I’ve often written about nostalgia and the role it plays in
our lives. Some would say to indulge is a
bad idea, but it’s not. We would be lost
without memories, whether they serve as marker points in our lives or simply instruct
us on how to live. I would say to live a
life overwhelmed by nostalgia is a bad thing, but most of us are so wrapped up
in simply trying to survive day-to-day that it just isn’t possible to live in
that fairy-tale place of cherry-picked memories.
Since I’ve been on such a weight-loss regimen over the past
few months, I’ve hardly gone drinking, probably not since early March or
so. I’m far from a big drinker but do
like the occasional happy-hour indulgence.
A micro-brewery opened up a few blocks from where I live in Queens
earlier this year, which had me thinking, oh, boy, this is great. But the few times I was there it felt like
hipster wonderland, and I’m just feeling too old for that scene anymore … a
good kind of old.
We all have drunk stories.
I wrote a piece for Leisuresuit.net way back in the 90s, My First Drunk,
that did a good job of detailing what it was like to go out and get bombed as a
teenager, that sense of intrigue and lawlessness despite just being a sloppy
teenage drunk on a doomed bar crawl destined to end in vomit (and my mother
seeing me naked with an erection). A
crusty, lowdown experience, but life-altering at the time as it was all new to
me. That story never gets old because I
rarely tell it anymore. Seems like you
pass over a bridge some time in your late 30s or early 40s where lionizing your
misspent youth just becomes a lost cause.
Or more likely boring because you’ve hashed it over so many times in the
preceding years with your other ageing friends.
But I feel an urge now to tell one of Brother M’s amazing
drunk stories, as it underlines so much of what went on between him and our
father, that weird dance a parent does when the oldest sibling of a group of
kids goes off the rails. I can see now
as an adult that this must have scared the shit out of our parents: the oldest
son, formerly a straight-A student, falls in with the drug crowd (which
constituted an alarming number of driving-age teenagers in the mid-70s in our
small town) and immediately starts fucking up on levels that are shocking and
new to them. They could handle kids
being prickly and combative … but a kid driving his car into the side of a hill
and appearing like an stoned ogre in the living room at three in the morning,
covered in dirt and weeds, the cop who escorted him to the door, telling them,
“He gets a free pass this time, but not next.”
That’s not even the story I’m thinking about. There are quite a few. We always say Brother M broke our parents in
for the rest of us, but the rest of us never got anywhere that out there, which
must have been a huge relief for them. I
shied away from drugs as a teenager and college student simply because I saw my
older brother get so nuts on them a few years earlier. Of course, I experimented in college, but I
can count those experiences on two hands … or one hand that looks like two. And I have to admit, those were some
wonderful nights, particularly when magic mushrooms were involved, but I just
never picked up any sort of habit or social structure that encouraged prolonged
drug use.
The one I’m thinking of ended unceremoniously. On a summer day, my father was working on
some minor issue with Brother M’s car.
He needed to get the jack out of the trunk. He went back to the trunk, opened it, stood
there for a few minutes looking into it, started shaking his head and muttering
to himself, left the trunk open, but decided it would be a better idea to skip
working on the car and mow the lawn instead.
The end. But that
ending was just a beginning. I watched
all this happening from the back porch, can’t recall exactly what I was doing,
but I do recall Dad muttering to himself, small curse words like “god damn” and
“son of a bitch” and phrases like “I’m getting too old for this shit.” Since he left the trunk open, I couldn’t help
but walk by a few minutes later to see whatever had set him off.
I was met with the smell of stale beer. The whole trunk smelled that way. There were no beer cans or bottles; the trunk
itself looked like any trunk: spare tire, jack, crow bar, small tool box.
And a brown paper bag that had split open enough to reveal a
pair of deeply soiled underwear. Clearly
a pair that had been shat in, full on.
The smell of stale beer was so strong that I didn’t pick up on any sort
of shit smell … but, boy, not since kindergarten or so had I dealt with any
sort of pants shitting episodes to rival something like this. Generally speaking, you shit your pants at
any point in your life, it’s one for the ages, something you will never forget.
I knew Brother M was sleeping off his stew, but later that
day, he needed to hit the record store at the mall, probably to pick up a new Todd Rundgren album on eight track, and I asked if I tagged along. I told him about Dad’s situation with the
trunk, and his reaction, which had Brother M laughing his ass off. It was then that I got the back story on the
paper bag, the beer and the soiled underwear.
As usual at that point in the 70s, he had worked a shift at
the Acme supermarket in Shenandoah.
(Coincidentally, he often told another story of shitting his pants there
one day when one of his coworkers played the prank of locking all the men’s
room stalls from the inside, forcing him to attempt crawling over the top,
which is where he lost the battle and dropped a load, forcing him to go back to
work with a meat-butcher’s smock to cover the fact that he was wearing no pants.)
But not that night.
As with most nights, he hooked up with some friends, with beer and
whatever drugs were handy at the time, to cruise, which simply meant listening
to rock-and-roll eight tracks while driving around all night. Doesn’t sound like much, but we all did it
eventually (usually sober in my case), as teenagers back then simply loved to
go out in groups, be in cars at night, amongst their kind, listening to rock
and roll … and generally doing nothing but driving around for hours. I can’t recall how many times I did this as a
teenager … hundreds. I can look back now
and see that we were reveling in that sense of spare time we took for granted
back then. Even when I get spare time
like that now, it doesn’t occur to me to hook up with guys my age and listen to
music while we drive at night. I wish it
would, because I sort of miss those sort of casual, goofy fun times we often
had. Everything I do as an adult seems
to be so weighted down with intent and direction, and I can see being
directionless in small increments has its merits.
As the night wore on, he found himself driving alone while
killing a six pack, surely too drunk and high for his own good, much less while
driving. We should note here that drunk
driving was not the crime of the century back in the 70s. Guys would often get into cars with beers and
just drive – probably not drunk, but the simple act of getting into a car with
a beer is a bit shocking now. We all
drove drunk at least a few times in our youth back then – a cop was just as
likely to tell you to go home and don’t do it again back in the 70s and 80s,
unless you had been in an accident or drunk beyond comprehension. I’m not saying this is right or wrong: just
noting how different things were back then in this light.
Well, strange things happen sometimes when you get that
loose … and in Brother M’s case, he somehow shit his pants again. Just happened. Probably sharted, and things devolved from
there with the loosened reflexes. He
pulled over in a Burger King parking lot and thought, “How am I ever going to
go home like this?” He was wearing his
white pants, a snazzy dresser at the time, and the pants were luckily not
stained. But the underwear looked like a
road map of hell, where the rivers ran brown.
So, under those harsh parking-lot lights, keeping a keen eye
out for cops or other sane humans, he opened up the door, took off his pants,
stood up, shook out a few lumps and got his underwear off. The smart thing would have been to just
abandon them right there, but our parents were raised in the Depression and had
drilled into us that nothing must be wasted.
In a way, it was heroic that Brother M had tried to save his
irreversibly soiled underwear – he was paying tribute to our parents, even if
they could never see it that way. But he
seemed to be thinking, “I can salvage this horribly shit-stained pair of cheap
white underpants.”
Well, he couldn’t, but he tried. He poured a beer on the underwear and
scrubbed, hard. Another beer. He must have sensed some kind of progress as
he kept them. What to do with this
underwear. He had the paper bag for the
six pack. Why not put the underwear in
the paper bag, put it in the trunk, and the next day, go get it and see if there
was any way to salvage it or at the least throw it away. Again, the only possible explanation I could
have for why he didn’t just leave that shitty underwear in the parking lot was
that he was so high that some sentimental sense of honoring our parents by not
littering or abandoning a piece of clothing our parents had paid for kicked in,
and he just couldn’t do that.
You do strange things when you’re high. One of those strange things is often adhering
to some gentle code of morality that would escape you while sober, but because
you’re high, you feel a type of yearning to be good in some higher sense, so
you convince yourself that if you do something honorable while you’re high,
that means you’re still striving to be a good person despite being hideously
wrecked. I’ve been there – we all
have. Some people get mean when they get
drunk or get high, but I know I’ll often get gentle and overly agreeable –
almost always sentimental. Alcohol is a
depressant, and I’ve never quite understood people who get out of their heads
when they get drunk.
Brother M could be a prickly kid and was surely hell on
wheels as a teenager. But I gather a
moment like that, alone in that parking lot, trying to figure a way out of a
hellish situation, the better angels of his soul came shining through. In ways he probably thought were enlightening
and honorable. I’m willing to bet he was
listening to this song on the eight track and feeling spiritual. Not quite realizing, his version of being an
enlightened human being … meant our father, a few hours later in the harsh
morning light, opening the trunk of his car and having a deep WTF moment
decades before WTF moments were noted as such.
Dad never mentioned the situation to anyone. Had I not been on the back porch, the whole
thing would have quietly passed as opposed to entering into teenage legend. I felt like that tree in a forest that hears
another tree fall – it happened, and I was there to prove it happened. But I suspect there were many other odd
little instances like this in Brother M’s teenage years where there was no one
or nothing else around to verify that the falling tree had made a sound.
This all seems so silly now, years later. Dad passed on, we all grew up, Brother M
eventually got his head on straight and became an adult, as I have, just as
rule-bound and rigid as our parents were.
Or not. If they had been that
rigid, the insanity they went through in his teenage years would have turned
into a full-on generational war, and it never happened. So I gather our parents were a lot more hip
and patient than we gave them credit for, despite our tendency to picture them as
the opposite.
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