond I obsessed with my weight. I was never wildly obese, but the cool clothes didn’t fit me like I’d wanted. My friends, like Tim and Tim and Tim and Tim, were always skinny young guys who, with a simple air of confidence, were able to pull forth all manner of beautiful young girls lurching for the same sort of ego drift that I yearned for. I just waited behind, all smiles and pockets full of drugs. Being the kid with the drugs made me feel…well. It kind of made me feel skinny. That’s what I was always reaching for.

                                                                                  ***

              Heroin makes you skinny. Or it makes you fat. Given enough time, one of the two will reveal itself. I was the skinny junky if I used long enough. I have friends, who, while they were on a run just spent every, last non-dope dollar on donuts and ice cream. They’d cop and get home and cook up and as they’d see the black tar dissolving and start to bubble, vibrant images of pulsating cakes and puddings and pizzas and fried anything would start rotating in their locked-on consciousness, penetrating the imminent rush of opium. Let’s get high and eat!

              I was on the entirely opposite end of the spectrum. I’d go through the entire copping ritual and wind up back home in Silverlake, or, wherever, and after cooking and shooting, think, for the first time in my life of anything but sex and food. Sex and food. My oldest friends. I’d get high and proceed to do anything than pursue these two lifelines. Maybe it was video games, maybe it was cleaning the house or maybe calling old friends. I was energized but not locked down to the two primal instincts that always seemed to waylay me: sex and food. The truth is that I would have been better off fucking and eating sushi off of her stomach.

                                                                                  ***

              Eventually, I’d run out of money, and start to wonder what was available to me. Can I steal? Well. Maybe I can boost some books from a vintage bookstore. Can I rob? No. I can’t do that. Can I prostitute? I surely have would but no one would have me. So, what to do? Well, I have a whole lot of empty checks in this checkbook. What can we do with these? And those thoughts come trickling in like scenes of movies of tough guys like Goodfellas and they land, and it feels exciting. I pick up my checkbook, back when such things still existed, and I’d head out and start driving to the nearest grocery store.

I remember these days like a movie; I’m looking down from above and watching someone who only looks like me. You roll into line and the woman behind the scanner reaches for the few nectarines (about 60 calories) you’ve chosen. She weighs them. About a pound and a half, if they’re nice and all July-red, speckled with a million little brown dots: the perfect kind. You write a check for not a buck eighty-nine but forty-one dollars and 89 cents. Cashback. You walk away trembling, not quite believing it and looking back at her and realizing she’s all the way on to the next customer and you’ve made it. Forty bucks profit and some nectarines.

              For weeks and weeks, all I ate was nectarines while I got loaded with dope and crack courtesy of bored grocery store workers anywhere within my reach. These were the glory days. I got so skinny. I’d wake up one morning, knowing I had a balloon of dope awaiting me and thus, able to feel anything but doom and realize, “I forgot to eat yesterday! I forgot the two days before too!” My God! What a pretty thought for a fat kid to have. I’d forgotten to eat for a few days, and I had drugs and what could possibly be wrong with this life?  If it could only last. If only I could have stayed in the realm of nectarines and dope and easy money. But that never stays alive.

              Eventually, I got caught. Well, sort of caught, the repercussions so surreal as to make the whole thing and the thousands of dollars I’d stolen seem like a cartoon punishment. I received a letter from the LA District Attorney with a list of all of my bounced checks. I was to attend a seminar in an El Segundo Hilton conference room where I’d be reeducated. That’s it. I was in another sober living by then. When would the hammer fall? By way of introducing ourselves, we went around the room and said our names and why we’d bounced so many checks. Everyone had some version of “I just lost track of my balance.” Or” I had a huge emergency and had to just hope I had money when I cashed the check.” Probably all true. As the line got closer to me, I got anxious. I wanted to tell the truth. And so, when they all looked at me and I was meant to explain the rational reason for bouncing piles of checks, I simply said, “crime.” No more questions were asked. They just quickly moved on.

                                                                                  ***

              I was watching the TV one day and I felt besieged by a certain commercial. Relentless. Just pounding into me but it took effect. There was some procedure called the “Lap band.” A simple procedure that tightened the path to the stomach and thus made it all but impossible to overeat. Every bite of all you love just landed at the band and it hurt. So much pressure. I sat on it for a while but eventually I wanted to do it and it cost a lot so, as usual, I reached out to my mom. She was game but also very reticent as she’d heard these pleas so many, many times before. I called the place and set up an appointment. I was going all in.

              The entire process took a few months complete with office talks and so much testing; would I survive it? Of course, I would. I’m immortal. Immortal but fat and unlovable. I gradually came closer to the day. I woke up one day and my Mom and my best friend Judy, who is completely estranged from me now, and I still wish we could sit on my couch under a blanket and watch the Flaming Lips documentary, but we can’t. Those days are gone. Saudade.

              I thought this operation would change everything. I saw myself skinny and wearing suits. I always wanted to wear suits. Fat kids dig suits because they’re so removed from us.

              I awoke gasping for air. I didn’t know how to breathe. They gathered around me, and it passed. I was given rules for the next two days and sent home, my right shoulder pounding around the clock. They told me that might happen. Which by the way afforded me painkillers.

              And so, I started the ride that I’m still on but it’s faded into the sky, this thing that was meant to save me and wear suits. This thing was supposed to make me lovable.

              I tried my best. I followed directions. I’d taken a drastic move which I was so ashamed of. The Lap Band is my true deep dark secret. It makes me feel wholly dirty and beneath you all. I followed the plan for months and lost some weight, but it wasn’t sustainable. It’s still in there. It just blocks food in my throat, and I have to throw up, filled with shame and trying so hard to hide it. Every meal with friends becomes a minefield. Do they notice? I time my trips to the bathroom. I pretend to get someone something from the kitchen and throw up in the trashcan. It’s horrific and yet it’s just everyday life. It lives in me, and it taunts me.

                                                                                  ***

              By March of 2021, I was drinking to an insane excess and playing World of Warcraft all night while seeing patients all day and pretending. Dan came over, as usual. He asked me if I wanted to try this thing called NOOM. What? Explain! It was an app that was just another weight loss gimmick. I’d tried everything. Only heroin made me thin-ish. But, hell, I said yes. And so, I stopped drinking and I started and by Christmas, I’d lost 100 pounds. This was nothing short of a miracle and maybe Divine Intervention.  Everything just morphed into some other thing. I was skinny! When I said yes to Dan, I’d finally reached the place where I was willing to endure overwhelming discomfort for some, unpromised, version of me in the future.

              Time to buy suits. Who knows how to do such a thing? I pored over websites and videos trying to learn what a good suit was. Eventually, I found a place and they wrapped paper tapes around me, now skinny, waist and arms and legs and it was done. I bought two.

                                                                     ***

              For years and maybe my whole life I’d dreamed about being a skinny guy who could wear beautiful suits with crazy, floral shirts. I thought of Warren Ellis, Nick Cave’s right-hand man. We had the same white-ish long scraggly hair and unruly beard, And Warren was always in a suit. He became my style Icon. I’d settle for less but that was my target. I was transformed. I was almost weirdly skinny but none of it came from some crazy deprivation diet. I just changed.

                                                                                  ***

              In March of 2022, Nick Cave and Warren Ellis announced a tour. Of course, I went. The first show was at the Shrine Auditorium which seems to be a part of USC and if not, it lends its hand to some other bigger brighter place. We drove there on March 9th. Me, Dan and my beloved friend Piper, who’d never heard a lick of Nick Cave’s music. We pulled in and drove up a winding parking garage. All the way up. I got out and lit a cigarette and straightened out my three-piece navy checked suit and felt like I was finally a human. A human who didn’t sulk in the weeds when everyone better trod upon me.

              We started to walk to the elevator when a gorgeous woman walked determinedly toward me. When she spoke, it was in a beautiful French accent. I would have swooped her up and taken her all away from there. But instead, I said “hi.” And then she said the words. She merely said, “You look exactly like Warren!” At that moment I loved her so Goddamn completely. But I just listened and said thank you.

              I was finally, at least on the outside, who I wanted to be. Or at least I was what I wanted to pretend I could be. All of it worked all scrambled together. She said I looked like Warren. I just said, “Thank you.” I hope she’s in the place she loves the best. I know I was.

                                                                                  ***

              Always the fat kid, me and my soul, and on into my adulthood. Shooting dope to try and lose weight. The things I’ve done to stay high and not eat. The things I’ve done,

              On Friday I’ll wear a suit and go talk with a bunch of guys in a sober living in Culver City. They’ll exclaim! They’ll touch the fabric. And I’ll feel okay. I’m not the fat kid anymore. I’m just me, slinking away from pain and rushing towards joy. And if you see me, I hope I have a suit on. I’ll wrap it lightly around your head and kiss your forehead and tell you I love you. I’ll love you until the end of the world. Just you and me.

Alone Again Naturally

My Mom tried to kill herself. I shouldn’t be putting this out there as if it was just something she tried to do like a new recipe or a sport she wanted to learn. But she told me she wanted a way out, a way to end all of the terror of being a mother to me. And what could I do? I have no memory of this. But she’s told me how it was when I came into this world with just her and my Dad to make sense of what my being thrust into their lives meant. I wasn’t unwanted but I was surely something to be dealt with.

              They didn’t even have the term “Post-Partum Depression” at that point in 1964. I bet so many women who had babies and felt this awful blanket of lead and sleep and disinterest felt awful. My Mom told me she did. Nothing had prepared her for having a baby and then as if struck by some magical twig, a specter’s wand, a baby appears and she simply wanted nothing to do with it. It wasn’t me she didn’t want; it was the overwhelming responsibility of keeping something other than herself alive, an entirely defenseless little ball of need.

              It’s nothing short of mind-boggling that we live in a world where so much is made of prenatal care and there isn’t a moment of it dedicated to preparing a woman for the emotional atom bomb that is about to detonate in their life at roughly nine months. Nothing. Not a word. We just figure that any woman is somehow graced with this sort of resilience and knowledge from birth. How hard can it be to have a baby and keep it alive we seem to ask. Well, my mom, at least, wasn’t prepared and it really did a number on her.

              I survived. Clearly. I was fed and I guess given some sort of liquid. But she fled and my Dad didn’t understand. He had no training in this either. He was furious at her and he threatened to tell her mom how out of hand her daughter was. That terrified my mom. While they fought, I just laid in a crib alone, maybe dreaming of heroin and pussy and guns. Maybe not. I was just a little thing. I didn’t know about such things yet.

              At some point, with no backup from my dad as far as spending time with me, the little Mike languishing in the crib in Towson MD was enough to make my Mom take a bottle of Valium and just try and find a way out. Who can blame her? She’s told me this with scant details but enough to know and I love her all the more for it. I know the feeling. I’ve kissed the thought of pulling the plug and leaving all of you behind. She tried. I never did…yet. But somehow, she survived, and it all lifted and my memories of her are of an incredibly loving and devoted mom. A best friend.

                                                                                  ***

              I called her like I’d done so many times before and told her, through tears and choking breaths that I’d been using and was strung out and needed help. I really had no one else to call. My Dad was gone, and my Mom was all I had. Sure, I had friends but when that moment comes and there’s nothing left but to let someone know you’ve fucked up again and were strung to the gills, well, I called my Mom. I’d hear the sadness and disappointment in her voice. She was never surprised. She always suspected it. I sound different when I’m loaded. My voice is lower and more frantic. I speak like I’m trying to sell an idea to some angel investor. I’m on fire and yet I’m dying. She always knew.

              And so, I’d wind up in another rehab with more of the money my Dad had, inexplicably, left us. Christ, how much money has been spent on my rehab habit? I burned through tens and maybe a hundred thousand dollars on drugs. Imagine what that feels like. It feels like you’re a monster. Just taking everything and putting it in your right arm and burning it away on some bonfire of the soul. A diseased soul engulfing everything your father worked for to set you up and you just blew it. You trade it in for comfort. You trade it in for oblivion.

              And I’d call my mom and ask her to come over so I could tell her face to face. It’s happened again. I’ve returned to type. She’d get angry and then relent. She never wavered and I’d wind up in another place full of meds and beige walls and people whom I fell in love with and never spoke to again

***

My Mom is 87 years old. It scares me to death. I can’t imagine a world in which she’s not in it. And, that day will come, and it terrifies me. One day, I’ll be alone. And what’s to keep me alive? I guess it’s my dogs. My mom has been my anchor in this life of wayward floating through the seas of drugs and laziness and slight depression. Just a hint of anhedonia. But it’s enough. She’s all that keeps me from getting high sometimes, imagining having to tell her. It’s too much and it works, and I haven’t got high, I mean, actually high for years. Psychedelics and wine and such come and go but the real thing, the heroin, has been kept at bay in some locker of the past. And it’s my Mom’s tears that keep it there. Will I simply self-destruct when she goes? I hope not. It’s certainly not my plan but I haven’t built up a whole lot of faith in myself over this crazy life.

                                                                     ***

Sometimes, when I was little my mom would meet me in the kitchen on a school morning and ask me if I wanted to stay home and go on a picnic, or maybe fishing or just spend the day with her. These were some of the best days of my life, little kid or not. And so, we’d spend the morning around the house planning an adventure and I was so ecstatic to miss school with my Mom’s blessing. Both of my parents knew the value of letting a kid miss a day of school every now and then. They knew I did well in school and missing a day wasn’t going to derail me. And so, we’d decide to maybe go to the health food store that at that point in time and in our little rural town was a real mystery as to how it even existed. Health Food which mainly meant alfalfa sprouts and whole wheat bread was a very new thing and my mom, always adventurous was an early adopter. This was in the days when McDonald’s Filet-a-fish were considered health food. The health food store was in a little building at an intersection in Hickory. Hickory was basically what became of my town, Bel Air if you drove north into the farmlands. All of a sudden you were in Hickory and there in a little wooden building as if it was an afterthought was the place of sprouts and wheat germ and the novel whole wheat bread. They made these sandwiches which to this day are something I’ve never had since, and I’ve tried so hard to replicate. There really wasn’t anything fancy about them and I can easily walk to Vons and buy all the ingredients but it’s never the same. Whole wheat bread with some sort of mild cheese, tomato, mayo and alfalfa sprouts. Easy enough but Jesus they were good. They were so good because of my mom and the fact that she’d let me stay home from school to get one and take it to some pond, many of which dotted my childhood landscape. We’d sit in the grass and throw bread into the water while eating and watching little mouths pop up and pull the bread under. It was magical. Sometimes I’d bring my little fishing rod and try and smash bread into a ball that could stick on the little fishhook. Sometimes I’d catch a little bluegill. We’d put him back and that was our day. Just my mom and me and some hippy sandwich and sitting on the edge of the water fishing or, more likely, feeding the little fish. My mom went through the wringer when I was born but somehow, she turned into my hero.

                                                       ***

About a year or so ago, maybe less, and just about after the last New Year, my mom got really sick. Not sick like a cold or even something that required the hospital; she just lost so much of her faculties and had a horrible time walking and talking and thinking. I brought her here to my house to keep an eye on her and to help in any way I could. I felt helpless. But I also knew that there was no way I’d do anything but this. Over the years she’d make comments about what would happen if she ever needed to go to a nursing home or whatever. I always told her that there was no way she’d ever go to someplace like that if I was alive. Absolutely not. And now this felt like that moment had come. For a few weeks, she just laid on the couch and slept and when she was awake, she was like a different person. All jumbled thoughts and silly arrangements of spoken words. I was just terrified. I’d talk to Dan every day and tell him how afraid I was and how I think that she’s here forever. And I didn’t care about that I was just so afraid I’d spoken to the Mom I knew my whole life for the last time, and I didn’t even realize it when it had happened. She just became someone else.

This went on for a few weeks and I felt so helpless but also fully resigned to the idea that this was just where my Mom was going to live for the rest of her live. Every day I’d beg her to move to my bedroom, but she was always afraid she’d trip if she had to get up in the middle of the night. Trip over one of the dogs that are forever lounging in doorways and hallways. They’d be closed in all night if I slept in my bed and kept the door closed. She felt more comfortable with that. At some point, as I was going over her meds that she took daily I asked her where her Lexapro was. She didn’t know. I knew enough to realize you just can’t stop taking an anti-depressant like that just like that. I asked her when she stopped taking it and why? She remembered that it was about 10 days earlier, but I never got a solid reason why. And so, I went to her house and got her Lexapro, and we slowly got her back on it and up to her dosage. It was like a miracle beamed down on us. Within days she was completely back to normal. Christ, the relief I felt. And she felt it as well. It was an episode which had no real reason to exist and yet we went through it together. The point of all of this is that I feel like I know what I’ll do when the day comes when she really can’t acre completely for herself. And I know that I’ll be there for her and everything else can go to hell. I owe her that much. And now I know I can do it.

                                                                     ***

I think my mom has felt tremendous guilt over the way I was left alone for the first two years of my life. I tell her that all I know was that she was the best mom I could imagine having. In an effort to assuage that guilt she became more of a friend than a mom. And as beautiful and close as this can be, I certainly took advantage of it over the years with my addiction. There was the day that I received a big bag of methaqualone powder from South Africa via the dark web. A big baggie of Quaalude powder. By this point, my drug use was fully out in the open and while she certainly didn’t condone it or in any way didn’t want it to stop, she made some sort of weird peace with it. I’d found some Methaqualone test kits on eBay. Instead of hiding all of this from her as she happened to be at my house when the package arrived, I did what I usually do when I want to hide something from someone. I just go the other way and offer it to them and it defuses the shame. “Hey, Mom! You want a Quaalude?” She’d bark “No! You shouldn’t have that stuff!” I’d laugh and ask her if she, the pharmacist, wanted to help me weigh and put the powder in the capsules that I had waiting for this day. She lightened up and while she was utterly opposed to it, the pharmacist in her beamed forth and she kinda got into the whole process of testing the powder, weighing it and portioning it out into so many empty gel caps. Admittedly it's a fairly screwed up mother and son moment but we’d come to this, and you know what? It was fine. We wound up embracing the absurdity of the whole thing. When we were done, I put everything away and we made dinner. I did not take any Quaaludes while she was here.

I can’t imagine having a better mom. I often wonder where I’d be with a different mom. Everything about me is the same but without her to fall back on. I truly, to my core, believe I would have died a long time ago. God knows I’ve done so many things that people routinely die from but somehow, my mom was always there to pull me through that last yard of life instead of floundering at the one-yard line and dying. And maybe I did it myself, the thought of causing her so much pain by living through my death was enough to push through and ask for help or not put just a little more coke in the spoon or not pick up the gun when it was all too much. My mom’s kept me alive on so many occasions and it’s simply because she is the perfect mom. She loves every part of me, even the darkest, dirtiest most diseased parts of me.

When my friend John Albert wrote “Wrecking Crew” which chronicled the baseball team I started I desperately tried to keep it from my parents. There was no way I could allow them to read such an unwavering description of my debauchery and hedonism. The book, which uses all our real names details my drug use, my screwed-up relationships and the occasional treatises with call girls and common hookers, both of whom I look up to. And so here was this book, a real book. A hardcover book that was for sale in the Baseball Hall of Fame bookstore and which Phillip Seymour Hoffman wanted to make into a movie and I had to hide it from them. Eventually, my Dad passed, and the book didn’t seem so important anymore. At some point, my mom and I were talking about things of which neither of us knew about each other. I won’t reveal hers, but I mentioned the book, “Oh yeah, I read that. Mike, you really got into some crazy stuff.” I was flummoxed! How had she found it? “You read it??” “Oh yeah” she said and then just laughed. I’d got her all wrong. I’d not ever given her enough credit for just being able to roll with things that were real. She understood me. She knew what I was like and where I’d been. And she loved me unconditionally. Truly unconditionally. Have your mom read a book about you fucking prostitutes and see how she reacts. I can’t think of a more mortifying experience and yet it happened, and it just brought us closer.

                                                       ***

When my Dad passed away and we went through the process of dealing with everything that the world throws at you when someone you love dies, my mom decided to move to LA. She’d always liked it here and there was really nothing to keep her there. She’d always had a life that was rich in interests that weren’t tied to my Dad so when he left us, she was ready to move on. It took some time but eventually, she moved into a condo in Pasadena, not five minutes from my house. If she couldn’t or wouldn’t have made that move, I would have to move back to her. The distance and worry as she gets older would have destroyed me. But now she’s just up the road and thank God for it.

              On Sundays, she comes over and I cook dinner. Sometimes we’ll skip it but it’s a sacred ritual. I love these Sunday dinners with her and me and often other people whom she loves. People like Piper and Dan. I make some sort of spectacular meal and we sit around watching cooking shows or such while she drinks her wine and I smoke and try to make her laugh. At times I’d drink too but it was always in secret. Sometimes she knew and sometimes I’d hide it. But these Sundays mean everything to me and yet, they can be incredibly painful.

              My mom is very active, but her age is definitely apparent in how she talks and remembers things. She still seems more active than me with the constant classes she takes at the senior center, classes like improv and painting and straight-up acting. She does all these things. She still drives and has a tribe of friends who she regularly hangs out with drinking wine and playing cards. She’s quite something for her age. But when we sit and talk and when she forgets things she’s just said or can’t remember how to operate her Apple TV well I get annoyed as I would with anyone half her age. And sometimes I express this annoyance and then I want to slit my throat. Fuck, the pain of betraying her with my petty reflexive impatience is overwhelming. So many memories of her taking care of me flood back and engulf me and a million fingers from this vaporous movie of the past point at me and call me a monster. I try so hard to be more patient and when I fail, I hate myself. I know that the day will come when I’d give everything I have to experience a single moment of talking to her again. That day will come and there will be no buying anything back. She’ll be gone forever, and I’ll be swimming in the regret of every moment of not treating her like my friend and my mom who spent so much of her life just trying to keep me alive. Literally and figuratively. I love you, mom. I love you like the sun loves the moon as they both conspire to keep us all alive.

P.S. This song has been an almost vapid pop song for my entire life. And yet, a couple of years ago while playing World of Warcraft and talking to a friend on Discord he played this song for me and asked me to read the lyrics. Good Lord. The weight and sadness he’s smuggled into this pretty little song is quite something. Maybe the saddest song I never knew existed.

Fears of Gun

I felt the edge of the knife press against my throat. He didn’t push hard but I could feel its presence and maybe, if I really stop and try to remember or, more to the point, imagine, I can feel the coldness of the steel. I’d come to buy dope when the whole thing was nascent. I had no idea of the game. Or the rules. Somehow, I found out that there was a dealer around Melrose and Van Ness. I can’t remember how I ever met him, and it seems so unlikely that I’d even have any inroads to meeting him but for a period I had a pager number and I’d call him and he’d either come to me, after a very long wait or I’d go to him, somewhere near that intersection. Over time, other people, his support team I suppose got involved. This was very early on in my junky history and all of it felt so wild and exciting. At the end of the day, it was just me buying balloons of heroin from some Mexican guy in a shitty car but for a moment there I felt like I was in the rarified air of real junkies like Lou Reed or Nick or Keith. Christ, the things we imagine.

              At some point as is often the case I was handed off to some underling and I’d drive slow around those blocks and look for him. He was a corner guy. Not a pager guy. Corner guys are always hit or miss and sketchy. At the end of it all I had a connection who’d show up in minutes and sell me half ounces of dope and bags of cocaine. But that took many years. Such are the dreams and goals of a junky. A steady, punctual connection with good prices; imagine all your life’s goals reduced to this.

              I drove down Van Ness or maybe some other side street and see my guy. He’s with another kid. By this point, he recognizes my car and I pull over and he gets in. His friend, unknown to me gets in the back. Immediately I feel him push forward and press a knife against my throat. It’s a timid but deliberate presence as if he’s trying to impress the older guy, my guy, and he’s scared but feels compelled. My guy (imagine calling someone who is ready to cut your throat “my guy”) tells me to “give me your money!” And so, I do. I’d just pulled out thirty or so dollars from the new bank account that Leslie and I had just opened. It wasn’t easy. We had to get driver’s licenses and all sorts of stuff to open an account in California. I pulled out the cash and handed it to him. That’s it. The knife moved away, and doors opened and closed and they vanished.

              And so, I went back to the bank to get more money and came right back to the same place in the hopes of finding someone else. All of that happened in about twenty minutes. I get robbed with the edge of a knife at my throat and immediately get more money to try my luck again with the same bunch. I really don’t remember if I copped or not, but I suppose I did. If I didn’t it would have made a much bigger impact on me and I’d remember. Not getting high is a tragedy you remember; having a knife at your throat is a mere anecdote in this world I was slowly walking into.

                                                                                  ***

              Most of these experiences were directly related to me trying to buy drugs. And others were simply karma I presume. Retelling these stories makes me feel like I’ve lived beyond what most people have. They make me feel special and edgy. But the truth is that they only exist because I was a naïve and obsessed drug addict who was easy prey. There’s no tough guy in me. I suppose I can explode with rage like I did with the gangbanger fireworks party but really, that’s an anomaly. I just wanted drugs and when threatened I’d just calmly admit defeat and while handing over whatever money I had immediately began thinking about how to get more. People like to see themselves as heroes in memories of violence or threats of violence but really, at least for me, I just gave up because it got me to the inevitable drugs I was after quicker. Why fight? Just get robbed and go steal or whatever I had to do to get more money. Nothing heroic or romantic about it.

                                                                     ***

              After my Dad passed away, my mom came and visited for a month or so. She was checking out LA and deciding if she wanted to move here. I think she already knew that this is where she wanted to be, but she did her due diligence. I was completely strung out when she came. I’d wake up and get well and for the entire day, we’d be in my backyard planting flowers and doing all sorts of projects. When I’m high I’m on fire and a real go-getter. We truly had great days buying little flats of flowers and lovingly planting them in newly dug beds that we’d design together. Every so often I’d go in and get high to keep it all rolling. By the end of the day we’d be done and looking forward to cooking dinner and watching cooking shows until sleep found us. But I needed to cop and so I’d always make some sort of flimsy excuse to leave and be gone for an hour or so. “I’m going to go get us dinner” or “I really want to look for a new book so I’m gonna go to the bookstore in Glendale.” I could really tell her anything because she had no idea where these places were, and she was so tired from gardening all day. I’d always tell her that I’d cook dinner when I got back and “just rest and have a glass of wine. I’ll be back really soon.” Every night I did this. I have to think that at some point she knew what was going on or at least she realized that I was up to something in some way no good, but she never said anything. I remember that period so well because I had such a string of good luck with copping. I’d drive to skid row and park and within minutes I’d find a connection and buy what I needed for the night and the next day. Incredibly good luck. Sometimes I’d be there for hours just walking around trying to find anyone holding with so many old junkies just saying, “It’s hot tonight” which meant that the cops were around, and the dealers were inside somewhere. Sometimes they’d just say “Man, it’s dry today.” But for that month it all worked out smoothly. There were definitely nights where it took longer than any trip to the bookstore would take and I’d lie and say I’d seen a friend and was talking for a while. Overall, it was a pretty good month if such a thing can be called good. I shot heroin around the clock and spent a month planting flowers and such with my mom ending with some beautiful meal I’d cook, and we’d drift off to bed watching cooking shows.

              Much later, after I’d gotten sober again and my mom had moved out here, we tried to replicate the planting flowers experience. Without dope, I was just not into it. I wanted to be. For her but that’s what dope gave me. Excitement for the little mundane pleasures of life. Without it, I needed choirs of angels and beams of starlight to get excited for anything. One day, after again begging off planting flowers with my mom she looked at me and said, “I like you better when you’re high.” I could only laugh, and she did too; she didn’t really mean it but the truth was what it was. I was actually more fun to be around when I had heroin coursing through my veins.

              Eventually that idyllic, heroin and love-filled month ended, and my mom was going back home. Back to Bel Air. Back to the house, I grew up in. I had to go with her. I just had to. I was so strung out that I told her it was a great time to come back and see the home for maybe the last time and see old friends and such. It seemed a given that she’d decided to move out here eventually and it provided a convenient excuse for me to “visit.” I needed some place away from dope to kick. I’d handle that when it came. Claim it was the flu. Maybe she knew. I don’t think she did, but I had to go back to try and get out of this spiral I was in. Fainche still lived at the house although we’d broken up almost a year earlier. The entire month my mom was here Fainche made herself scarce. She loved my mom, but she knew precisely what was going on with me. I think it disgusted her. She never said anything but when I left with my mom there was a look of dwindling hope and steeling herself for some great loss in her eyes. And so, I went back home.

              I took some dope with me but by the first morning, it was gone. I remember it was a hot, humid Maryland summer day and I sat outside smoking a cigarette and crying. I had to tell my mom. I was closing in on fifty and still this lost child who needed to confess his sins to his mom, just like I’d done decades before after the years of torment from being molested. I needed her to know. I asked her to sit with me and as she saw my bloodshot eyes and realized I’d been crying she knew. She simply said, “Oh no.” And so, it was out and my elaborate and hopeful plan of what I’d accomplish within the next two or three weeks was laid out and we both pretended to buy into it.

              I was high the next day. I think I lied and said I was going to a meeting in town, but I went straight to the city and literally went to the corners I knew about from The Wire, the greatest piece of filmed art our species has yet to conceive. Of course, I found dope. I bought syringes with no questions asked in some drug store and I got high. Nothing was going to change. I did this for days. It got to the point where I had to find the car keys and run out and just bolt. Just drive away like a fugitive and turn my phone off to quell the constant worried calls and texts from my mom and other’s she’d reached out to. Eventually, I’d get high and come home and swear it was over. And the next day maybe I’d kick a little. At some point I coerced my mom into asking for Percodan from a family friend because “I was sick.” Christ. I can’t even imagine doing that now and putting her through such a frightened and humiliating ordeal, but the fact is, I still have it in me. I can go south at any moment. There’s nothing good about me.

              At some point, maybe a week or so into the whole fiasco I drove again to west Baltimore after running off with the car. I went to the same corner and was met by the same cadre of Black teenage boys all desperately trying to sell dope or anything to any slowly passing car out of place in such a depressed and forgotten area. Desperation on both sides of the car door. I pulled over and asked for dope and with a nod a kid, maybe sixteen, hopped in and told me to drive around the corner. This wasn’t unusual. The dealers generally stand away from where the little crumpled, brown paper bag of vials of white paper lie wedged behind a rock or trashcan. We turned the corner and he said pullover. Everything was as it always was. Once we stopped he pulled out a pistol from his waistband and put it against my head and screamed, “Give me your money motherfucker!” I was so defeated. I just slowly handed him the thirty bucks I had hoping to get three vials. He wasn’t content with that. He pressed the barrel harder against my head and screamed, “Give me all of it! Don’t fuck with me!” I had a moment. I just said, very unheroically and very honestly, “Just shoot me. I don’t care.” I remember truly feeling the truth of that. It wasn’t a strategy. It wasn’t false bravado. It was just a wish that all of this could be over. All the heartbreak. All the girls leaving me. All the dogs dying. All the dreams ending up in burnt spoons and all the pain I’d forged into my parents. I meant it. “Just shoot me.”

              He was so rattled with that response and the calm tone in which it was delivered he just shorted out and opened the door, grabbed my phone, and ran away. Who knows? The gun may have been empty. He got what he wanted. But in that moment, I was perfectly ok with dying. Just let all of this end and let something stop me from hurting everyone else. Let this sixteen-year-old Baltimore corner boy be the deliverance of my end and the eventual healing of everyone I’d infected.

                                                                     ***

              These sorts of things happen from time to time when your main concern is committing a felony multiple times a day to get drugs from people who don’t really care what it takes to get your money. Generally, they’re on the level and you can trust them but sometimes they just want what’s yours and they’ll use whatever’s at hand to get it. I’ve had a guy in a crowded LA alley chase me with a brick that he’d happily cave my head in with. I’ve had guns fired at my car for no conceivable reason only to hear the bang, drive off after getting crack and find a bullet hole in the pale blue roof of my ’67 Fairlane just above the driver’s seat. God knows where that little unknowing and forced into service lump of lead landed. I never found it. And sometimes it’s just karma that gets you. Like coming home from work with Jeff after a day on set and after parking and getting out of my Fairlane being told by two specters from the shadows to lie face down on the street. The barrel of the gun jammed into the back of my head. They took everything we had which was virtually nothing. We had empty wallets, one watch and one trench coat (mine) between us. We called the cops, hardly rattled but it felt like something you’re supposed to do. The cop told us “You should get some sort of protection in this neighborhood. Something that has some range to it. You know what I mean?” We lived in Echo Park and he was telling us to get a gun. We didn’t but I thought about those two lost kids doing the same thing to people who couldn’t handle it and how they’d fuck them up forever, the trauma they’d instill, and I wanted them dead. And yet, who was I to cast blame for pain jammed into people who didn’t deserve it? Is a gun any more deadly than a broken heart?

The Weeping Song

I’ve told you about the mushrooms and how they cleared a path for me to finally understand and love The Birthday Party and more distinctly, Nice Cave. He’s been such a fixture for the entirety of my adult life if one can even say that I was an adult when that mushroom fueled night happened. I was much closer to a child, just someone who did what their Dad wanted and looked down at their feet as he shuffled towards where they were told to go and tried to figure out who they were and what they might become. Heroin was yet to happen and so was Los Angeles and all of the joys and pains I’ve experienced here. So maybe it’s safe to say that Nick Cave has been a part of me since I was a child.

              I sit here trying to write and become completely transfixed by videos of him singing live to some group of disciples in God knows what city in God knows what country. I’m drinking wine and wondering how all of this came to be. How does one become so entrenched in the soul of someone he’s never met? Well, never spent time with.

                                                                                  ***

              At one point I was in love with Nery. I loved her as deeply as I’ve ever loved anyone, and the truth is that I’ve never loved anyone else to that depth. Our entire relationship lasted from one of my birthdays and ended exactly one year later and on my birthday she left. If you ever read this Nery, the truth is I still love you like we’ve never parted.

              When our first Christmas came around, we’d become accustomed to the pattern of how we existed with each other. I want to be kind. I want to share responsibility. Something about me made her intensely jealous and we cycled through ten-day cycles in which the first nine days were days of love and sex and adventure and tenderness and support the like of which I’d never even remotely experienced. And then came day ten and she’d flick a switch, and maybe it was something I did to provoke her but for the life of me I can’t imagine what it was, and she’d calmly and almost religiously eviscerate me for some betrayal which I had simply not committed but that she’d convinced herself had been levied at her. She hated me and wanted me to suffer, and I’d just become an inarticulate writhing mass of tears and defense. And it always seemed to happen at 2 AM.

              But on that first Christmas together she had a few little presents for me. She saved one for the last, her smile growing wider and more excited in that beautiful Spanish and Columbian face which I still equate with love and sex and happiness and torture. She handed me a little thing, just a little thing and I think it was wrapped in brown paper, but it may have been a wholly different object. But I know this. I opened it and inside were two tickets to see Nick Cave at the Greek Theatre on June 29th, 2017. So far into the future and as happy as I was, I wondered if we’d even make it. I know these tickets cost her a fortune, a fortune she didn’t have and within the box were little pinned on badges of Nick and the Bad Seeds and the Birthday Party. She cared about what I considered to be precious. That was very new to me. She dug deep into me to find out what made my heart beat. She found Nick Cave and she found baseball and she found making things in my garage and she found herself. She found herself in my heart and I think it scared her.

              We kept living this ten-day cycle for a few more months and then it just became too much and on one awful April or May day, who can remember, we fought each other on hills we were both willing to die on. She emasculated me and I called her a cunt and we screamed and tried to outdo each other for hours. For days. It lasted days. And finally, it just evaporated, and she seemed to snap back. The irony of her jealousy is that I am so completely enraptured and amazed that anyone would have me that I don’t see anyone else in this entire world. But she was sure I was still with my ex and countless other women. Christ. It’s such a preposterous idea but she believed it. And so, she flicked the switch to off and she started crying and apologizing and, as usual promised she’d “get help.” But she was leaving. “You can take someone else to see Nick Cave.” She said as she hugged me crying. I’d never seen her cry before. I held her not knowing what to do but feeling like a monster for pushing her to this state, but I had nothing to defend. And then she left, tears sliding down that beautiful angular but perfectly angelic face.

                                                                                  ***

              It lasted a day. She appeared at my open garage door as I was soldering a guitar amp together with the hopes that it would work when I was done. We embraced and promised to love each other, and we set about trying to be different people. We agreed to be different characters in this movie of our lives together.

              And it actually worked for a few months. Gone were her bouts of jealousy but my own came into play. We named it “Jack.” I became obsessed with some meaningless night of sex she had with someone I knew long before we met. I do this. I have this. It makes me feel wholly inadequate as if anyone who loves me is making a deal to be with me. There’s enough about me to like but the sex will never be like that one night they had. It becomes debilitating for me. You’d think heroin addiction would be enough, but I have this as well. Maybe it’s connected. It all boils down to me feeling like someone a beautiful woman is reluctantly in love with. And yet we carried on and on one sunny day we bought a ring and I, on bended knee, proposed to her. And she said yes. That moment burns in me like a phosphorous flare melting asphalt. So bright. So hot. So deadly.

              As the Nick Cave show approached, I bought her a dress. I bought her a dress which seemed perfect for her and her body and her sensibilities and it was a design by Susie Bick also known as Susie Cave, Nick’s wife. I remember the day it was meant to arrive; I was in my garage making something. Nery was in the house. I got a text that DHL would be delivering my package shortly. Within hours. I waited. When it came and when she saw it and loved it, I just fell into some sort of dream which lasted until she left. I just believed everything would work out. I believed we’d love each other forever.

                                                                                  ***

Finally, June 29th landed on us. The day of the show. We were still so in love. She was wearing the ring and I was beginning to believe that she actually loved and wanted me. Starting but not fully there. She kept telling me that my real Christmas present was that I’d get to meet Nick. She was a psychic and astrologer by trade and so I just said, “thank you baby” and kissed her. We became more excited as the day moved on. At this point I’d seen Nick Cave countless times. Anyone who really knows me would know that I’d be at the show regardless of tickets or money. I’d just be there. Missing a Nick Cave show would be like missing the birth of your first child.

And she kept telling me I’d meet and hug him.

We arrived at the Greek Theatre and navigated the bored and slightly angry teenage parking manipulators and somehow, inexplicably, were directed to the single best parking spot of the entire lot. We nosed onto a driveway of sorts leading to the street. We had no one to wait for or block us. It was magic.

As we walked up to the theatre from our magical little parking spot, I came across so many people I knew. I had a lot of friends who’d been a part of this Nick Cave tribe for as long as I had, and I’d see them at every show. It truly was like church to us. Nery and I would walk and every so often I’d stop to greet someone I hadn’t seen since the last show and sometimes they were women. Sometimes beautiful women. This was always a cause for alarm for me because I was simply not allowed to even acknowledge the presence of any other girl much less one who I’d known for years. None of these women we saw that night were anyone I’d ever slept with or had anything beyond friendship and a bond centered around Nick Cave, but I was so tense. And yet, Nery just responded like a different person. She was happy and embraced these people. Something about this night was altogether mysterious and unexpected. She wore the dress I’d bought her under her little denim jacket. She looked radiant. I was so in love with her, and each new minute of this night felt better and freer and more relaxed than the last.

The show was what it always was. It was some sort of bigger than life spectacle comprised of so many intimate moments of connection between Nick and the audience. In earlier years his shows were marked by his almost feral attack on the crowd as if trying to wound them or at least diminish them. But something changed over all the years, and it seems to be the loss of his son Arthur. Arthur one of two twins he and Susie had who at age 16, fell to his death from the cliffs around their house in Brixton. Who can imagine getting through such a thing? But they did and this tour was in support of the record he and the Bad Seeds had made called “Skeleton Tree.” The record was in its beginning stages of recording when this horrific thing happened and eventually, they returned and completed it with the presence of loss and grief and love hovering above all of the mics and amps and copied lyrics and cables and coffee. Just floating above them like a cloud of some unknown gas that alternately inspired and destroyed them. There’s a movie of the whole affair called “One More Time With Feeling.” It’s a documentary about how a man and a family and a band which is just another type of family gets through something as awful as the loss of a child. See it. Please.

And so, we watched this show. This thing which was such a massive part of who I am. Nick Cave, math and heroin are the three staples of my entire life. Not to dimmish my family and friends but they’re different things. These three are what drove me, for better or worse, to this moment right now typing this in the sunlight coming through the window on my left and lazily illuminating this blue plywood desk which I know you’re all imaging wrong.

Nery, throughout the day and on into the show kept assuring me that I’d meet him. It seemed preposterous but what can you do? You just kiss her and love her, her faith so solid and wrapped around the both of us. We sat about 20 rows back, maybe row S or somewhere towards the end of the alphabet. Close but not totally close. Not like seeing Sonic Youth in Pittsburgh one college night at the Electric Banana with no stage and standing so close I could smell Kim Gordon’s breath.

Nick Cave spends almost the entirety of his shows interacting with the audience. At times this involves him moving out, chair top upon chair top with baffled security guards following and wondering what’s expected of them. Sometimes he’ll quide them; “I do this a lot. I know my way. You’re doing fine.” I’ve seen him say that. And on this night, it was no different. As the show drew to a close with his almost always ending, before an encore, of “Stagger Lee” he started moving out, into the crowd, held up by precarious balance on so many Greek Theatre chairs. He kept getting closer.

Nery had been taking pictures and videos of the entire night. At points it annoyed me. I felt like she was more focused on her phone than this thing that was so precious to me that I wanted to share with her. And yet, I came to understand that she just wanted me to have as many memories of this night as possible. She wanted this to be perfect for me. And so, as he moved, awkwardly, angelically toward us and as he slowly sang the filthy lyrics of his version of Stagger Lee, she caught it all. I have a video that she took at the very moment when two wildly different appeals to me conspired to form magic. Eventually he stood on a chair one row in front of me. Everyone is standing up in some sort of collective, religious ecstasy and singing along with all he’s putting forth. In the video you see him mouthing the words “Well..just..count the holes..in the ..motherfucker’s head!” while pointing directly at me, eye contact and all and I sing this line with him. While all of this is making its way into Nery’s phone a woman from about 20 feet away is screaming “Mike! Mike!” She grabbing someone focused on Nick Cave, likely his idol, standing mere feet in front of him and demanding that he turn away and reach out to me to get my attention for her. The poor guy is dumbfounded. The video ends.

He moves on to some other chair and surely someone else's story of the night. And as my adrenaline ebbs and we stop hugging, the show finally ends, and the lights come up and put us into almost daylight. Just like that, it's over. And we all look at each other beaming and exhausted and smiling, all of us people we don't even know, and this is pure joy.

"See? I told you he'd find you." I don't really have anything to say because I'm little-boy-excited and so I just hold her and thank her for all of it. The crowd begins to haphazardly and with no great energy move towards the brightly lit exits. And I hear my name again. From behind me, my friend Leigh who I haven't seen in years bursts through the crowd, and she's so excited, "Mike! I saw that whole thing! He sang right to you! I was trying to get your attention." She was a girl I’d met on set one day, a production manager I think. Over time we began talking with the rest of the Art Department guys. She was beautiful. At one point, while talking about the best cheeseburger I ever had, I slapped her in the face to describe what a sensation the first bite of that burger felt like. It hit me like an assault! She was completely startled by some, almost stranger, just slapping her but she just laughed and has loved me to this day for such an audacious beginning of a friendship. Sometimes I guess I just do the right thing regardless of how wrong it is.

It's all very confusing as her husband Jake is saying hi to me excitedly while Leigh and Nery realize they know each other, and I'm just trying to keep up. "We were saying we'd surely see you tonight, and you were just there next to us!" he tells me. We talk for a bit about the show and how wonderful it was, and the crowd thins, and we realize it's time to leave, and we say goodbye and hug and walk in different directions. But before we get too far away, I hear her yell my name again, and she comes running back to us. "Here, take this. We only have one, and we're too tired to go. You go!" She hands me a pass for the after-show party, a perk of being married to the son of a very famous director.

We start walking out in a movable hug and seeing other happily exhausted friends. I tell Nery that I love her and that I'll never doubt her again, and she just smiles and says, "I knew he'd find you, but maybe that wasn't it." We only have one pass, and I'm not going to leave her outside. She tells me to go in and see if I can find another pass to bring out for her while she goes to the bathroom. It seems reasonable enough, so I go into the velvet rope lined-off bar and patio nestled into the theatre as she moves away. The scene is what you'd expect. There are lots of industry types and their dates and a few celebrities and people trying to act bored lest they be accused of excitement and some people like me who seem like little kids just giddily trying not to get caught. I see a handful of people I know and promptly borrow one of their adhesive-backed passes and head out to find her. It's that easy. And so, in a few moments, we are standing on the patio just waiting to see what happens.

We're standing with my friends Dave and Norm. Dave's friends with a producer who works with Warren Ellis, who's the keystone of the Bad Seeds and who's been Nick's right-hand man for decades. Norm is a close friend I'd recently made a record with and whose pass I borrowed to get her in. He has some wildly excited and anxious, little goth/hippie chick on his arm, and she is not at all afraid to show her excitement. The five of us just stand and drink the free water and take it all in.

We look over and see Brad Pitt and Catherine Keener walking up the stairs from the lower patio. They and Nick were all in a movie together years ago. It was called Johnny Suede. I'm struck that they seem to be actual friends hanging out rather than movie stars. And then I'm struck by a crazy realization. The date is June 29th, 2017. When I woke up that morning and looked at Facebook, I was presented with a memory from that day four years earlier. I had written on June 29th, 2013, "I still fall in love a little bit with Catherine Keener every time I see her." When you're in love with a magical sprite of a psychic girlfriend, these things take on much more meaning than mere coincidence. By the time I dumbfoundedly explain this odd déjà vu to all of them and show them the post from my phone, Keener is gone. I wanted to show her. It seemed sweet and sincere and ok to tell her, but she vanished. I wanted to tell you that I had indeed told her. I rationalized that it just adds to the story and who would know? But it's not true. I didn't tell her. And so even her vanishing just added to the moment.

We see some Bad Seeds start coming in and being surrounded by friends and fans. We see Warren, and he draws a larger, more intent throng. And we wait. And I begin to go over the whole night and to make a case for leaving so as not to be disappointed if he doesn't come in. Beat disappointment to the punch. What more could I ask for? It was enough. She'd given me enough.

But of course, he comes in. He's in his ubiquitous suit and smiling and laughing. He is not the Nick Cave of my youth. He is not the sullen and the heroin-addicted role model who captivated me and who I followed into all of his vices. This is a wholly different Nick Cave seemingly forged anew by whatever it took for him and his family to get through the trauma of losing a son and brother. We never know what might save us.

I'm starting to get nervous. I feel like I'm compelled to take my chance and meet him. I feel like I'm supposed to nervously walk up to him and not bother him and introduce myself and tell him how much I love his music or something like that but what the hell does a fifty-year-old guy say to his idol that isn't just weird and awkward and I just feel anxious, and Nery takes my arm and simply says, "just wait babe, he'll come to us."

And so, we wait and just talk and pretend to forget about him and let go of tracking his movements, and it almost works, and we find ourselves just talking to friends at a party at which we've all wound up.

When it happens, it happens so quickly that I'm not really sure what's going on. Having truly lost track of where anyone is at the party, I watch her face look up and smile as I hear someone from behind me say loudly, "Is that my wife's dress?!" "Yes, it is, and my boyfriend here bought it for me to wear tonight, and he's been a huge fan of yours forever." Or something like that. She just goes all-in and brings him into our orbit. "Can I get a picture of you two?" she asks, and he simply wraps his arms around me and hugs me as she takes pics. The look on my face, as you can see in the pictures, is intense, goofy, childlike glee. There's no sign of a fifty-three-year-old man who's been in and out of rehabs and failed relationships and broken bands and the dying of a father in his arms. I wish you could see it. And Nick does not merely have his arm around a fan waiting for the next polite picture to be taken. For whatever reason, he has me in a bearhug with a look of "I finally found this motherfucker!" triumph on his face. At least that's the way it looks to me.

More pictures are taken, and he hugs her and talks about the dress, and finally, the little goth/hippie chick gets her picture too. And we actually say goodbye, which is an odd thing in that scenario. He moves on, and we laugh and giggle, and I shake my head and remember every time that day that she told me he'd find me.

We are excitedly and stupidly in love, and it's time to go, and so we walk happily down the steps and through the patio and out to the sidewalk which will take us to our car which is waiting for us with a drowsy smile just waking to glide smoothly and unimpededly out onto the road and take us home.

We never made it to our wedding, which we'd planned for her birthday on December 29th. My old demons resurfaced, and so did hers. And finally, on my birthday, exactly one year minus one day after our first date she left. We had one final awful fight, and she went, and everything that had gotten tangled up in her got dragged off the tables and out of the drawers and out from behind the couch and clattered and banged after her like empty cans following the car from a wedding. 

And so, it's been almost three years since I've seen her or spoken with her or seen the merest trace of her on social media. And she lives just two miles away if she still lives there. Yesterday I broke a vow and reached out and sent her a message, and I just told her that I've been thinking about her a lot. And that they're all nice thoughts. She answered today. She said, "We were a good team." And I just said yeah, we sure were.

Can you feel my heart beat?

God Is In The House

The first time I ever confessed my sins, officially, from behind a screen in a booth with a Catholic priest on the other side, patiently and compassionately listening, was on the weekend John Bonham died. I was in ninth grade at John Carroll High school. The same school that would eventually expel me for cheating on an exam which I simply did not do, but I had it coming. I was a pain in the ass to the school. I got a lot of laughs from the other kids, but I imagine they figured everyone concerned would be better off if I just left. Never mind that there were only five weeks left of my junior year and that my Father was the organizer of their yearly fundraising weekend fair. They had it with me. And my parents told them to fuck off. I've told you about this. My mom hates that place to this day. She'd bring fire down upon it if she could.

              But long before this dramatic showdown, when my parents showed the world who they loved the most, I was in my third year at Catholic High School, which meant going on the yearly weekend retreat that almost all of us attended. I don't think it was every freshman. Maybe money was an issue. I don't know why anyone would say no to it, as it was a weekend-long field trip with pocketfuls of Valium and Seconal and tucked-away joints in John Carroll bookbags. At least for my little tribe, it was. I loved it. We "meditated," which amounted to forty or so kids giggling and trying not to burst out laughing over the simple fact that we were meant to be silent. We fucked with each other at night as some would fall asleep early, and we'd pull the shaving cream, toothpaste, or some sort of sticky fluid in the palm of a sleeping friend's hand and tickle their nose and wham! Gotcha!

              The most exciting aspect of the weekend was that we all knew, or at least the coolest of us, that on Monday morning, tickets for Led Zeppelin went on sale, which was a reason to get as close to God as possible, if ever there was one. This was decades before Stubhub. If you wanted tickets, you got in line days before they went on sale. We had friends who'd stayed home to start camping out. "In Through The Out Door" had just come out, and while it was no "Physical Graffiti," it was still Led Zeppelin. We had no access to radios or TV at the retreat, so I really don't know how we found out, but news traveled much more slowly in those days. By the time we got to the retreat on Friday afternoon on September 26, 1980, John Bonham was already a day dead. Somehow we didn't find out until some point during the weekend. And it truly did a number on us. At least the coolest of us. Some had no idea what it meant, and we hated them for it. Some knew and dismissed it as "just what you get for being a junky rockstar," and we hated them even more. But for my little Valium-laced tribe, the news was devastating.

              At some point, I was asked if I wanted to enter the confessional. I'd be brought up very Catholic-lite, but I was a curious kid, so I said yes. I remember walking into what seemed to be the kitchen and through another door where this ornate wooden little house, the smallest of all houses, sat in the middle of the floor. I went in one side, and the nice middle-aged priest went in the other. I can't begin to imagine what I confessed to. I suppose I mentioned something about getting high and jerking off a lot. I really had nothing on my mind. I was particularly ashamed of short of getting molested, which I still thought was my fault, and there was no way I was going there. He heard what I said, offered some kind words and a list of prayers to say, and I emerged and walked back out through the kitchen, only thinking of never getting to see Led Zeppelin. That seemed almost a sin in and of itself.

                                                                                  ***

              I always believed in God. Despite how much I railed against Catholic High School, it never touched my belief which I'd formed as a little boy, of God being this old man dressed in white robes with a long white beard sitting upon a shining marble or perhaps even more precious throne. That was good enough for me. It still is. It's all the visual touchstone I need. I never thought I knew God existed, but I just believed it. Even as a little kid, I knew it was a concept beyond comprehension and proof. You either believed, or you didn't, and those that said they knew, either way, seemed odd to me. Now they seem just sorta pathetic.

              I've been the classic prayers in the foxhole kinda person. "Please, God, just let him walk around the corner with some dope, and I swear I'll kick tomorrow, but I just can't today." Or "Please, God, take my life and leave my Dad alone. At least he's doing something with his." I never wondered whether my belief might be faulty. Belief can't ever be faulty, I'd reason. Anything that can't be proven or disproven, which the very existence of God is maybe the purest example, allows me to believe that which makes me happiest. I'd be a damn fool not to believe in God and Heaven and all of its trappings, and by the same measure, I don't believe in Hell. I get to choose because I can never be proven wrong or right. I just choose the belief that makes me the most at peace. Nothing is at risk. Nothing can be lost. Only everything can be gained, and If I do, in fact, leave this world and am faced with the absence of God and Heaven and seeing my Dad again and all of my dogs, well then at least I lived a life where I drew some comfort from those ideas. It seems pretty mathematical to me. Believe that which gives you peace when no proof is possible.

                                                                                  ***

              These aren't popular views which is why I delight in espousing them. I admit to great joy in riling atheists up. It's so easy. No one thinks about God as much as an atheist, and it takes precisely the same amount of faith to believe there is no God as to believe there is one. They hate that. They short out. They sputter and foam and fall apart, and I light a cigarette, hug them, and pat them on their little confused heads. They don't understand the math of it. They think something is at risk to believe in God. And nothing is. It's simply a comfort that costs nothing to wrap around oneself.

              And I am surely not talking at all, even remotely, about religion. Religion is man's attempt to argue the unarguable against one another since time immemorable. I don't fuck with religion. Nor do I condemn anyone who embraces it. Who am I to deny someone peace, wherever they get it? I shot heroin and cocaine for decades in a focused effort to be comfortable. You think I'm going to be the one to tell someone they shouldn't go to church? Far from it. I applaud them. Find peace and comfort and love where you can and try and spread it around.

              We live in a world, well, I live in a world where believing in God is not as ubiquitous or as popular as it once was. And maybe that's good. Maybe that means people are making their own choices, but I think it's more a factor of blind hatred for what so many people see as the opposition to their tribe. Somehow, the atheist crowd has commandeered the idea of intellect as their main proof of the denigration of people who believe in God. Look, I'm smarter than almost everyone I know, and I believe in God, and I can eviscerate, given enough time, anyone who wants to argue it with me. And it's so easy because it's simply a belief. And to use intellect and science and such to disprove a belief is the nadir of dumb. Belief is that which we hold in our hearts to keep us from shooting a gram of fentanyl or sticking a gun barrel we found in our bedroom in our mouth and pulling the trigger when it all just becomes too fucking much. That's what belief is. Knowledge leads to zero comfort, and it destroys wonder. I want to live in a world of wonder, magic, and a billion possible and unanswered ideas. I want nothing to do with being sure of anything anymore. I lived that way for my whole life, and it just pushed everyone away, and all I was left with were tears and needles.

                                                                                                ***

              I believe in God. He's an old white guy with a long white beard and robes and sits on a glowing throne. So be it. I refuse to back down from it. I've caused enough damage and pain in my life to myself and others, yet I still feel like he likes me. That's enough. I think God likes me, and that's enough to keep me going as often as I think about just quitting. Not dying per se but quitting. Just sitting on my couch and drinking white wine mixed with fruit juice and watching Youtube until something gives out, and someone notices and they break in, and my poor confused dogs watch them take me away. And truly, it's more the idea of keeping my dogs from that day that keeps me going, but the idea of God liking me definitely helps.

              If you're an atheist, I love you as much as the next guy and without any sort of denigration. We all have to do what we have to do to get through this thing. The old guy with the beard just makes it a little easier for me. Maybe he was there when I needed dope, and someone showed up as if by magic, and maybe he was there when they didn't, and I kicked my way to rehab. Either way, he was there, and that's fine with me.

              Maybe God doesn't exist. But I won't know until after a lifetime of taking comfort in the idea that he does.

Kooks

              I spent this last Friday night and half of Saturday with two girls I met through an online "meditation" zoom group. I've written about one of them. I love them both. I just do. I love people immediately. Both are now part of my life, and there's nothing to be done about it. I see two beautiful young mothers as little sisters despite how gorgeous they are. But it's the truth. I want to protect them and keep them safe and happy and maybe make them bread and pay for ramen for their kids, and only then do I feel free from the feelings that any guy like me might naturally have, but I push them away and just marvel at what great moms they are,

              Between them, they have three kids. Two boys from one and a beautiful little girl who wears a green hoodie and claims she's a "bush" when she pulls it all the way up. Just three little people who I could fall in love with and destroy anyone who even looked at them sideways.
              They came here to help celebrate something another mutual friend, Jaymee, was going through. A naming ceremony pulling him into a lineage of Buddhist teachers, and it meant something to all of us.

              I pulled into the driveway the very second they did after their long drive from Utah. We arrived together, and one thing was clear. The kids wanted ramen. How do three little sub-ten-year-olds love ramen with such fervor? And so we found them some. We went to a few places with no room for us and finally landed in a Glendale joint so devoid of activity it seemed overtly dodgy. But that fucking guy knew his stuff. It's our ramen place forever.

              And I wonder: where are my kids? How did I fail this most basic of human functions? Knowing my story, it's surely easy to be nothing but thankful that I didn't drag any children into my smeared and hole-filled life. What would have become of them? What might my lapses in basic humanity have done to them? I suppose it's for the best. But fuck, sometimes I feel like I dropped the ultimate ball. I created nothing of actual value without creating a life to love and nourish. Am I truly that selfish or simply diseased, or maybe I just never got it together enough to let it naturally happen. But It weighs on me. I always said I didn't want kids until I met some I loved, and the whole charade crumbled, and I sunk into the vapor of quiet observing and judging myself. Again, like so many times, I blew it.

                                                                     ***

              For a while, J and I tried to have a kid. We went to fertility doctors. We took tests. We fucked exactly when we were supposed to. J pointed her toes to the ceiling, thinking that gravity might help my cum do its job and then take the test and then….nothing. And thank God for it. We were both gone. Kings and queens of oblivion. Strung out. And we didn't think having a kid would save us. I think we truly wanted to love someone little who was a part of both of us. So much of it was pure. I loved her, and she loved me, and we wanted all of that to wrap around some little creature just grasping for our love and care. And we would have showered this little being with love unknown regardless of how much we were killing ourselves. Such a bad plan. Such a bad fantasy, and yet we tried for months. I kept shooting blanks, and so many of the blanks were bought by her by offering me oxycodone 30mg pills to make me feel well enough to fuck. Fucking was so hard. This thing we're made for became so entwined and dependent on little blue pills, and everything was fucked. God save the kid who didn't appear before us.

              We just stopped trying. In fact, we just stopped fucking. We'd watch TV at night to divert our attention and drift off, probably thinking of different people and different lives. At least, that's what I assumed she was thinking of. Just lying there dreaming of anyone but me.

              She wasn't the first to make me feel this way. I said I didn't want kids like someone might say they don't want the hassle of winning the lottery. Just a wholly obscene and inane proclamation. Of course, I wanted a son or a daughter, but I never felt anywhere near worthy of it. I could never bear the responsibility. I could barely bring in the mail more than once a week. What was I going to do with hourly feedings and diaper changes? Surely I'd be the death of this young soul, and so I bought into all of that and forged this idea that I did Not Want Children as if it was a badge of honor. I still hear myself echoing it. And fuck! I blew it!

              What I wouldn't give to play catch with a son or with a daughter. These days who can tell? I'd love them completely and totally, and now they're with some other family. Hopefully safer and happier; I have my wine, typewriter, knifemaking tools, and hours of alone time wondering what might have been.

                                                                     ***

              I try an imagine what it would be like to have a little version of me and her running around here all but sleepless, and I hear other parents telling me to count my blessings. But I also see the look on their faces when their kids look into their eyes and tell them they love them, and then something melts away from them like years of wax and ice and doubt and fear, and for an instant, I see them smile a true smile. Not the smile of a laugh or a gift received or a mouthful of delicacy. They smile this soul-deep smile of their soul finally being at peace. I've never felt that.

              At one point in my life, I was besieged by the idea that I'd so totally escaped fatherhood. It felt awful, and yet it was also like someone giving me an award for persevering with something I set out to do. When our goals and wishes clash like atomic fusion, there's nothing to feel but unending pain.

              The part of all of this that haunts me the most is realizing I never got to share what my Dad shared with me when I needed it the most. On that Christmas Eve, when the Atom Bomb landed on him, telling him his newly-minted electrical engineer son was a heroin addict, he extended nothing but love. Of course, he was apoplectic and at a loss for graceful words, but he hugged me and told me we'd get through this together. We tried. He died before I got through it. I'm still not "through it," But I'll never know what he felt to love someone so completely that no transgression could threaten it, no matter how precarious it seemed. He was my Dad, and he had my back. I've never had anyone's back like that. Fuck. I'm crying as I type this. Where did it all go wrong? Where exactly did I stop being human?

              I suppose I could adopt a kid and give him a life. But so could so many better people who haven't just dragged themselves out of the muck of childish dreams of being someone special, famous, unique, and beyond simply caring for someone else who can't care for themselves. I am that person. I am that monster.

              Well, maybe I'm not a monster, but I truly feel like I blew it by not having a kid. And yet, I don't know when It could have happened without me being a completely different person. Maybe there's a place for someone like me, childless but wanting to love. Maybe there's ramen to buy

Hector (For Winnie)

I have two dogs. Buckley and Winnie. Buckley is named after the dog in The Royal Tenenbaums. He didn't make it out during the last fire drill. "Where's Buckley??" one of Ben Stiller's sons asks him, full of dread. "He didn't make it." It was just all some weird prepper's middle of the night, child-abusing drills, and there was no fire. But in their pretend apocalypse, Buckley, the little white and brown dog, didn't follow them out. He didn't make it. And so, he died. That's who my dog Buckley is named after, although he's much, much bigger than the little guy in the movie.

              Winnie is named after a conglomeration of ideas and references. I adopted Winnie when she was a puppy. A friend on Facebook, a saint who rescues dogs, regularly posted a pic of a little black puppy who needed a home. I'd always adopted older dogs, thinking I was their last shot. Adopting a puppy felt kind of awful. Any puppy would find a home, but she told me that this little puppy was likely to grow big, and most people returned little puppies if they got too big. People are generally awful. Even the non-heroin-addicted kind. And so, with a strong sense of guilt, I took this little black ball of fur into my home. She looked like a little bear, all chubby and furry and clumsy. I thought of Winnie the Pooh, making me think of Winnie. One of the truest and most awfully treated friends I've ever had. So Winnie, my now huge Belgian Shepherd, is named after my friend Winnie who I also wrote a song about.

                                                                                  ***

              I was in love with Melinda in Impact, the drug rehab where we both landed in 1990. I've told you all about it. One day a girl showed up in her own car, not a client, to pick Melinda up. It turned out to be Winnie who'd become Melinda's sponsor. We all had to get a sponsor, and they had to be willing to take us out for meetings and, later, overnight trips. That's where John Berry, he of the "Lord of the Flies in a van" story, came into my life.

              If only for her connection to Melinda, I was attracted to Winnie. But she was beautiful as well. The next several decades would intertwine us and make me feel incredible love and soul-crushing guilt. Winnie was one of the good ones.

              I kept seeing her every so often when she'd walk in and sign Melinda out and take her all away from there. The place felt so empty without Melinda. I smoked myself stupid, waiting for her to return. I grew to thread Winnie into Melinda, and they became a magical talisman. Either one would fill me with joy, and only when they were together would I wince because I knew it meant they were leaving. Leaving me alone with so many other broken characters wishing for lives that would never exist.

                                                                                  ***

              Eventually, Melinda and I left Impact, and by that point, we were friends in spite of us not being allowed to communicate with each other in any way. But we did. And we became friends. What she didn't know, I think, was that I had fallen in love with her and I wasn’t still just her friend. She probably knew, but that's been covered. After we left, we formed lives around each other and added others to our orbit. So many others. At first, I slept in Melinda's bed as I was couch surfing from a friend's place to place. And then we got an apartment together in Silver Lake, right down from where Spaceland started. In time we decided to move across the street as two single-bedroom apartments opened up, and it was there where my friendship with Winnie really started. She lived upstairs. Our friend Rosey moved in as well, and Marty, another friend, lived there as well. Marty is gone. He was a good man. But drugs took him early. Between us five of the six units were inhabited by our little gang. I can't even begin to picture who lived in that last apartment. I hope they're well, whoever they are.

              I saw Winnie every day, waltzing in and of my presence with a perpetual laugh or a rare sadness. She'd come down to have coffee which she rarely drank, a filled mug thrown away into the sink after she left. Small price to pay for such a friend. Winnie was beautiful, but she was like a sister to me, and she knew how obsessed I was with Melinda. Everything became entangled. I started fucking Melinda, and after a month, it ended, and after a couple of weeks of hearing her above me, moving around and getting into more intimate situations, I left. But we all stayed friends.

                                                                                  ***

              Do you know what it’s like to have someone who loves you? Someone who loves you like a family member? And do you know what it feels like to not be able to be there for them to the degree that they need? And do you know what it feels like to only reach out to them when you believe in all of your heart that there’s no one left to call? That’s what it feels like for me to be Winnie’s friend. I love her and alternatively hate myself for abandoning her for years on end.  Days, and weeks, and months and years and whole decades would pass between my disappearance and our reconnection. Whole lifetimes would be experienced by both of us while we lived not fifteen miles, at most, away from each other. Two simple presses on an iPhone screen. That’s all it took. And I just didn’t do it. Of all the people in my life who into their souls like a cyclone I blew only to vanish like a spring rain, Winnie bore the brunt of it. There’s a reason why I have songs and dogs named after her. She matters and I’ve spent years shrinking away from it. It..it is whatever makes her such a good friend and I think whatever that is scares the hell out of me. I think that in Winnie I see my most acute failings of human decency and so I just hide.

                                                                                  ***

              At one point I was, again, completely strung out. I was living here in this house with Fainche but we’d long ago broken up. We were roommates. I was at the end of the cord. Somehow Winnie became involved. She would always just appear like an angel when there was simply no accounting for it. Just like she did last week when she sent me a message on a dating app that I only recently and rarely even engage with. And there she was. Just saying hi.

 I was sleeping in the basement room of a Hollywood Hills mansion in which my friend Alice lived with her mom. She told me I could stay there. I’d get heroin and crack and retreat to this little, beautiful room just next to the well-lit pool and I’d get high and smoke crack and watch pimple popping or bot fly or other such atrocities on youtube while smoking cocaine. This is where I ended up. And somehow I spoke with Winnie after years and she told me to come to Venice, to her, and she’d help. A few days passed in which I used as much as possible and I counted the minutes until this weird and ugly and subterranean holiday ended. I drove to Winnie and she took me to a doctor in the hopes of getting some sort of take-home detox kit. He wanted me to go on Suboxone maintenance. Even I was against that in spite of its promise of some sort of mind-altering aspect. Just give me Valium I told him and with enough pressure he relented and wrote a script for beautiful, angelic, light-blue 10mg Valliums and we filled the prescription and drove to Winnie’s apartment. She was sober. So was her boyfriend at the time. That first night I laid on a leaky air mattress in her living room and let the heroin withdrawal start to take form. She had a rabbit. Like a real rabbit. A bunny. A pet. It ran about the place free. He was so beautiful. I woke the next morning on a completely flat air mattress and a hole in my head where the bunny had slowly chewed into me. The rabbit chewed a hole in my head! I was too sick to care. His name was Boscoe. God love him, he slowly and methodically nibbled on one spot on my head all night as I started kicking a massive habit and I awoke to blood-stained pillows and shirts.

              I got high that night. I got away from Winnie. I only needed about 45 minutes and so while she went to a meeting with John, another John, her boyfriend. I drove downtown like a demon in my recently passed and handed-down Dad’s Saleen Mustang which boasted 605 horsepower. It was a supercar that I ultimately sold because I knew it would kill me despite how much I wanted to keep it because it was my Dad’s. I so desperately wanted to keep something he loved safe and under my care. All I have is his driver’s license in his wallet which I’ve used since the day he passed. I’m sorry Dad. I just couldn’t handle it. I bought some balloons and got back before Winnie and John returned and climbed the locked fence and shot up in the bathroom. I remember her boyfriend eating a Big Mac as I walked out, right as rain. Blood was all over my right arm. The next morning I did more and overshot. I was way too loaded to hide it. Winnie knew. I just laid with her in her bed and vaguely watched Little House on The Prairie in the bright morning Venice sunlight until I came to my senses and after a few hours, we checked me into a detox which I ran away from in hours. I was in six places that week. I couldn’t stop. I just kept running and getting high and apologizing and running and hiding and getting loaded and looking at my shoes and God kept trying to pull my face up but it was stuck. All I could see were my shoes. My God, those shoes. Eventually, I wound up at a place in Pasadena, Las Encinas, and after running away from there within hours they somehow got through to me and said I could come back if I was there by midnight. I sat in the parking lot from about eleven o’clock until twelve smoking crack, scared and exhausted and crying and wanting to die but having no real idea about how to go about that in any way that wouldn’t hurt my mom and a couple remaining friends, like Winnie. Winnie, someone I’d been dodging for years but had somehow appeared and put into motion this whole machine of me finally getting clean (for a while again) and whose imagined heartbreak at my suicide helped keep me alive. And so I went in and just stayed.

              That was about fifteen or twenty years ago. We stayed in touch for a while and it again became too much for me. I could so clearly see all of my fractures and failings of what it really means to be a friend in her and I’d eventually shy away. At one point her boyfriend John relapsed and OD’d and wound up all but comatose for months and I showed up for her then for a few weeks. I gave her my iPod for him to listen to in his hospital bed inexplicably in Lancaster or some other weird high desert hospital. I never knew why he was there and not in LA. But I drove out there a few times to sit with Winnie; I really didn’t know John well. It felt so good to be there for her but then that feeling of being a hero or at best, a good friend made me feel like such a fraud I just slipped away. She’d call every so often and we’d make vague plans of getting together but I could never pull the trigger. Winnie just truly freaked me out. No one has ever made me feel so worthless simply by their goodness. I guess the way the snake may have felt around Christ. And none of this was anything she did or even realized was happening. She was just a really good friend and a good person but my perception of her and how I compared to her just made me wither.

              The next time I saw her was at a memorial for our friend John Berry, my friend we tortured as he went on tour with us for three months. He just died one night. I don’t think any of us ever knew how. It was very mysterious. The obvious guess would be OD but I don’t think it was. I think he just lived enough and decided to try something new. It got too bright for him here and so he closed the blinds and turned off the lamps and slipped into the darkness of wherever that takes us. I stood and hugged and was so happy to see Winnie. I always was. My reticence of being around her was so torturous because I loved her. I truly loved everything about her. I loved that she watched the same eight movies over and over again and that she still had metal lunchboxes and other kitschy things in her life. I never took a step away from Winnie for anything other than feeling like I didn’t deserve her or at least I couldn’t be enough for her. I’ve never felt that way about anyone else. And no one has been there for me, as if by magic, as much as Winnie.

                                                                                  ***

Like I said, a couple of weeks ago she said hi on a rarely used dating app. I responded and we texted how’ve ya been and such and we should hang out and so on for a day or so. She said I should say hi to Melinda. I was actually shocked. I asked her if she could ask Melinda if I could have her number. She did and that led to Melinda reading all the parts of this thing, and more, which I’ve written about her. She sent me a message that I would have waited lifetimes to receive. But this isn’t about Melinda. It’s about Winnie appearing like an angel just when I most need her.

                                                                                  ***

Writing this book has been alternatively wonderful and awful. I had no idea what I was signing up for emotionally when I started. So much of my life has been uncovered and it rises and floats on the surface of the decades uncared-for swimming pool of my life. I’m not in very good shape. I feel wildly out of balance and my life is full of things that are eating away at my soul and it turns out there are so many things that can do that to one besides drugs. I’d leave if not for a my Mom and my dogs and a couple of friends. But you know what? Winnie has appeared. Maybe that means I’ll be okay. Maybe I’ll go see her and catch up and laugh about bunnies eating holes in my head and some of her eight favorite movies. And maybe I won’t disappear this time. Maybe I’ll just be the friend she deserves and maybe, in turn, I can save myself.

Ambulance Blues

              I can't remember exactly what it was or how it came to me, but it was a crown of sorts. I was working at Refuge Recovery Center. I was doing my practicum for my master's, and eventually, they just hired me full-time, which is pretty rare and which I'm kind of proud of. We'd moved from this beautiful location in Silverlake, right next to the Against The Stream meditation center with which Refuge was most assuredly aligned and wound up on the corner of Lincoln and Washington in Venice. A shithole. Nothing good about this place. I think we moved so that there'd be room for a tattoo parlor beneath us in the same building, which seemed very important to Noah, the founder of Refuge Recovery and our treatment center as well.

              Eventually, we pulled down the shutters, and we closed on a dime on a Friday morning after Noah's wholly fabricated and weaponized "Me too" -ing made our business untenable. That's an entirely different story, but while I was never that close to Noah, it seemed clear to me that he'd been fucked on the deal. And ironically, not actually fucked at all.

              And so we all moved west which was maybe only eighteen miles away; it was at least an hour and a half of drive time each way. A lot of the Refuge team said forget it. I'm staying on the East Side, the civilized side. I really had little choice as I was earning hours for my degree, and it didn't seem like such a big deal anyway. I listened to a lot of podcasts and smoked a lot of cigarettes. I still made it home each night.

              So some of us made the change, but some key people didn't. Loesha, who's a long-time friend and actually was a counselor in a few of my stints in rehab and who was by then the Program Director of Refuge, decided to call it a day, and she moved on. I just got a text from her today inviting me to a dinner in December, asking me to give some guidance to a newly graduated male therapist. Christ, if anyone can help someone navigate that level of imposter syndrome, it's me. I told her I'd be honored and that I'd bake some ciabatta.

              One day we were told as we unpacked and secured desks and rooms in the best locations of this upstairs little partitioned plot of therapeutic space that our new Director would be coming in, and we'd have a staff meeting at lunch. For reasons I can't remember, one of the clients made me a crown of flowers or bright paper or something, and I, of course, put it on and just went through my day with it. If you ask Dan, who this entire thing is about, what his initial impression of me was, he'll tell you that he was flummoxed by the gall or at least lack of decorum of me sitting down to the conference table with all of the above-the-line people waiting to welcome him with me with some silly hat on. I just did this stuff. I've always figured it was best to show up on the first day of a new adventure half-fucked up. It created all kinds of headroom in the future. I'd just be "Mike, the guy who dresses weird and never washes his hair." And when I'd wear normal clothes and at least rinse my hair, I'd seem like a king. Try it. It's brilliant.

                                                       ***

              My first impression of Dan was that he was kind. He made time to meet all of us and asked about us as people, not just our jobs. He'd entered into a system fast approaching implosion, yet no one knew it yet. And here he was, taking control of a ship that was manned by half-seasoned sailors and entitled students. He couldn't have known what was about to explode before him like an atom splitting in mere weeks. I liked him from the word go, but we were so wildly different. Where I wore half-cleaned pants and the crazier-the-better shirts, he wore standard issue khakis and trusting light blue or so button-down shirts. I actually envied his audacity. Make no mistake; being an outlier makes everyone else seem like an outlier, too. We get so entrenched in just being different. But he was a truly kind person, and that's all I ever required of anyone.

              Within weeks we were soldiers in a foxhole dodging bullets and praying that at least one of us would survive to spread our love to those that survived. He couldn't have been there more than a couple weeks, and he was still learning the ropes when the "Me Too" tsunami slammed against Noah and, by extension, Refuge itself.

              I'd received a ton of texts the night before the final normal day with copied and pasted articles about Noah being accused of all manner of nebulous and detailless accusations. He was canceled. So I did what any smart therapist would do. I brought in a couple dozen donuts for the clients to keep them at bay, and we just talked and listened to music. Everyone bailed except for Dan, another intern who at one point threatened me with telling the state about an "inappropriate" relationship I had with someone who I knew for decades and who'd wound up at Refuge and me. And a bunch of confused but very open-to-donuts clients.

              This is when, I think, Dan and I became fast friends. I think we'd already started walking around the neighborhood at lunch, as he always had to go to the bank for some inexplicable reason. We were certainly friendly, but this galvanized us.

              Dan loved Neil Young. That was our first point of reference. One day, I threw caution to the wind and asked him if he wanted to go see Jordan Peterson speak, as I had 2 tickets. He seemed a bit hesitant, but he said yes, and this experience further cemented our friendship. I won't go as far as saying I "red-pilled" him, but I don't think that Peterson was someone who'd he'd go see on his own accord.

              We kept walking at lunch and then at 7 in the morning. I'd get there as early as possible, so I could leave after the last group. Dan was there because he surely had work to do. But we'd walk and, as always, go to the bank. God knows how much is in there. The fuckin' guy must be made of money.

              In time, we just became friends, and then something so rare happened. We became brothers. I suppose it sounds awful to say, but I felt like the older brother. I think Dan was in some sort of awe over how out of control I presented myself as being. Who knows? But it worked, and we just started hanging out a lot after work and on weekends. We walked every day without fail, and I mean an endless streak for more than two years. He'd read every paper I wrote for my master's classes, and I'd listen to him divulge little shiny rocks of his life. I grew and still have grown to love him.

                                                                     ***

              I've said this about my mom, but it applies to Dan as well: I'd be fucked without him. Eventually, Refuge closed, and I started working in Santa Barbara at Good Heart Recover. Jaymee and Lacee from earlier stories and still such a part of my life helped start this place, and they wanted me to start doing family therapy. And so I did. I was beautiful for so long. I'd drive up on Mondays, and they'd pay for a hotel that night, and I'd drive home the next day. And, as I always do, I fucked it up.

              When Covid hit, I thought I was purely designed for quarantine. God, I loved it. But after a few months, it wore on me, so I started drinking a little wine. And then a little more, and then each day would repeat the day before when I was trying to get clients sober while shaking from needing a drink. The inevitable came, and I got Xanax from Craigslist in an effort to stop drinking. The Xanax was  meant to "keep the edge off." Well, all that happened was a week-long blackout in which everything collapsed. We still walked every day, and one day Dan, quite reservedly and nervously, suggested I go to detox. I said yes. And there went Good Heart and everything else we'd cobbled together these last eight months, like playing World of Warcraft drunk and my swears to Heaven that tonight was the last night.

              Without Dan, my brother, who I never had, I can't imagine agreeing or even thinking of going. But he ushered me in, and I went through it. He brought me cigarettes. He took care of my mom. He was the brother I never had. I'd like to say everything is back to normal now, but I still struggle. This book has required a lot of lubricant, and maybe it actually didn't, but I surely used it as an excuse to drink.

              Dan, I think, sees me as something beyond him. Something bigger than him. Someone more unafraid to be a cyclone in a world of thin rain. And I know that sounds horrible, and it's not meant to put me above him, but he's more controlled than I. He's more civilized than I. He's less shattered and less willing to disperse into a million blazing shards of light. In a word, he's better than I. Or at least more human and able to travel through humanity without causing fear and discomfort. I don't always have that quality. And so, I need Dan to reign me in. without Dan, I'd be a million knife blades slicing through a billion hearts, all with a guilty laugh on my face. I'd be a tornado. A cyclone. A rapacious predator slobbering over fresh meat, giggling all the while. And so I love him and need him. In some way, he protects you from me, and my sheer laziness to keep control and my primal desires are what pose a threat. Dan wraps a fence of love around me and makes it okay to just be this version of me and not the terrible me who I so yearn to let loose.

              Dan has become my best friend. My. Best. Friend.

              So be it. Dan's still here. I still have my brother. He still goes to the bank like a fiend, and he still seems to revel in how weird and unchecked I am. It makes me feel good. He makes me feel good. I love him. I keep trying to get him to do LSD with me, but he's too wise or at least waiting for the perfect time. I suppose they're the same thing.

              I know what it's like to have a brother now. I know what it feels like to have someone in your corner, no matter how fucked up you get. I know what it's like to love someone, no matter how weird their banking habits are. I know I love you, Dan.

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.

The End

I think I’m coming to the end of this thing. I’ve been roaming through all of the little films I see in my mind for months now and trying to convert them to strings of letters and words, always trying to make them seem as important or magical to you as they are to me. Just little flickers of old movie reels that roll like forgotten films shown at some revival movie house on which the marquee screams, “Mike’s Life and everything he’s done wrong! (and a few things right).” I suppose I could go on forever with these stories, all becoming more diluted than the last. But the time has come. It’s time to wrap this up and hopefully start an entire other life that might be worth writing about someday.

              I never set out to create a history of things that I did and experienced strictly connected to times and days, and the vetting of so many others dragged into this thing. I just wanted to make these little, but powerful movies I see in my mind stand alone in text. So many of these stories might not even have happened. But they sure feel like they did, and maybe that’s all that matters. Our memories rule us. Our history is virtually meaningless.

              I look over this thing and see my propensity for highlighting the pain. I glorify the suffering. The abject non-life of being a junky. And the fact is, I’ve had a beautiful life. I’ve been charmed by the sunlight of God, and maybe God isn’t real to you, and maybe you even recoil at the very idea, and that’s ok. I love you whether you think I’m a naïve puppet or a warrior in a garden protecting the gardener who’s never raised a blade. I can take it all. But my life, with all its derailments and sickness and heartbreak, has been nothing short of magical.

                                                                     ***

              The other day I was interviewed on a podcast. My dear friend Jaymee, who was one of the small gang who pushed me onto the path I’m on now, has a podcast and asked me to be on it again. I’d been on two other times. But a couple things came up which I needed to say to him, and maybe a couple of dozen or hundred or thousand people listening. It’s this: I hurt an awful lot of people. I broke a lot of hearts. I wish I could say it was from love gone bad or something as romantic as what we generally think of heartbreak, but it was usually something different. I broke hearts because people fell in love with me, or maybe they simply fell in friendship with me, and I was so often, in their minds at least, on the verge of dying. Being with me for some people was to shudder and recoil at a phone ringing late at night. Was this the call? I had that call when my Mom called me about my dad. It’s a deadly call. You never expect it, yet you fear it every moment of your life. I put that fear of a simple telephone ring into people.

              On the podcast, Jaymee called me a “dirty Saint.” His way of identifying the concept of the wounded healer. Those of us who have been dragged through the mud through our own choices and emerged in some fashion, someone able to help others going through the same pain. Surely I like that. Surely it makes me feel good that all the pain, selfish decisions, and botched moments of life put me in a position to help others. And I do. I do. I help people. But I railed against Jaymee’s characterization of me.

              If I am, in fact, a “dirty saint” whose pain has enabled me to help others, then credit must be given to all those who paid the emotional price for my ascendence into some wholly fucked sainthood. What about them? I paid virtually nothing for my years of addiction and debasement. I wrapped myself in a Teflon cape of heroin and sex, and everyone who loved me whithered at my slow diminishment. They are the saints. They put me in this place. No equation which results in me being anything of value can not involve what they went through simply by loving me. I fucking hurt a lot of people. And I emerged all but unscathed, and they, I hope, barely remember me, but at times, at key moments, I destroyed them with my selfishness, greed, hunger, and solipsism.

              And so to all of you. I owe such a dept. It’s a wholly unpayable debt, but it’s a dept nonetheless. I don’t say this to create a pool of guilt in which I’ll drown grasping for one half-deflated plastic seahorse, but I can’t pretend I did any of this on my own.

              The only way someone gets to the point where their singular catastrophe can be translated into helping other people is to acknowledge that the fuel of the engine is the pain I jabbed into so many willing and hopeful hearts.

                                                                     ***

              I think I wrote this thing in the hopes of being loved. And I felt if I exposed every part of me that was so awful and rotten that somehow you might take some second glance at someone willing to lie naked in the middle of Harford County mall, just a fat white kid exposed to all the taunting that such an act would bring. And maybe I thought it would lead to some sort of compassion and empathy. I think I thought you’d all see yourselves in my secrets and wretchedness and maybe as if by magic, look upon me with something like love or at least understanding. I think I did all of this for selfish reasons. I fear dying alone and unloved more than any conceivable fate. And so I put it all out there. And maybe I was a fool to do so. But that is why I wrote all of this and shared all of these secrets with you. I wanted to be loved. Not idolized or put on a pedestal but just loved how we love a friend who we know exactly what eats at them at three in the morning. Those kinds of friends. Coming right out and saying you want to be loved is almost surely to be dismissed. Who asks for such a thing short of a broken doll of a clockwork human? And yet, here I am. Asking for love. And so ready and dying to return it. As I age into what is likely the last chapter of my life, love is all I really care about. I fail at expressing it and embracing it all the time, but it remains the little pebble upon which my greying and diminishing body balances on. God, but I wish I could have embraced love so much earlier in my life. The things we put ahead of love on our list of wishes and proprieties are simply staggering in their inanity. The young who truly embrace love will rule this world, and they’ll do it with kindness and empathy. Complete empathy. Selective empathy is hate. I fell for that so many times.

                                                           ***

              I think it’s all out now. I think I’ve told you everything. Every petty and shameful and secret transgression I can remember. I think this thing is done. I think I’m empty. And you know what? It feels ok. I’m happy it’s all out. I’m an empty slate ready to create so much more scratches on my soul, and hopefully, I’ll keep them less buried. I just wanted to be loved. What else is there? This is the end, my only friend, the end.

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.

                                                                                 ***

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.

                                                                     ***

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.