Death in the House at Pooh Corner

Sorry for the delay between postings, but July has been a ragged month. From the moment I set foot in the office after a short break in late June straight through last week, it’s been nonstop bullshit at work, to the point where I’ve pondered throwing in the towel and pulling out of a contract early, even in this bad economy. I’m hoping it was just a bad spell, but we shall see. All I know is that when I come home from work too beat to write, or do much of anything, that’s not a situation I will tolerate for long.

And it looks like some time in the last few days, Randy Pausch finally passed away from pancreatic cancer at the age of 47. I recall hearing his story a few times over the past few months: Carnegie Mellon professor doing pioneering work in virtual reality research, wife and three kids, incredibly popular with students, struck down with pancreatic cancer, knows he has X number of months to live, gets it all together for The Last Lecture, which serves more as a life summation and final farewell done, as he notes, to show his kids what he was all about long after he’s gone. Lecture filled with warm wit, life lessons, wisdom, cautionary advice, etc. I understand he put out a book called The Last Lecture that sums up his philosophy and apparently has sold like hot cakes on the Non-Fiction best-seller list.

I finally watched The Last Lecture today, after hearing it hyped for so long, and even took in the long Diane Sawyer special he has posted on his website, which visited Pausch a few months after his last lecture to see how his life had changed.

I get the impression I would have liked the guy immensely: a no-bullshit sort of person who recognized you need to live simply by a few hard, set rules, have a positive attitude, and his big thing, be honest with yourself. Cool stuff that he expressed well.

But, man, after watching the thing, I feel oily. Not because of the man himself. It’s the aura around him, created by the media, the “dying young” aura that attaches far too much meaning and weight to a single person’s passing, when you can look at your own life and find much more meaning in the deaths of people, generally much older, whom you’ve known and loved. If anything, Pausch stressed that death, and the visible approach of it, is not sappy and, in fact, requires a person to bear down and decide how he wants to spend his last days, what he wants to pass along and be remembered for. In his case, that’s far over-shadowed by too much self-help bullshit with a patina of sentimentality that anyone who’s watched a loved one die knows is bogus. Again, not the man’s fault, but I’m acutely aware of this routine when I see it, and, boy, I don’t like it.

His last lecture was about “achieving your childhood dreams” … which makes no sense to me. I haven’t thought or cared about my childhood dreams in decades. They’re meaningless to me as a grown man; they were meaningless by the time I was 25. My childhood dreams? Let me think …

Have Tina Louise (Ginger from Gilligan’s Island) give me a blow job while Olivia Newton-John tossed my salad (more like a teenage dream … don’t think my mind was working that way at eight … but teenagers are still children).

Kill Phil Donahue.

Have shotguns for arms.

Make the world and everyone in it stop moving for an hour so I could take $1,000,000 out of the bank and be rich forever.

Have the ability to make various people's heads blow up just by looking at them.

Grow wings and fly, mainly so I could shit on my enemies from above.

And those are the more sane ones. Be a baseball player? A doctor? Man, whatever. My point is, as a guy a few years younger than Pausch, I no longer see the relevancy of childhood dreams: whether they came true or not. As he points out in his lecture, some of his came true, some didn’t. And, of course, he learned much more from the ones that didn’t. It seems like an overly precious concept to base a last lecture on, but I consider his place in life, as a college professor surrounded all day, every day by people who are virtually kids, thus it probably made sense for him to go on seeing the world this way.

It’s cheesy stuff, meant to tap into a Disney-style take on life that I find mildly offensive. Just not my cup of tea. Another major point in Pausch’s speech was to ask yourself whether you were one of two characters from The House on Pooh Corner: Tigger (the energetic tiger always in a good mood) or Eeyore (the morose, long-faced donkey). Frankly, I’d rather not be either. Obviously, no one’s going to cop to being Eeyore all the time. And if you see yourself as a Tigger … stay the fuck away from me.

The “honesty” angle is also specious. Honest to a point seems to be more the M.O. Because the honesty and truth of the last few weeks of someone dying from any type of cancer is a truly brutal, ugly thing to behold, one you don’t want to experience for yourself or anyone you know (but most likely will, sooner or later). We’re never shown this. We’re told, by Pausch occasionally, that he goes through bad spells. We never see these, or have any understanding of them. Never shits the bed. Never has spells of dementia. Never is in so much pain he can’t even move without weeping or gasping in agony.

Of course, I suspect he experienced all these things and more on the way out – most people do when they’re in the final stages of cancer. We’re spared them. But if he was to be honest, we’d see that side of him just as surely as we saw the sprightly, optimistic guy leading up to that awful phase where he spends the last few weeks of his life physically decimated and waiting to go. I’m sorry if this sounds blunt – you experience it with a loved one, it isn’t. It’s every-day reality: the truth. Frankly, I’m glad to be spared bearing witness to this sort of pain – it serves no purpose other than to tell the truth.

If you’re going to be honest all the time -- a point he stresses above all others -- and make the truth a priority in your life, this is it, at the very end, for millions of people throughout history. There’s absolutely nothing sentimental about it – it’s a tough thing to witness. And I respect Pausch for understanding he had to make himself as strong and positive as possible to enter into that last stage. We’re spared this simply out of respect for someone deathly ill and doing about as poorly as you can physically.

But it’s a crucial thing to acknowledge … that goes unacknowledged when you have Diane Sawyer cooing over you on a TV special, with every camera shot of her on such a vaseline-coated lens that you can hardly see her face much less the wrinkles on it, and the soundtrack welling up, literally, with the theme from Chariots of Fire. (I often use that movie-theme reference as a joke to mimic overboard sentimentality – it’s been years since I’ve heard that piece used as anything but an ironic put-on. Until now!) All we see are the heartfelt quotes, the audience rising to its feet at the end of The Last Lecture, the accolades, the tears, etc. That’s the good stuff. The truth is the guy surely went down 30 miles of bad road at the very end, and he didn’t want anyone else seeing it. And I’m glad he made that choice, because no one is filled with warm wisdom and witty quips when he’s in agony on his death bed and probably medicated to the gills.

What we’re purposely left with is that illusion of youth at death’s door – the nerdy professor doing push ups on stage, giving the speech of his life, laying out his path so his kids knew and understood who he was, what he did, how he chose to live. And I can’t knock him for that – it’s a beautiful image to pass along. All I’m underlining is that had we been shown the complete truth about this man and his awful predicament, all sentimentality regarding his legacy would have been stripped bare, and more likely become a thousand times sadder and more human than the forced cotton candy of the Sawyer special and that illusion of beautiful youth bravely standing at death’s door.

I guess what I’m getting at is I can’t stand seeing death turned into a sentimental opportunity. Because it sure as hell isn’t. It just speaks to me as exploiting young people's lack of experience in dealing with death, or the refusal to acknowledge the profound depth of it, because it is so daunting. I’m glad Pausch got a best-seller out of it – that’s probably the smartest, most-sane aspect of this situation. The man realized he wouldn’t be around to support his family, and also realized there was money to made putting his personal philosophy into a book that objectified him as a dead man walking, i.e., filled with senses of knowledge and urgency most of us don’t have. It gets published, sells incredibly well, and I’m hoping it provides enough money for his wife and kids to live the rest of their days without him. That’s called being a good husband and father, above all else, to the end, and after. You can leave the legacy of your words and physical images of yourself, but, man, to be able to provide like that after you’ve gone, that must have given him great comfort in the last few months.

Can you tell the mixed emotions I have over this entire situation? Again, it’s not him. If anything, he seemed to underline that he knew he was presenting his best face, and that he knew he was in for much worse times physically as his disease progressed. Most people who know they’re going to die are much older, and must have a stronger sense of fairness in their passing, that they’ve lived this long, and it’s time to leave. But you also need to understand – millions of people have said goodbye to their kids in the same way. Whether the kids were six or fifty-six. Doesn’t make it any easier to bear or understand. And that's one thing you don't grasp as an adult until it happens, because you've spent years being one, but you forget you've spent a much longer time being someone's child.

And that’s only one type of death. Recently in my home county, an illegal immigrant from Mexico was beat to death by a mob of drunken teenagers one night, leaving behind a (white, American) wife and three kids he had by her. Same number of kids Pausch had. Same sense of leaving the world far too early (he was in his early 20s). No one’s fawning over this poor bastard and his life philosophy, which just seemed to be “work two jobs in a foreign land because there’s nothing for me back home.” Of course, the incident has been turned by some into an immigration issue, and a racial-divide one, too, as opposed to the simple horror of a bunch of thugs beating someone to death on the streets of their town, which should be the only issue.

Is his passing any less relevant than Pausch’s? Does it mean any more or less to you? Do you cry for them? Well, think about it, thousands of other people died the same week, all with their own stories that might register nothing with you or might touch you in some sense, and you simply haven’t been made aware of their passing. Which is the way of the world. And something I like to routinely acknowledge, because most people don’t think about death unless it’s happening in their lives or, because of someone’s celebrity, are made aware of it.

I don’t think about death all the time, but now that I’ve seen how it works in my own life, I accept it and think about it like I’d think of the wind. Do you think about the wind a lot? Probably not. Only when it blows and you feel it. You feel it brush your face. Or get dust in your eyes. Or watch it tear off a tree branch because it’s blowing so hard. Or jingle a set of wind chimes. Death is the same thing. And it’s just as ever present. I was going to write “just as plainly visible.” But you don’t really see it. You see the effects of it. And you feel it. Sometimes you live in fear of it – think a tornado or hurricane – other times, you welcome it.

So, forgive me if I blanche at the idea of having a TV special make me believe it’s something more resembling a Lifetime Network movie. It’s a force of nature, not an emotional party trick. Not something I take lightly. I want to see this thing as clearly as possible, and these are the sort of takes on it I've come up with over the past few years. As for childhood dreams and such, pfffttt. Ditto "happiness" and such. Just get busy living your life and stop worrying about how you or anyone else sees it. We'll have a hard enough time making sense of our every-day lives as they go along, much less trying to determine how they fit in with a concept as quaint and meaningless as childhood dreams. We're going to get a lot more out of life, good and bad, than we ever could have imagined as kids.

The Zen Redneck

I often wonder where to draw the line with things I’ll write about here. Once upon a time, I considered my life an open book of sorts, that any topic was fair game. That’s what artistes do: bare their souls.

Still have no problem with that, but the real issue is baring other people’s souls, or more likely my pale imitation of what I think their souls are, and deservedly catching grief in return. A lot of times, it just isn’t worth it. From a writer’s point of view, and much more importantly, from a humane point of view. Some shit, while it would make for great reading, could be perceived as hurtful or disrespectful by a reader who recognizes, “That’s me he’s writing about.” Some things are better left unwritten and unexploited.

Now, if you think this is a lead-in for me hanging someone’s ass out to dry, think again. No lead in, just wanted to get into writerly stuff here. Poking around the web, or just reading various themed-blogs, I gather a lot of people think everything in their lives is fair game. My intentions here are to only write about topics that I gather would make for good reading by an audience, but to leave plenty of stuff private, as I don’t see the logic in making that stuff public, not even for money. If you’re taking a shit with your laptop, or bored at work, or following me all along as I stumble through life, here’s something that will hold your interest for 15 minutes (and don’t forget to wipe). There are any number of petty gripes and personal opinions I could get into at any time, but most times, I think, honestly, who the fuck cares. I wouldn’t even care after the fact. Any person involved in the gripe would care, would think I was a huge asshole for doing it, and would have my total agreement on that opinion.

This all plays into the “there’s just so much I’ll do for writing” theme I developed in my life a few years back, which may well be a kiss of death in terms of making it big as a writer, but screw it, that’s part of it, too. There’s just so much I’ll do to make it big. (I don’t even know what “big” means anymore – I have friends making a living as writers, and they’re hustling their asses off to make ends meet.) It just doesn’t matter as much to me on that level anymore. I’ve managed to make a living all along. I’ve worked through stuff in my head to realize personal happiness is something you create for yourself, every day, like an exercise routine that keeps you fit, as opposed to some shining goal you must reach, which of course requires another shining goal once you realize that wasn’t quite it. My ambitions are to be sane, solvent and healthy, above all else. In my mind, happiness comes from those things. Not other people, not things, not various emotional states that come and go.

I’ve somehow entered a zen redneck frame of mind. I’m not a redneck, nor a Buddhist. But I can gather the way I see the world has become laid back in a way that I’ve seen many times before with guys in the country, who are rednecks. They don’t have a lot of money. Their wives are often plain. Their jobs kind of suck. Their homes are nothing to write home about. But, you look at these guys, and often you’ll see a look of contentment on their faces suggesting they know something you don’t. As related to the above details, they love their wives, work hard, and take pride in the upkeep of their deeply average homes. On one hand, some less savvy people would look at their lives and mutter “loser” under the breaths. But you have to ask yourself, how can it be that a guy like that appears to be happy and satisfied with his life. (This song might help; after two decades in New York, it rings true in ways I hadn't grasped before.)

And there you have the zen, the acceptance of life on its own terms, surrendering to it in a sense. I don’t think life makes sense until you’ve failed a bit, had life kicked your ass a little harder than you thought it could. You see that failure is an option. Granted, you don’t want to choose it all the time, or even again. But you fail in some sense … and life miraculously goes on. You’re left with a choice to pity yourself on some mass, grieving level that suggests you deeply understand Christ’s pain on the cross. Or you get your shit together and make your life worth living again. Could be a professional failure. Could be a relationship failure. Could be anything that didn’t work out the way you planned it. Frankly, I don’t understand people unless I can see and understand how they’ve failed in some sense. It makes them seem much more human and real to me. I guess it also gives me a sense of compassion towards the person. I don’t always feel compassion for people cruising through life in a convertible while “We Are the Champions” blasts from the car stereo (although a more apt analogy for "successful" people might be driving a tank through a maternity ward).

I guess this all is a minor lead-in for something. I’ve mentioned her before, a woman I see regularly at the laundromat – beautiful woman with two kids from a previous marriage, appears to be on her own now. Every time I see her in there, I feel a nice, beatific sense of peace. We smile at each other, say hello. I’d love to say more to her, but often it’s hard. Sometimes her two kids are there, and they’re doting on her more than she is on them. She also speaks Spanish, don’t know where she’s from (I thought she was a basic white girl for a long time, looks that way, as do her kids). I’ll often see her speaking Spanish with a nice older couple who come in at the same time and have really taken to her. This morning, there was a swarming nest of Indian kids and their mother next to my friend as she folded laundry, and it was nigh on impossible to do anything but say hello and pass.

It’s always something. I guess I’m saying I’d like to hit on her, but the circumstances are rarely conducive. Not to mention it’s 8:30 on a Saturday morning, I’m sweaty from sweeping the sidewalk, and I feel about as sensual as Boog Powell. It’s a fucking laundromat, not a tikki lounge. This woman has two kids, for crying out loud. I look like I’ve been working under a car. There are all kinds of nutty neighborhood people hovering around as we inter-act.

If you had told me at 18, back in rural Pennsylvania, listening to a Bowie album on headphones in my bedroom, that I’d be a single guy in (a previously working-class neighborhood in) Queens, New York in my 40s, seeing the good in the world in a pretty latina with two kids in a laundromat, I’d have shook my head and told you that you were nuts. Just telling me I’d be living in New York one day at that time would have had me thinking you were nuts.


But there’s that serene, kind look in her eye that I recognize: the zen redneck. Whatever’s gone on in her life, man, it's had to be rough. And I can see that she’s obviously learned from it, as she always has a smile on her face and carries herself light on the breeze. Good for her! I can’t tell you how attractive I find that quality in people, no matter what the relationship. I love seeing that sense of grace. That older couple she talks to, they look like the kind of people who’d drive around on a motorcycle with a sidecar, and bring along their pet chihuahua Raoul in a little helmet. And I think they're cool. I love meeting hang-loose, friendly people like this in my outer-borough existence (because not everyone here shares those admirable qualities, to say the least).


Where does something like this go? I’m not really sure. For all I know, it might stay right where it’s at the rest of my days, and in some strange way, that’s all right. Could go somewhere else, if I ever see an “in” to gently nudge things in another direction. I don’t feel pressured to move too hard in any direction. But I’ll tell you this – if it does go anywhere, this is most likely the last time you’ll read about it. Because I feel like I’ve already shed enough light on this scenario, and shedding any more wouldn’t sit right with me. Sometimes you just got to live life instead of writing about it.

That Song: “Misfits” by The Kinks

I’ve decided to add a new feature: detailing how certain songs affected me at a certain point in life. I’m sure recording artists hear these stories all the time … overly-excited fans starting with “dude, you changed my life” and ending a few painful minutes later with “and that’s how ‘The Killing of Georgie, Parts I and II’ saved my marriage.” But if the artist has time, listens, and the person relating the story isn’t some sputtering maniac, this could be interesting stuff for him to hear – I know I can surely pull this off on a regular basis.

I can’t pinpoint when it was in the early 70s when I fell in love with The Kinks, but I can tell you it happened with hearing the song “Lola” on the radio. I thought it was the most intelligent, funny, creative and wild song I’d ever heard, on top of rocking. Most “rocking” songs had no meaning. They were just Robert Plant yowling “baby, baby, baby” over and over. With “Lola,” I could hear the story of a young guy going to a nightclub in London, meeting what he thinks is the love of his life, then realizing Lola was either a drag queen or a deeply masculine woman. The immortal couplet: “I’m not dumb but I can’t understand/Why she walk like a woman and talk like man.”

The Kinks were all over AOR radio back then, along with their early hits like “You Really Got Me” getting regular play on AM radio. Again, I can’t recall when I bought the monumental two-record set The Kinks Kronikles, but that day changed my life, as I heard all the great album tracks they weren’t playing on the radio: “Shangri-La,” “Autumn Almanac,” “Get Back in Line,” etc. Nearly every song killed me. I had been a huge Elton John fan, but he was blowing wind by the time of his Blue Moves album. The other key bands for me from that time, ELO and Queen, were good at what they did, but not quite what The Kinks were all about.

This all must have occurred around 1977, because I can recall the radio playing the shit out of their current album cuts, “Jukebox Music” and “Sleepwalker” … which weren’t bad, but nowhere near as good as the stuff on Kronikles. Every time I’d go to the record store, I’d see that bin full of weird Kinks “concept” albums, some on the ubiquitous Pickwick record label (for the uninitiated, Pickwick picked up albums that had bombed and reissued them with their no-frills vinyl and packaging … if you had an album on Pickwick, you knew hard times). I wasn’t buying (yet).

A year passes, and in the spring of 1978, I heard a song on the radio, that I immediately knew was by The Kinks, but had never heard before. Back then, I wasn’t so quick to assume this was new material. I recall that a few years earlier, I had heard The Beatles song “We Can Work It Out” on the radio and assumed it was a Paul McCartney and Wings song I didn’t know. Understand I was 11 or so, a Wings fan, and at that point only had The Beatles “Blue” greatest hits album … so much of their back catalog was new to me. One of the greater listening experiences of my teen years in the late 70s was going back and buying all those Beatles, Stones, Who and Kinks albums (at least the ones still in print), hearing landmark songs for the first time and having just enough listening experience to know it.

This song had a beautiful opening riff on acoustic guitar that repeated itself before Ray Davies came in with those first few lines: “You’ve been sleeping in a field/But you look real rested/You set out to outrage/Now you can’t get arrested.”

It was one of those songs that made me stop what I was doing and listen. That happened all the times with Kinks songs, because you wanted to hear the words, as you’d know they’d be worth your time. I was in my bedroom, doing school work at night while listening to WMMR on the radio, and whatever I was doing just stopped.

As with all great songs, I got it on the first listen. There are good songs that grow on you, but it’s been my experience that great ones hit you like a baseball bat upside the head, and there’s no mistaking it.



Let’s go back to 1978. I’m 14 at the time. This picture is a pretty accurate representation. Notice the goofy headphone hair – hair literally shaped by wearing those Radio Shack Nova 40 headphones – the ONLY good product the Radio Shack has ever produced. (Their in-house brand name for small electronic products was Realistic. The shit was realistic; it broke down all the time.) I went through two pairs in my listening years through the 70s and 80s, used them religiously. (Those were the days of dropping a needle on the start of the album, playing it all the way through Side 1, flipping it, and then Side 2, about a 40-minute endeavor I repeated thousands of times.) Notice the slight dose of acne – I never got it bad, just enough to be annoying. Notice the flannel shirt – my choice of clothes when not wearing goofy band, movie or comedian t-shirts. Throw in jeans and sneakers, and that’s my daily wardrobe.

I was a smart kid, but not too smart. My problem in school wasn’t so much lack of discipline as not caring enough about grades. I got Bs and As with ease. When it got to be crunch time in Math and Science classes, my least favorite, I’d even get Cs on occasion. I was good at sports, but not inclined to join the high-school teams. I tried basketball and golf, but gave up both by my junior year. (Golf I could have easily stayed with, but was getting bored with the game after hitting a plain of mediocrity I couldn’t surpass, and basketball, I didn’t like the stiffness of the plays and structure, a world away from the schoolyard ball I was great at.) I didn’t do drugs, but knew plenty of kids who did, and would go on knowing them, simply because we were kids and still in that groove of knowing each other by proximity and habit.

My friends were a like-minded group of stranded kids who weren’t “cool” by any standards, nor were the objects of derision. Most of us didn’t get laid. The ones who did, man, it was like they were already in a bad marriage. We were a pretty good bunch of guys: loyal, smart, not prone to head games, great senses of humor, which we should have exploited a lot more under the circumstances. The popular kids didn’t think we were popular enough, the jocks not athletic enough, the stoners not stoned enough. “Low profile” would be an apt description. You could be part of our gang, if you could find it, and didn’t mind our befuddlement with all things important to your average teenager.

So, it’s odd to me now that when I heard “Misfits” for the first time, it struck me with a thunderbolt of recognition that I was some type of misfit. I had always felt out of place in some sense – still do now. At the time, I didn’t know it was a condition many people feel in the same way, too. And I can look back now and see that I really wasn’t the huge misfit I made myself out to be: I was a pretty normal kid, all things considered. Very bizarre and developed sense of humor for my age, smarter and more well-read than your average kid, but aside from that, about as normal as a teenage kid could be. "Misfits" is a romantic sounding soung, and I gather there were kids and even older listeners who took it upon themselves to romanticize their sense of displacement just as I was doing.

I could point out the kids who were misfits. The handful of teenage guys in my class who were obviously gay and catching shit from all sorts of demented goons on a daily basis. The kid who smelled like shit and wore KISS t-shirts every day. Those wayward kids who seemed like they’d be a lot happier jumping boxcars headed west than sitting in “the rubber room” (where the bad kids went for being bad). The large kids who “overheard” fat jokes and comments all day, every day. The homely girls no one would pay attention to, much less ask out. These weren’t people who were waving their freak flags high. These were kids who seemed on the verge of being invisible, or willing themselves to be so. A lot of them were always angry and no fun to be around. There was nothing romantic about it; self pity is a quality that comes too easily to most teenagers. (And why I despised grunge and wasn't so hot on groups like Nirvana when they rolled around ... kids didn't need any extra encouragement to feel that way.)

What got to me about “Misfits,” as with so many other Ray Davies song, was it made the unusual universal – he let you know he understood that we’re all strange in some sense, and it’s all right. The song’s bridge said it all: “Look at all the losers and the mad-eyed gazers/Look at all the loonies and the sad-eyed failures/They’ve given up living because they just don’t care/So take a good look around/The misfits are everywhere.”

The song stops, then kicks in with a great country-sounding guitar riff. The whole song has that sense of building, like any good ballad, and “Misfits” has a few of the moments, when the song fades to nothing, then fades back in on an organ note, or that signature riff repeated on the acoustic guitar. This song wasn’t a hit – I’m not even sure if it was released a single. The big songs from the Misfits album was “A Rock ‘N’ Roll Fantasy,” a similar song in sound and theme, Ray singing about his uncertainty about the band, and his decision to keep on going because there were people out there who loved his music more than he did, and it touched him. The song seemed a bit cheesy and dishonest to me – of course, he wasn’t going to stop making music, what else was he going to do – but “Misfits” seemed real to me, like Ray was walking with me through those nutty high-school halls, where everything seemed to be some desperate competition I wanted no part of, and kids either chased that brass ring or turned too easily towards bitterness and rejection.

A cool thing about The Kinks in general that I discovered in my senior year. I was in one of those awful science classes again – Nuclear Science – with the legendary Mr. Welker, who actually made me learn my shit in Chemistry and get good grades via ass-busting and rote repetition. Nuclear Science was another story. Last semester, so I was feeling pretty lax to begin with, but on top of this, that shit may as well have been Chinese to me. I just didn’t grasp Nuclear Science. And I didn’t care – I was graduating in a few weeks, already accepted at Penn State, and I was just looking to get out of there.

Being a smart kid, I was in these smart-kid classes with that mix of eggheads and go-getters. Some kids were just smart. Some were smart and popular (i.e., into sports and school-related activities). Some were popular and faking the smartness to the best of their abilities. That class was no different. We all got along in that weird sort of “smart kid” camaraderie.

One day, we went on a field trip to the Berwick power plant – I don’t think that’s a nuclear reactor, but it’s a power plant, and Mr. Welker knew people there so we could get a detailed tour of how the place worked. (Mr. Welker also worked at Three Miles Island, and would go off on tirades about the movie The China Syndrome being a load of shit, not his exact words, but, boy, he hated when Hollywood turned what he recognized to be the future of electrical power into a horror story.)

The tour went as planned – we all wore hardhats and had a ball, being out of school, middle of May, 17 years old, about to graduate – just a great time. On the way back, we all had the van to ourselves. Since Mr. Welker knew we were the “good kids,” he trusted that we wouldn’t go apeshit and tear the thing up. We didn’t. But as we were pulling out of Berwick, I’ll never forget this, Mike and Dave, who were two best friends from the football team, pulled out a portable tape recorder and popped in a tape. I’d figure, “Jocks … nice guys, but probably assholes when it comes to music … here comes Journey, or Styx, or Def Leppard, etc.”

The fuckers popped in The Kinks Kronikles and were blasting “Waterloo Sunset”! I freaked out, as I was one of about five kids, the others soulful musically-inclined stoners, who seemed to know or care who The Kinks were. I asked them how they got into The Kinks, and just like me, hearing stuff on the radio, a stray King Biscuit Flower Hour here and there, etc. They said they played the album all the time after practice. I tried to imagine a busful of jocks grooving to “David Watts” and couldn’t. But that was Dave and Mike, two cool kids who shocked the hell out of me that day, but I should have seen it coming as they were obviously bright, insightful kids before this.

And I guess that was the point of “Misfits.” I took a good look around, and there were two kids on that bus just like me in some sense that I’d never considered before. This is a strange song for me, because it no longer has that direct emotional impact it once did. I still love the song and can listen to it repeatedly. But not in that same way I did when I was 14, and the song was like a veil being lifted on some important truth I’d yet to grasp, the recognition that no matter how fucked up I felt at any given time, I more than likely wasn’t alone, and might even be surprised by who was feeling the same way. It was a good song to listen to at the time.

Fortysomething, blah, blah, I forget, what time is it?

Well, birthday in a few days, um, cough, on the, cough, lower side of mid-40s. Same age as a very powerful handgun, the kind that can blow a man’s head clean off. (Oh, for the days of turning the same age as a snubnose .38. Or a .22 rifle. Or a 12 gauge shotgun …) Of course, I plan on spending it the same way as I have every birthday since the age of 20:

a. curled up in a fetal ball on my darkened apartment floor listening to Eric Carmen’s “All by Myself”

b. shooting a man in Reno just to watch him die

c. badgering everyone I know to show up at a bar so I can act like my life is like this all the time

d. like a pedestrian stepping over a homeless person on the sidewalk, pretending this shit just isn’t happening.

The correct answer, of course, is E, all of the above. Actually, I’ll go to work and catch a bus late afternoon to go back to PA for a few days on a long summer weekend. Why? Because there’s only one person my birthday matters to, and it aint me. It’s my mom, who’s getting on in years, and I know she’d love to see me on that day. I’m due for a few days off anyway, so what the hell, it’s always good to get back to the country in the summer.

I already gave myself a present of sorts, which I’ll feel a lot better about once I get my “economic stimulus” check which should have arrived last week: a new laptop, which I’m typing on now, a great present, as the old Compaq I bought in 2002 was getting long in the tooth, and it felt like “goodbye old paint” putting that thing down, a great computer that served me well. I now have the quandary of trying to find an American flag decal to put on the new one – the one I got for the Compaq came in the mail from the bank on 9/11/02 (in memory), and it just doesn’t feel right to work on a laptop without an American flag decal on it. Where do you buy these things?

This thing has a webcam. You will never see a picture of me posted from this webcam. Why? Because I gave the thing a test run, and based on this and other webcam photos I’ve seen, it’s virtually impossible not to look like a web-surfing pedophile and/or serial killer in a webcam picture. I looked like a fucking maniac. It’s something about the positioning of the head, the downcast eyes, the lighting – none of it works. I looked like I was obviously masturbating as you couldn’t see my hands, and the look on my face I can only describe as disturbing.

No joke, every birthday since 20, I’m convinced, is designed to make people feel like assholes. Think about it. 21, you’re already being cast in that “getting older” light as compared to a fixed point in your teenage past. You can legally drink now, ergo, the thrill is gone. Mid 20s, you’re freaked out over having a real job for a few years and realizing your life has radically changed form the carefree teen days of yore. Late 20s, you’re fretting over turning 30, that big, foreboding bridge with a number you no longer associate with wild youth. Early 30s, if you’re a woman, you’re thinking about slinging a pup, if you’re a man, thinking that you should be on schedule to get hitched and grow up and have kids, etc, the whole package. Mid-30s, that first experience of being considered irrelevant and invisible by society (which is actually liberating …). Late 30s, staring down 40, even though you did the same stupid dance 10 years earlier. 40, you’re “middle aged” now and on a whole new level of responsibility and maturity (my ass). Early 40s, you start realizing guys who run companies and states or countries are roughly your age, so what the fuck have you done, etc.

I should point out that in my 20s, the great barometer I used to judge age and passing time was Playboy centerfolds: how old I was in comparison to them. At first, you're either the same age or slightly younger, and feel great about this. By your late 20s, you're seeing girls with musical and cultural tastes glaringly a few years behind yours, and you think, as you hold the magazine with one hand, "Man, what would I talk about with this young girl?" In your 30s, you cast yourself as the slightly older man who would guide Bambi through the rapids of her late 20s, as she realizes Mondays and cigar smoke really are a turn-off. In your 40s, dude, give it up, you're spanking it to girls who could be your daughter. At some point, you recognize the insanity of it all, how these women don't even look like that normally, and even if they did, their minds are so geared to being eye candy, you recognize that unless you're speeding through life on a jet ski with hundred dollar bills fluttering in your wake, you may as well let go and read the highly informative articles.

Man, it goes on. The point being, you’re always supposed to feel like you’re not doing something right, or if you are, why are you doing it, for whom, for what reasons, do they matter, etc. I don’t think I have to tell you I delight in jettisoning every possible mind-fuck thrown my way. Age is no different. All this psychological bullshit we attach to it is purely artificial, like so many of the worthless judgments we attach to our lives to give them false (generally more important than they really are) meaning and weight.

I’m all for growing up – what I’ve learned is it just happens. You age, and if you’re smart, you simply mature as you go along. I look at it as there being two types of people in the world: people who like to break beer bottles on a sidewalk, and people who will clean up that glass so other people don’t have to deal with the bullshit of broken glass. I’ve never been the bottle-breaker type, which would have pained me to acknowledge well into my 30s, but you know what, when I’m out there, say, cleaning up a smashed wine bottle on my landlord’s sidewalk, like I did Saturday, I feel a lot better doing something like that than I ever possibly could doing something as assholic as smashing a bottle like that in the first place.

What I’m trying to say is there’s nothing romantic about being an asshole. Being an asshole is just being an asshole. And you’re either busy being an asshole, or you’re busy caring about other people in some sense.

These are the things I’ve learned living next to schoolyards. Watching the unfettered 15-year-old male mind go through the motions, and knowing that it’s not an age thing, you’re either geared to be an asshole or you’re not. “Maybe he’ll grow out of it!” No, he won’t. It will just shift shapes and come out in other more acceptable ways. I’ve learned the same thing working in offices. And living in New York. Watching people base their entire lives on a value system that makes no sense and is nothing but a grind.

I sometimes feel stunted living around here, surrounded by so many people who are “on fire with ambition” or some such crap. Ambitious for what? That’s a question I find myself asking a lot these days, because I honestly don’t understand what people are ambitious for. The answer always seems to be the same to me when you strip away the layers: power. In whatever form it’s perceived. Usually in very base, easy-to-digest, visible ways: money, sex, social standing, etc. Strip away all the layers, and it’s self respect. Which you either have, or you don’t, no matter how much shit you pile on your life in hopes of impressing other people.

One of the message boards I read got into a discussion the other day about women “settling on schlubs.” Usually fat schlubs – apparently no such thing as thin schlubs. Or young schlubs. Guys who smoke dope and play video games past their adolescence. Or middle-management types who will never be rich. Etcetera. You know the drill. My advice to women is don’t "settle" on anything. Actually, my best advice is masturbate the rest of your days. But the whole discussion was another of those mind fucks. Like there’s some ideal: a thin man, always handsome and well-dressed at any age, think David Bowie, wealthy, at the top of his profession, etc.

If there’s one thing women should learn about “ambitious” men, it’s that their ambitions are more important to them than women are. Women are secondary, at best, to that above-noted glamorous image. And chances are, that image aint all it’s cracked up to be. We’re all just people, and you’re more than likely to find more insufferable, arrogant pricks supporting that image, with women being just another accessory to the lifestyle – not the loves of their life, and they sure as hell aren’t Prince Charming. You don’t “complete” them – and fuck that lantern-jawed pussy Cameron Crowe for putting forth such a misleading Lifetime Network-friendly concept.

None of this shit accounts for working-class people, guys working in factories, or on farms, just going about their lives, never getting rich, that’s out of the question, just guys working, maybe with a wife and kids, not overly concerned with appearances, just getting on in life. There are millions of people like this out there – hell, I’m one of them and willing to bet you the reader might be, too – as opposed to people who see themselves as shining stars around which the world revolves. Jesus Christ, where I’m working now, the guys running the place look like The Three Stooges and act like four year olds. These are guys making over half a mil a year, living in mansions and supposedly tapped into “that life” we’re all geared to be yearning for. The one thing they have in common: if not miserable, they always seem under extreme pressure and not very happy. I don’t envy or look up to them. (Don’t pity them either. I don’t pity anyone.)

I’m supposed to want that? I guess if I could trick my mind into believing all that shit mattered, it would work, but I just can’t. Wish I could! It’s always made more sense to me to go through life asking questions, mainly why you do the things you do, with little regard to how this appears to anyone else. Granted, you can get caught in a vacuum with that kind of mindset, but you also need to look around, see how other people are living, learn from them, see good things worth working towards, bad things to avoid. Move forward, with time, which doesn’t give a shit what age you are. Age is meaningless to time. It’s a social construct we’ve created to clarify passing time. You just go to move. That’s all. I took a boxing class today that would put your average person down like a dog. It would make a professional boxer laugh. On a scale of 1 to 10 of physical fitness, it would require about 6.5, 1 being someone who does nothing, 10 being a professional athlete. 6.5 is nothing to scoff at!

And I note that, because when my parents were in their 40s, back in the 1970s, I don’t recall them ever working out. You get in a time machine, grab my Dad from 1974, put him that boxing class with me, his only response, from the hospital gurney, would be: “Bill, what the hell are you doing? Training for the olympics?”

Because in his world, in your 40s, you worked all day at the factory, came home to the wife and kids, did work around the house, kept the cars in running order, and basically relaxed when you weren’t punching a clock. I’ve just placed a different value on exercise, which I think is a damn good thing to do at any age. Shit, there’s a lady in our class who told me she’s 72, and looks every minute of it. I asked her why she was there, not insultingly, and she said, this stuff makes me feel alive. Granted, she doesn’t do the full work out, she basically moves as fast as she can, skips the heavy calisthenics, and goes light on the bag. But there she is. At first, I couldn’t stand the sight of her. Jesus Christ, what’s that old bitch doing here again? But after awhile, I realized, that’s an amazing thing this woman is doing, not only to be there, but to have the mindset that this still matters to her, and she wants to do it to the best of her abilities.

And that old bitch simply reinforces how I see the world, how I want to live. I’m not an “age is just a number” person – you get older, you feel it. Christ, two years ago, I got these two little things in my left armpit, I don’t even know what they are – nowhere big as warts, these two minute bits of skin. The next year, I got two more, symmetrically positioned in my right armpit. Seeing these things freaked me out, I still don’t know what they are, but noting the symmetry, all I can figure is it must have something to do with age and the body, things that just happen. After the right armpit, I started checking my neck for gills every morning. I don’t want any more crazy shit growing on my body.

And here’s my birthday present to you. My favorite band, The Gourds, blasting through a strange, disjointed medley of The Beatles songs “Birthday” and “Yer Blues” from a recent show they played. Pull it down and play it in my honor. That’s a good enough present for me.

Hot Snakes

One thing that occurs in your 40s: time really does a number on your memories. The farther you get away, the harder it is to recall things that aren’t hallmarks in your life. There are certain memories from back then that are burned in my mind – like puking in church on Easter Sunday, 1972. But many other things – the huge bulk of life, I’m having a harder time with.

My Grandma, for instance. She passed on in 1981, just a few days before my birthday in June. Somewhere in her early 80s. Six years earlier, she had suffered a massive stroke which truly did a number on her memory and cognitive abilities. At the time, and being a kid, I just rolled with it, not knowing any better. If something like that happened to my Mom now (who is just a few years shy of that stroke age)? I’d be devastated, mostly because I now know and can recall how rough a six-year ride that was.

I wouldn’t say it was like growing up with death in the house, but it was growing up with the recognition of someone very old who had been dealt a grievous blow, and my teenage years, that time of blooming and discovery, were tinged with that knowledge of old age and impending death. And I don’t consider that a bad thing! A worse thing would have been to have her shuttled off to an old-folk’s home, which was not an option.

Before the stroke, Grandma had been the matriarch: mother to four sons and a daughter she had raised through the Depression and sent off to fight in World War II. Her husband, my grandfather, must have died before I was born, in his 50s. He worked in the mines – not sure if he was a coal miner or not, but I know he worked at the mines. When there was work. Dad would tell us that during the Depression, guys who worked the mines got to work one day a week so they’d have just enough money to afford basic food needs and not much else. To raise five kids in that sort of time must have been something – but they were far from alone.

For years, Grandma kept a little flag in a drawer that was given to mothers of soldiers in World War II to designate how many sons they had in the war. Hers had four stars (red on a field of white with red stripes on the edges) for her boys (my aunt was in the WACS, but I guess that didn’t register as a star), who got around: one in a bomber (which was a near death sentence), one in the jungles of New Guinea, don’t know what my oldest uncle did, and Dad, thanks to a grenade accident in boot camp that killed two guys behind him (their body parts covering him ensured that only his legs got sprayed with shrapnel), missed the Battle of the Bulge, but spent a few years in Germany as the war ended and during the Nuremberg Trials.

These guys had been through a world of shit by the time they were 25; there’s a reason that generation wanted to settle down, fast. My uncles and aunt went off in their own directions, but Dad stayed home after wandering the world as an army mechanic for roughly 10 years. Think he gave college a try, didn’t like it, and found his way into factory work. How it was he came to take care of Grandma and live at home, I guess it was a slow sort of acceptance that this is how it was going to be. I grew up with an unrealistic view of home ownership as a result: I thought everyone paid their mother $1.00 for a house, and it was theirs.

It was mostly a blessing to have her there. I’ve noted this earlier. One of my earliest childhood memories is Grandma leading me to the upstairs bathroom, after I had shit my diapers, a full load, and had me sit on the toilet … while she picked up each turd by hand and dropped it into the water between my legs. While I just sat there, slack-jawed and shit-assed; this probably freaked me out as much then as it does now. I’d post a “kids, don’t try this at home” warning about something like this, but I think most people would ride a bike through a safari park in a steak suit before they tried this at home.

She was always doing hard-core things like that. Things that sort of said, “I love you, little boy,” but also, “I’m harder than you are.” And I can imagine a woman who raised sons through that above-noted storm of circumstances must have been hard as nails. The most memorable incident for me was Hot Snakes. That part of Pennsylvania qualifies as deep country – even now, although I notice way too much of suburban influences starting to sink in as time goes on. You can see it in various pictures, where there’s a wilderness beyond our backyard, where houses were just starting to be built in the 60s and 70s. Thankfully, not many were built, and the woods crept right up to the cemetery a block away, still do.

In the spring, sometimes we’d find snakes in the backyard: copperheads. Never got bit, but they scared the shit out of me. Why they came out of the woods was to seek warmth, which they’d find on cement that absorbed and held heat longer than woods and grass. So one of those breezy May mornings, you’d sometimes look out the kitchen window at the backyard, and there’d be a snake or two sunning themselves on the sidewalk. Sooner or later, they’d leave, but just the idea of them being that close to kids and pets wasn’t cool with anyone in the neighborhood.

Grandma did her thing, at least on one occasion – not sure if this was a regular occurrence. But she once went out with a baseball bat and beat two copperhead snakes to death on the pavement. The picture is long gone – and you better believe I wish I still had it – but there was a polaroid taken of her standing with the two “hot snakes,” one in each hand, smiling as the spring sun rose behind her.

She was tough. I noted earlier, “mostly a blessing.” The downside was hard-line Catholicism. I mean full-on, “if I had my way, you’d all be priests” Irish Catholicism. When Dad married Mom, a filthy Protestant, he may as well have married a topless African native – the level of acceptance would have been slightly better. It was like a “mixed” marriage, something staunch Catholics just wouldn’t advocate. I can tell you now, marrying Mom was the best thing Dad ever did, because her sweet and open view of life and the world was something that perfectly set off his more hardened, stoic take on things. It wasn’t as bad as the actual Catholic/Protestant “troubles” in Ireland, but it was surely frowned upon.

Especially by Grandma. But I think Mom immediately won her over, or at least I never remember them arguing about religion, mostly because Mom was a non-practicing Protestant for the most part, and Dad bagged church religiously every Sunday (claiming to go off to church in another town, but driving around listening to the Big Band station in his Sunday’s finest, which probably did him a world of good in terms of keeping his head on straight). Grandma was the Catholic enforcer, and, boy, she put us through the paces. Routine confession, all the classes involved with catechism, confirmation, etc.

Luckily, we dodged being sent to Catholic school, probably because it cost extra as opposed to a free public-school education. We also dodged being altar boys. How, I don’t know, as I know Grandma was hot on having this happen. Thank Christ she never got her way … as we later learned the parish priest was diddling little boys at his various assignments, and I shudder to think if he got anyone in our neighborhood – I assume he did, but don’t want to think about it.

Catholicism was a constant under-current in the house, and the quiet message was that Mom was an outsider. I’ve always been leery of religion as a result. When you’re raised in a house, by a woman you know is true and would give her life for you, and you’re being fed the subtle message that she’s somehow lesser because of her religion, you either reject the person or the concept of religion. Seeing as how Grandma was forcing the stuff down our throats like castor oil, you can guess which side I leaned towards. But I never fully rejected Catholicism – still haven’t, although I’d be hard-pressed to call myself one. I think when you’re raised Catholic, that sort of things sticks with you the rest of your days, and not in a bad way. Like guys who have been in the military. But I’m far from a practicing Catholic and don’t particularly worry about it.

All along, the matriarch quality of Grandma’s life was constantly driven home for me, mainly by our relatives routinely visiting the old homestead and paying tribute to her. I hardly ever see any of my cousins anymore, as we’re pretty spread out, and even if we weren’t, it seems like we all have our own lives now as adults, and we’re not like one of those extended clans where cousins are constantly flitting around each other’s lives. But every summer, it was visiting time, and every few weeks, there’d be another massive family invading our house, which was already crowded. Kids in sleeping bags. Huge vats of baked beans. Cook outs where we could have eaten an entire cow. Amusement park visits, constant activity of some sort. It was fucking chaos. Upwards of 12 people in a house that would have comfortably suited four. It was amazing we didn’t have too many memorable blowouts, but we were also on our best behavior, and looking back, I genuinely liked a lot of my relatives and recognized them as good people.

But it was made clear, these visits were happening because in my uncles’ and aunt’s minds, this house I was being raised in was their home, and my grandmother was their mother, whom they still loved immensely. Again, a good thing to be exposed to that and recognize the value of someone. Do I miss those sort of huge family convergences? Not really, but by the same token, I’ve realized they weren’t the horrific weekends I made them out to be at the time.

And then, of course, one day around 1976 (I can’t recall the exact timing), I come home from school and am told by Mom that Grandma won’t be home for awhile, she’s had a stroke and needs to be in the hospital. When she came back, man, day and night. Before that, she had been vibrant, hands-on, wouldn’t think twice about putting you over her knee and giving you a good swat for being fresh. The effects of the stroke were immediate and obvious. Slurred speech. Scrambled thoughts. Memories jarred askance. Physically, she lost a lot, moved slower, was prone to falling and hurting herself in ways that would leave her bed-ridden for days. Until one’s experienced a family member going through something like this, it’s hard to explain. But again, I’m hoping nothing remotely like this happens with Mom. Lord knows, Dad was hobbled in his last few months from the chemo he received for his stomach cancer – and I think in his mind, he was probably thinking, “Been here with my mother. Later for this shit, I’m checking out.”

That was the cataclysmic change in all our lives, especially Mom's. On top of taking care of four kids – luckily we were either teenagers or just getting there – she now had an elderly woman to watch over who was having a rough time just dealing with every-day life. And Mom, to her credit, handled it like a pro. Never once complained. Did everything and then some to make sure Grandma’s life was as comfortable as possible. This would often involve bathing her, helping her up and down stairs, watching over her all day to make sure she didn’t wander off, basically being a round-the-clock nurse that would have cost a fortune to hire. You have to understand, up to that point, I felt like I had two mothers, which is a great thing for any family to have, and why I'm prone to not busting on grown adults living with their parents in some form.

This is also where the Catholicism got strange. Because of her stroke, Grandma could no longer attend church. And with her mind wandering through her entire life, she’d often be banging on our bedroom doors at four in the morning on Sundays, telling us to “get the horses ready, we have to go over the mountain.” She was referring back to her childhood when she and her family would prepare a horse and buggy to take them to church at the next town on the other side of the large ridge on the edge of our town. Since she couldn’t be at church, she became totally obsessed with making sure we got ready for it on Sunday morning, with the campaign usually kicking into high gear by Friday.

It was nuts. This was when my brothers and I stopped going. Sure, going through the motions, getting dressed, and leaving at the appropriate time. But we’d pull up short, stop in the cemetery next to the church, and go sit around the mausoleums, waiting for the bells to ring that signaled the end of mass, so we could scurry back home and make it seem like we had gone. This became our teenage ritual. We weren’t all that nuts about church to begin with, but to be harangued over it constantly all week … forget it. When we were in the cemetery, one of our neighbors would sometimes drive by in his utility vehicle and stare us down. Expecting what to happen, I’m not sure. (As this guy was later nailed repeatedly for tax evasion, he should have been more worried about his own problems.) We just sat there and stared back. We weren’t “bad” kids. Christ, we were wearing plaid pants and clip on ties! Short hair! Just sitting there. A sane adult, like me now, would have said, "fuck it, kids bagging church, obviously they're not going to cause trouble for anybody as they don't want to get caught." But he had our number, yes sir! We’d also field disapproving glances from some of the “church” people when we saw them during the week. To which I thought, too bad. You make church seem like a prison sentence, no kid in his right mind will want anything to do with it.

I should mention that all along here, my grandmother’s sisters (of which there were four or five, I can never recall) all lived in the same house in a town called Port Carbon, which is still a gritty little town back home. Back then, I recall there were occasionally riots, the kids in that town were particularly nuts, over what, I have no idea, probably just a very bad grouping of kids by chance (and drugs, most likely). Their small row house was by the side of an enormous rock-faced hill on the edge of town, and everything about it screamed “old lady.” I don’t know how they all ended up there. A few of them had been married, but I gathered their husbands had passed on. The place smelled funny. Like pennies, vinegar and cigarette smoke. It seemed like Bing Crosby was always on the stereo. In my mind, it was always raining over their house alone, like in The Addams Family. This was Irish Catholic Central. We may as well have been in Belfast.

When relatives would visit, Port Carbon was always part of the agenda, we would always go down there, on top of us routinely visiting with Grandma throughout the year. There was a forlorn park on the other side of a shit creek a block from the house, and we tried to get over there as much as we could. The place felt like Mars to us – the whole fucking town. Even now when I pass through Port Carbon in a car, I feel vaguely melancholy as I zip by that crooked rowhouse that used to be theirs, that I spent so many rainy Sundays in. They had two dogs, a pissy little chihuahua that bit, and a big old Irish setter that was friendly as hell. Most times, they’d be camped out behind the coal stove, wagging their tails as they took in the heat from the boiling tea kettles.

After Grandma’s stroke, Mom got in the habit of taking Grandma down to the house in Port Carbon much more often, I guess because she sensed that whatever had happened to Grandma, the end could always be near, so she was probably just honoring Grandma’s request to spend more time with her sisters. Mom’s reward for this? Being called a filthy Protestant and a bum on a much more regular basis, as it was clear the sisters were inundating Grandma with even more anti-Protestant dialectic when she was down there. Without fail, every time she came back from a visit there, the Protestant bashing rose to a much higher level. Understand that my Mom never gave a shit about being Protestant – non-practicing, and frankly didn’t care what you or anyone else believed in, so long as you were a decent person.

This memory shades my overall memory of those women as a result. I don’t hate them now – in fact, I can recall how loving and warm they were to us kids, how glad they were to see us, every time. I was forever wiping my face after getting a big wet kiss from one of them, generally after hearing, "Oh, look at little Billy, all the children in Dublin look just like darling Billy!" But the bullshit they put Mom through over something as pointless as religious differences, man, Mom had the patience of a saint to never blow her top. She owed those women nothing. They weren’t her blood relatives. She could have just as easily said, “Screw it, I’m never speaking to those assholes again. And someone else can take care of her, since I'm not good enough!” But that never happened, because Mom was better than that. And I think they eventually came around when it became clear a few years on that Grandma’s health was truly deteriorating, and Mom was going all out to make sure all was as well as could be.

When that started happening visibly, I think I’ve blocked out a lot of it, but it surely went on for a few months, at least. All I recall is that she started having more accidents, falling down and injuring herself more, becoming more delusional. I don’t know how long this went on. I think the bulk of her post-stroke life was tolerable, but the last few months, things came apart more quickly. There were a few falls requiring hospital stays, and it was becoming clear, at least to us, that this was leading nowhere good. Again, for a kid, this was an odd experience – I’d never watched anyone die over a period of time. I didn’t know she was dying. People want to believe the best when it comes to situations like this, like a bad spell is happening, and things will get better. But there are points in life where things don’t just get better and only get worse.

I recall the last fall, that June in 1981, a perfect summer’s afternoon. My sister went into the bathroom and found Grandma on the floor, unconscious. Immediately, we called an ambulance. And I’ll still remember what a nice summer day that was, twilight, fireflies coming out, crickets starting to chirp. When the attendants wheeled Grandma by the screen door in the kitchen, where Brother J and I were, her eyes caught ours, and I’d never seen such a look, which I now recognize as “goodbye” but at the time wasn’t sure how to interpret. J blurted out, “This is it. I think she’s gone this time.” I didn’t know what to think. A few years earlier, a similar situation had happened with our dog Butch, an old dog who died on the carpet in the kitchen early one winter morning with Mom and Dad vainly trying to administer his medication with a dropper. We heard one last choke, Dad gasp, “shit,” then nothing, and J and I in the living room, with J saying, “Butch is gone.” Didn't have to see it. We just knew.

Sure enough, that was it, we never saw her alive again. She passed away in her sleep early the next morning at the hospital.

The next few days were absolute chaos. I don’t know how many people converged on the house: dozens. All her children came with their families. All her friends showed up, some traveling miles to be there, a few dozen older people, I gather who had known her decades ago, showed up for the wake and funeral. A few were legendary bums who only went to funerals to get a free meal. It was like a sad circus, with a lot of crying and eating. Food everywhere. As a kid who lived there, I felt territorial towards the house, but that feeling was forfeited for a few days, just absolute madness. I was too blown out first by her death, and then by this whirlwind of activity, with relatives and strangers, that I didn’t know what was going on. I remember us kids sitting in the living room on the morning of her funeral in our pajamas, just too freaked out to move. People everywhere. We had to get dressed and use the bathrooms. We couldn’t, as there was a constant stream of people in and out. When we finally did get out shit together, we were late for our own grandmother’s funeral.

All I remember about the funeral is that my brothers and I sat at the top of the hill in the cemetery, away from the action, and took our shoes and socks off because it was so damn hot. We were wearing collard shirts and ties, which was something we rarely did and never in summer. Everything about the day was disorienting and off. The Temptations have the song “I Wish It Would Rain.” It made sense on a hot, sunny day like that, a day that would have found us normally making money mowing lawns or playing tennis. We eventually put our socks and shoes back on for the ceremony, probably because Dad waved us down, but again, afterwards, going back to our house, there were far more people I didn’t know in and around the house that I didn’t know than the handful of relatives I recognized as being part of Grandma’s life over the past decade. Whether people were annoyed by our "antics," I have no idea. They weren't antics. We were shocked by her death and had virtually no space to gather our wits and relax from literally the next morning after she passed on.

Brother J and I found our way upstairs, got into our shorts and t-shirts, went to the local mall and caught Raiders of the Lost Ark, which had opened a few days earlier. Just as going out and renting Anchorman the night after Dad’s funeral had cleared me out, I’ll always have a soft spot for Raiders – for the simple reason that it gave me a chance to disengage for an hour or two from a really bad situation. Afterwards, we drove around as much as possible, got home around sundown, and luckily, it was just down to our uncles and their families, still a huge horde of people, but at least we knew them all. And everyone left the next morning. I can recognize now, for Dad and his siblings, that was it: their father had passed on years earlier, and now their mother was gone. I can anticipate what a raw, empty feeling that's going to be and don't look forward to that day.

A crazy few days, and I turned 17 while all this shit was going on! That’s a birthday that came and went without a trace, over-shadowed by a far deeper event. I wish there’s more I could remember. I’m sure pictures and chats with family members would dredge up a ton of stuff, most of it good, but these days, Grandma is more a feeling or a fiber of my being than an actual memory. If there's any toughness in me, and there is, I know where it came from. I think this is what happens when people pass on, and then decades pass. All that’s left is whatever they put into you in the first place. And it’s hard to remember how this happened.

Goodbye, Bullshit Stars of the City

Last night, I was going through some old files on my computer from the mid-90s, mainly coming across some old love letters that made me realize one thing: I wouldn't have fucked myself back then! Lord knows, I was a handsome specimen at 25, but my head was completely up my ass. Life does get better in some senses!

But I also came across this short story that was rejected at the time by the NYPress, where I was just starting to get stuff routinely published. The date on the original MS Word file is 12/1/95. I can tell that this story masks a lot of my feelings towards the Bronx at the time, but probably also captures my undiluted feelings towards the place, too, which weren't always pleasant. That was a strange way of life for a white guy from a small town -- but it worked for nigh on a decade. In any event, enjoy the story -- I did some minor editing, but most of it appears as it did in 1995. (Hopefully, the text comes out all right; it's giving me hell in HTML, but hopefully will appear halfway legible on your screen.)

***

Charlie’s dad was a big country fan. Maybe that’s why he had found it so easy to go away. He had named Charlie after his idol, Charlie Pride, the only black country superstar, ever.

Charlie had vague memories of his father explaining this to him, years ago, when he was five, and his mother was young and beautiful, and his two big brothers weren’t so big. The Charlie Pride’s Greatest Hits eight-track was plugged into the beat-up stereo, and his father nodded along as the whine of fiddles floated out the window and down the fragile Sunday morning streets of the South Bronx. "Is Anybody Going to San Antone?" was the song; the answer in the Bronx was “fuck no."

"Damn, that nigger can sing," his father said. He wasn’t drunk, and Charlie liked him this way, so gentle and wise.

“And it ain’t just the singing,” his father lectured, "it’s the man himself. A black man singing country music. Imagine that. He’s playing the white man’s game better than most white men. People must have thought he was crazy in the beginning, but this is a greatest hits album. I tell you now, son, so you’ll never forget. I put Charlie Pride on the same shelf as Jackie Robinson and George Washington Carver. People don’t know. That’s why I named you after him."

But for every quiet Sunday morning listening to music, there were hundreds of fallen Saturday nights: drunkenness, carousing, bitter arguments. At first, it was all behind closed doors. Then the doors opened. And the foul words would fly in front of the children. Near the end, Charlie’s father sometimes hit his mother. She would hit back. All Charlie and his brothers could do was cry. Soon, he went away. They didn’t know if he was a drunk, or a crackhead, or homeless, or in jail. Charlie hoped he was dead, for life seemed to be nothing but pain for the man. One of the kids in the neighborhood had caught a raccoon eating garbage from a trash can one day and put him in a cage. The animal died a few miserable weeks later, and the whole time, Charlie thought about his father’s situation. He had been a night watch man at the Hunts Point Market. For two years he had taken night classes at the community college to become an accountant, but he failed most of the classes, and that was when the drinking started.

But it wasn’t unusual to have no father. Most of the kids in the neighborhood grew up this way, for one reason or another. Some fathers were dead, or in prison. Most just left, coming back every now and then to see how much their children had grown and pick fights with their mothers, then leave again. Fifteen years of Charlie’s life had gone by since that morning with his father. They had been hard years for his mother. She watched her first son, Joseph, ease into the drug trade. It seemed as reasonable a choice as any. People knew it was wrong, but there were a lot of things wrong in their part of town, and one of their own may as well have grabbed a little for himself if that was the case. Everything was wrong, so there wasn’t much shame in breaking laws in a world that didn’t care.

Joseph had started as a roof-top look-out. Many days on the way to school, Charlie would pass by an abandoned building a flew blocks from his tenement. He’d look up and see his brother silhouetted against the morning sky, waving to Charlie as he ended his night shift. Charlie thought he looked like a pirate waving from the top of a ship’s sail. This would be the only time they saw each other, as his mother had kicked Joseph out the first time he came home with a pair of Air Jordans and an attitude.

Around this time, Charlie had taken it upon himself to fall in love with country music. It offered some kind of escape from the neighborhood. The life there could be seen on the pavement and in the gutter. Garbage all over the place. Dogshit left sitting for weeks. The tiny blue stoppers for crack vials. Obscure forms. Sometimes they were bundles of rags and newspapers, other times they were people.

Seeing his brother on the roof wasn’t so romantic to Charlie. He knew Joseph would be dead in a few years, or if he was lucky, in jail. The romance was behind Joseph. The open sky. Charlie couldn’t separate the sky from country music. He would go down to Tower Records in Manhattan with money he had saved form delivering groceries after Catholic school and look through the country section. All the old-time country was cheap on cassette, far cheaper than the new rap and soul stuff, which he shunned. His mother had a huge reggae and 60’s soul record collection, and all the new soul only bored him. Charlie loved pure country. He had them all. Hank Williams, Senior, not Junior. Patsy Cline. Jimmie Rodgers. Bill Monroe. Johnny Cash. George Jones and Tammy Wynette. Charlie could tolerate the strange glances and blatant snickers from the Tower employees. Most of them seemed like half-assed white kids pretending to be rock-and-roll stars anyway. He would buy one tape a week, and after a few years, Charlie knew as much about country as anyone from Nashville.

It was his habit to get his boombox at night and go up on the roof of his project. He played the music low and watched the stars come out and move away. The bullshit stars of the city, Charlie thought. Once, his CYO group had gone on a white-water rafting trip to Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, and Charlie had seen the stars in the country. They were so much brighter. He thought of his father’s words. And the music was sad and wise, like he had been. City stars had too much competition with the neon and skyscrapers down south in Manhattan. After awhile, Charlie would sing along and found that he had a strong voice. He realized that by hiccupping and moaning, he could do a pretty good country voice. Sometimes neighbors would come up while he was there, and they thought he was odd, this quiet little boy making funny sounds to that whitey music no one listened to. But “odd” didn’t mean much to him when people were turning up dead and crazy all over the neighborhood.

Joseph was killed two years after entering the drug trade. His body was found in a few garbage bags under the Throggs Neck Bridge. Only his mother cried for him. He had only fallen prey to an occupational hazard, like a janitor slipping on a freshly mopped floor. Unfortunately, Charlie’s next brother, Jerome, thought this was heroic and fell in with the crew Joseph had run with. This time, Charlie’s mother didn’t even wait for the telltale signs of flashy new clothes and surliness. She went out of her way to make sure Charlie wouldn’t catch the disease his brothers had. It wasn’t easy. Putting him in a strict Catholic school on the Upper East Side was one thing. But Jerome driving around the neighborhood in a BMW with a mouthful of gold teeth, a cellphone, and a beautiful girl close by his side was another. By this time, Charlie’s mother was drained from her battles. Her face, which had once been smooth and well-angled, was now wrinkled and sullen. Although she was forty-two, she looked to be at least sixty. She was still tough and fought for Charlie with love and reason, but many nights found her slouching in her recliner after coming home from her receptionist job downtown at an advertising agency, sometimes too whipped to turn the television off. It would drone on all night, the cop show sirens teaming with the real ones on the street.

It didn’t matter to Charlie, because he thought Jerome was bullshit anyway. Jerome had no personality of his own -- anything Joseph did, he would do, too. He was mean and stupid, and worst of all, he loved rap music. His BMW had an enormous bank of bass speakers in place of the torn-out back seat, and the throb of his beat could be heard for blocks in the ghost-town night of the Bronx. Charlie couldn’t understand why a criminal in training wanted to draw so much attention to himself. He told Charlie that if he wasn’t making the money, then someone else would, and that someone else just might be a white man if no one else in the neighborhood were to step up and take the chance. Charlie couldn’t care if the dealer was white or black, or where the money went. It was all an excuse. The only nice thing Jerome had done for him was buy him an acoustic guitar for his sixteenth birthday. It was a beat-up old Gretsch with bluebirds painted on the face. After Jerome gave it to him, he disappeared from the neighborhood, and no one knew anything, especially the kids in his crew. If he was dead, his body was well hidden, and if he was alive, he was lost somewhere in the drug world, selling or buying. Charlie didn’t care.

He almost threw the guitar away. But he saw it was the key to something else. He especially liked the bluebirds perched on the f-holes. The guitar would have looked good in Hank Williams’ bony hands. Charlie got a cheap “Learn How to Play” song book with a singing cowboy on the front and started to teach himself a few chords.

At first, his fingers bled, and he realized that music, even simple country music, wasn’t as easy as it sounded. It took him months to learn how to string chords together, and even longer to play without looking at his fingers. When he graduated from Catholic school, his mother bought him a few months worth of lessons at the Learning Annex. By day, he would work in the mail room at his mother’s advertising agency, and a few nights every week, Charlie would sit in on a class with three other people. They were all white. They started with “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and worked their way up to "Moon River."

The white people were trying too hard to be friendly to him, but he let it go. He came to realize he was living in two worlds -- the neighborhood, and the white world. When he first went into the white world, through the Catholic school, it scared him. He’d sit in his seat looking straight ahead with his legs together. The wound-up spring look, trying to fit in by not standing out. He saw the look all the time when white people came up to Yankees games on the four train. Now that he worked, so much of his time was spent around white people that he no longer felt afraid. It was rare that white people felt comfortable around him, either alone or in a crowd of other black people. They either kissed his ass or treated him like he was invisible. Whenever the office manager reported something stolen or missing at work, there was always an uncomfortable silence when she mentioned it in front of the mailroom workers. No one had to say what everyone was thinking. Charlie couldn’t stand that silence. At least the students in his class shared something in common -- the guitar. He kept to that and became the best student in the class.

He drove his mother crazy with his constant practicing.

"Why you listen to country music all the time? You want to be white?"

Charlie would stop strumming for a moment.

"No, mom, I like being black. Why do white kids listen to rap music?"

"Because they want to be black."

Charlie laughed to himself and started strumming again.

"I just want to be myself."

"You crazy."

It was an opinion shared by everyone in the neighborhood. He wasn’t like Prince, a genius who walked around in ladies’ underwear and sang about sex and God, sometimes in the same song. This seemed more acceptable than a black country singer. Charlie lived for connections. He would take his mother’s old records and make up country-style arrangements for the songs. He did a knock-down version of “No Woman, No Cry,” a little slower, imagining the empty spaces in his arrangement where a good steel guitar solo would fit right in. His song list of country soul was endless. “What’s Going On.” “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long.” “Where Did Our Love Go?” It struck him as a tragedy that Hank Williams and Ray Charles never had a chance to know each other. It was an even greater tragedy that singers like Same Cooke and Otis Redding never played the Grand Ole Opry. Even if they had been booed off the stage, the gesture alone would have been enough. The only singer who resisted his arranging powers was James Brown. He once tried half-heartedly to do a quick, two-step version of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Bag,” but it came out sounding like The Village People doing a polka. The godfather of soul was too black and proud to be anything else. For this, Charlie bore him a minor grudge.

He slept with his guitar. The teacher in his class told him musicians sometimes did this because they loved their instrument so much, and it took the place of a woman. The guitar was even shaped like a woman, a fine one with a long neck and an hour-glass figure, the teacher said. Charlie asked if she had any legs, and everyone laughed. He was a virgin, and it made him feel good to be sleeping with something he loved, as if he were a kid again with his favorite stuffed dog. But the woman talk was nonsense.

Everyone in the neighborhood called him “Cowboy Charlie.” He wasn’t treated like a village idiot; he was too smart for that. But his gentle ways and white-boy musical tastes made people treat him like a strange, old eccentric. Even the drug dealers knew of Cowboy Charlie and his guitar, and they fell silent when he passed. Some people lived beyond boundaries, and Charlie felt like he was living outside the outsiders.

“That nigger be crazy,” was his whispered shadow.

“Word."

It was a good shadow to have. Anything for safety. Charlie was at a strange place in his life. His grades in Catholic school had been excellent, and it was expected he would be one of the few to make his way into the white world. But Charlie had seen his father try that. The only thing his father had ever wanted for him was a college education. For what, Charlie asked himself. So he could start at some low-level corporate job and take years to work his way up? It made no sense to Charlie. He didn’t want to live outside the law. And the law meant nothing to him. All he had was his music. He’d look at Charlie Pride’s picture on those old albums. It was embarrassing in a way. Charlie had one of those dated 70’s bubblehead afros. And it wasn’t funky, like The Sylvers had. It was clipped short, and he had big side burns, like Elvis. He was wearing bell bottoms and a denim jacket with rhinestone doves on the lapels. He almost looked like a white guy in black face.

Sometimes Charlie thought he was crazy for wanting what he wanted. It didn’t seem like much, to sing country songs. He had it, but he also knew that he hadn’t lived enough to pull it off. He was young, and the lesson of country was to get yourself tainted. Even in the Bronx, Charlie was untainted. It seemed like an all-or-nothing place. You ruined your life all the way, or you went straight. Country singers were fallen angels. Halfway between heaven and hell. Charlie looked around and saw the desolation. But it was only a back drop. It wasn’t inside him. In so many ways, he was only a child. There were real stars out there, and Charlie wasn’t seeing them. The prairie existed only on a TV set, his burned-out mother too tired to turn Bonanza off.

"That Hoss be one fat boy. Child, I’d hate to be that horse."

All the real things seemed to be on television, and the world around him was too much of a nightmare. The worst part was he felt safe in the Bronx. It was all too easy to go down to the music stores on 48th Street and look at the steel guitars in the window, knowing he could play one, if only he had the money. But they looked good on the other side of the window down in Manhattan, and he though of Nashville, and Memphis, and Austin, and all the other places his heart knew and his eyes had never seen.

Charlie wanted his life to be a country song.

**

Things slowed down in deep summer. The days could get crazy with their stifling heat and gushing fire hydrants, and the early hours of the night were filled with people on the street, sitting out in lawn chairs and drinking on the corner. Sometimes the salsa and rap music got so loud Charlie’s mother couldn’t even hear the TV on top volume. But late at night, Charlie found that things got nice and quiet. He came home from work around five most days and immediately fell asleep regardless of the noise, just so he could get up around one and feel that time. It was always on the roof, with his guitar, closing his eyes as he played and sang quietly, so that when he got on a stage, he wouldn’t have to look at his hands.

Most people never knew the night sky, he told himself. It was like they were in prison and couldn’t see it, even if they wanted to. The roof was about the only place he could have this time, and at least rise a little above the noisy street. It amazed him that hardly anyone else ever came up. Maybe they were afraid that the danger of the street reached up there, and no place was safe but their cramped apartments. The only thing that gave Charlie trouble was the tar on the roof stayed hot in the summer, even at one in the morning, and he had to lay a ratty old blanket down so he wouldn’t stick to the floor.

On one of those hot July nights with the wind blowing hard, Charlie laid down flat on the roof and started playing “Long Gone Lonesome Blues.” That was his favorite song. You had to do two things to sing that song right, Charlie thought, yodel and hurt. Or at least pretend you hurt. He was tired of pretending. After awhile, he stopped playing and listened to the wind. He thought of leaving the Bronx, and then he thought of his mother. She was getting old. Men were forever leaving her. She could sing a beautiful song, if only she had the urge to do anything but watch television. If it weren’t for her love, Charlie could be fooling himself in the drug world. Or stuck in a pine box, wearing a cheap suit and mortician’s lipstick. So long as she had the TV set, life would be all right.

The feeling swept over him like the night breeze. He knew he had to leave. Anything could happen. Maybe he’d get rich. Maybe he’d fall in love. Maybe he’d shoot a man in Reno just to watch him die. He wanted to die a lonesome death on a rainy country road, forsaken after selling his soul to the devil. Charlie felt himself tingling inside. One thing would be certain. He’d sleep under real stars. He’d make a deal at an empty crossroads in the middle of the night. He’d leave a woman behind, then write a song about it. The lost highway.

Charlie came downstairs. His mother had fallen asleep with the television on, a late-night Cheers rerun, so he turned it off. The set was getting old, and it took a few minutes to fade to black. When he was famous, he’d buy her one of those huge ones that took up an entire wall. He went into his room and packed his clothes in his mother’s old suit case. It surprised him how little he had -- a few pairs of pants, some t-shirts, one dress shirt, socks and underwear. His only real possessions were his tapes and his small boom box, and he couldn’t take those. After he packed, he sat down to write his mother a note. The words didn’t come easy. A note didn’t seem like enough, but if he waked her to talk, she’d only cry and try to talk him out of it. And she might have succeeded. Charlie felt like he had blood on his hands. He had to slip away.

The note said he was leaving to find his dream, which was to be a country music singer, and that if he couldn’t make it on his own, he’d be back. Whatever it took, he wrote, he’d find a way to send back money to help with his part of the rent, and he’d call her once he got set up. He decided the best place to shoot for was Nashville, where he could find any kind of job to get by then use his spare time to knock on doors and sing. In the letter it all sounded so easy, but he knew he was walking off the edge of the earth. But that was how he saw the Bronx, a square planet where people walked over the edge sometimes.

Charlie left the note on the arm of her recliner and touched her hand. He looked at her for a long time in the dark. Tears fell from his eyes, he wouldn’t call it crying, and his hands shook. Charlie didn’t think it would be this hard. His mother snored. A siren passed on the streets below. For once, he paid attention as it came down his street and sped away, as if it were calling for him to follow. He thought of his father, and Joseph and Jerome. His mother had told him that they had all fallen, and he was the only good one left. Charlie decided to forgive them. He made sure to close the door quietly as he left.

As he walked through the streets to the subway, his guitar on a rope around his back and shabby suit case in hand, Charlie felt himself crying hard. It was as if he was still on the roof and watching a shadow of himself walk the streets. He hated the Bronx, but it was home. Charlie always felt that beneath all the garbage, it was a beautiful place. A long time ago, when people first moved there, it must have looked like heaven. Farmland and rolling hills. In a way, the neighborhood had been his prairie. He felt alone at home, always on the outside, and now he wanted to be on the inside of something. He didn’t know how. It scared him. The street lights’ tired glow pulled at his heart. Charlie’s feet felt heavy on the ground. He realized that he could walk on broken glass, like an Indian could walk through dry leaves in the woods, and be as quiet as the wind.