101 Things to Do before You Die

Last week, there was one of those “go figure” stories in the papers. “Globe-trotting author” David Freeman, known for co-authoring the book 100 Things to Do Before You Die, died unexpectedly at the age of 47 after falling in his home and suffering a head injury. I haven’t read the book (“things to do before you die” books aren’t my bag), but I’d imagine it’s stock-full of travel tips to exotic places, running with the bulls in Pamplona, shit like that. Obviously, he missed an important one, not quite as exotic, and much more mundane: watch your step.

The story I saw in the New York Daily News has a picture of him: a burly fortysomething guy wearing shades, obviously in the desert with joshua trees visible behind him. It’s an odd picture: he looks like John Elway gone to seed, a strange half smile/grimace on his face. What really floored me was one line in the article: “David Freeman was born in California but moved to New York in 1986 to work for Grey Advertising.”

When I moved to New York in the fall of 1987, I landed a very short-lived stint with Grey Advertising that saw me getting laid off just after Christmas of the same year, which was a blessing in disguise as I hated the place. If I’m not mistaken, I worked for David Freeman for a few weeks. I might be mistaken. In my mind, I’m thinking “David Friedman” … but the above-noted newspaper fact is pretty close to my time frame. (Another obituary I found in an advertising trade publication confirms that he worked in advertising all the way up to his passing … it’s probably him.)


The picture in the paper looks nothing like the guy I remember: I remember a fastidious, well-dressed little guy who was the embodiment of yuppie ambition that ran rampant in the 1980s. James Spader could have nailed him in a movie. (I understand Spader’s a good bit beefier today, too.) The one similarity is blonde hair: it could be him, 20 years on. It looks like Freeman went to the desert on a vacation, had a wild peyote experience, saw things in a different light, and came out a new man: that sort of transformation.

If it is, hats off to him. While I don’t read books like that, I do respect the ability of any writer to come up with a concept like that, and not just sell it to an editor, but sell it to an audience who will pay money and time to scour the list and gather new and interesting vacation ideas. I wouldn’t have imagined the David Freeman I worked for one day authoring a travel book – then again, I didn’t know him that well. Seemed like a nice enough guy, was friendly. I think running into him was my first exposure to that sort of corporate ambition I’m now a lot more comfortable around, simply by attrition. I’m sure at the time I thought that quality was horrible, dishonest and shallow. I was fresh out of college, an English major, and really had no idea what working in an office implied or required. I was the one out of place -- not him.

What I remember more than David was our department head, a woman I’ll call Edna. Didn’t know it at the time, but one of those real scumbags you run into routinely in offices. I recall her pitching a fit because she couldn’t find the right color of carpet to have installed in her office, which filled her with existential angst that she’d take out on her underlings and coworkers by being bitchy and sarcastic. Came from a wealthy suburb in Westchester County, had a smarmy lawyer boyfriend, just someone launched into that way of life I want no part of. The kind of person who would push hard to ensure her wedding made it into the Sunday New York Times and take some perverse pride in that. You run into these people all the time in New York – they think they run New York, and, you know, they don’t run shit. But give them a title, an office and a background of privilege, and they sometimes start thinking weird, grandiose lies about themselves. No one liked her, which is the way of the world with people so transparent. This was Edna.

I’ve since learned that there are easy rules to follow in terms of getting along with people in an office. Simply stated, if you can talk to a person like he or she’s a human being, and not engage in some form of insincere role playing with the person, that’s someone you can obviously deal with and count on. Sounds easy enough? Man, if I had a dollar for every time I’ve dealt with some megalomaniac who makes that common humanity virtually impossible, who will wrap himself in a cloak of self importance and literally turn himself into a villain from a Charles Dickens novel, all for a few dollars more in his pocket … it happens a lot, especially the higher you travel on the corporate food chain.

On that first job fresh out of college, encountering people like this was a pretty sobering proposition. I really didn’t like it: thought I had left high school in the rear-view mirror. But have since learned that Corporate America is one big high school, complete with bullies and cliques and senseless rules. That, if you want the money, you have to figure out how to deal with, or spend a lot of time being miserable and unhappy with your lot in life. Just aint worth it. Granted, for decades now I’ve felt like I’ve been hanging onto this way of life by my fingertips – because I’m sane – but another reality is I’ve also learned how to deal with people even more fucked-up than Edna, which is to play along so long as you’re not under their direct control, and if that ever does transpire, simply figure a way out of the situation, which becomes obvious after awhile and vastly preferable to putting up with such nonsense. In that case, lady luck did it for me and sent me and a few dozen other people packing into the January snow. (I remember the HR woman weeping as she told me the news. Shit, I felt pretty good. I gave her some tissues and told her the truth, that this was perfectly OK with me! I gather she had to break the same news to other employees who had more to lose.) But I’ve since realized, you can just bide your time and find another job: it happens all the time, at least in New York. I shudder to think being stuck in such a situation, like a rural area or a job that pays so well it would be very hard to leave. But haven’t had that problem just yet.

Grey was a pretty stuffy place for an ad agency. Again, didn’t know this at that time, but would later find out working in a few other agencies. Since it was so large, it had all those byzantine rules and forms to fill out for everything, and I’ve found that any place that isolates upper management is generally a poorly run place. By that, I mean the guys who run the place will generally be on a certain floor, by themselves with their annoying executive assistants, and visiting them is like entering a gilded palace where one must bow and kneel, preferably avoiding eye contact, unless you, a mere mortal, want to burst into flames. I’ve worked in a few places where the guy or girl who ran the joint was right down the hall, and you could easily stop in and say hello if you had a problem: these places may have had other issues, but that sort of welcome informality wasn’t one of them.

Grey was one of those little fiefdoms in terms of power structures. The creative people would huddle in their offices on their floor, grumbling about the business-side people and such. In the past I’ve laid out my take on “creative” people in corporate environments: generally, a bad mix, unless the individual grasps he’s working in a business and not viewing the job as an unfortunate imposition on his wonderful talents and time spent as a sentient being on this planet. The business people were what they were, which I’d eventually find refreshing and honest, but, man, what a shock to a kid straight out of college! Many people went to college to learn how to be business people, but all I could think after that first experience was, nothing prepares you for the politics, personalities and bullshit of doing business, you can’t teach that, and you can only learn it by experiencing it. So, if you’re going to college, feel free to major in something creative that actually gives you pleasure and purpose in life, because you’ll have plenty of time later to be more rational and responsible. Unless you’re very lucky, or very rich, life will demand you be that way, or pay the price in prescription meds and such.

I’m going to embarrass myself here, but even more than that idiot department head, and the late David, and many other things about Grey (including more than a few very hot women … don’t know what it is about advertising and women, but there’s something in the water there …), I remember one thing very clearly. That makes me feel like a flaming asshole now, even though it was an innocent thing at the time. I may have done this two or three times. Can’t recall. But I dressed up like Kevin Rowland, the lead singer from Dexy’s Midnight Runners, as portrayed in their video “Come on Eileen.”

I feel like a fucking idiot now remembering this! But I thought that was a cool look (no one else did). I had a floppy old military hat that could be worn like a beret. And a pair of bib overalls. A t-shirt. A flannel shirt I wore over the whole thing. And brogans (work boots). Hey, it was an ad agency: people were supposed to dress flamboyantly (although most people rarely did, especially in a mortuary like Grey). I would never in a million years dress like that again in an office, or anywhere for that matter, but for some reason, at that time, I felt that need to do so. I remember one of the security guards in the cafeteria getting red-faced and telling me to go home and change, and I told him to make me. Security guard? Now, if they had a fashion guard, I’d have listened. Most people just took one look at me, grinned, and thought, “Ah, youth … glad I’m older now.” But, man, for obvious reasons, the memory of me being naïve and dumb enough to dress like that at work … I don’t know what I was thinking. But it happened, and, boy, do I remember it, like a rash on my penis or a broken heart.

I don’t want to leave you with that song in your head. So, in honor of David, and probably because he may have missed this city in his book, a song from the late Warren Zevon, "Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead." Really, sorry to hear of David’s passing, and no disrespect meant. If anything, I’m glad to see the guy did something cool in his life beyond the world of advertising. It's a good message to leave behind.

Westerberg High

I recall when seeing the movie Heathers in a Manhattan theater in 1989, aside from an odd incident with one audience member getting harangued and booted for smoking, the nod-and-wink “in” joke of naming the school in the movie Westerberg High. This was a not-so-subtle salute by screenwriter Daniel Walters to the legendarily under-performing 80s band, The Replacements, and lead singer Paul Westerberg.

You have to understand, The Replacements were my band in the 80s. Have never felt so closely aligned with a band, agreed with Westerberg completely in terms of his talent and style, loved their ambivalence towards success. Westerberg and The Replacements took the place of The Kinks in terms of that one band I could relate to on every level, and even better, they were happening while I was in my late teens/early 20s, a time when most people start fading out on music. It was perfect timing for me, the only time I’ve felt so in-step with a band.

When the band broke up a few years later, it didn’t bother me that much, because I knew Westerberg was the driving force, and that he would go on recording. What I didn’t know was that each album he put out would present a mildly troubling listening experience: his albums never lived up to his promise. I shouldn’t have been too shocked – looking back, I felt the same way towards his Replacements albums, save that the classic songs from those albums (like “Bastards of Young,” “I Will Dare” and “Never Mind”) were him hitting home runs, setting milestones for which he'll always be remembered. The good songs on his solo albums were doubles or triples for the most part. And there was just as much filler as ever. The high’s didn’t feel anywhere near as high.

I felt myself backing away from that previously tight bond with his band and their legacy. I wouldn’t call it shame – I’d call it growing up and recognizing that was one band indelibly tied into that late teen/early 20s sense of dislocation – the easy cynicism, the disdain at even the faintest hints of ambition or normalcy. I did an earlier post on that awkward time when I realized I no longer fit into thrift-store clothes, literally or figuratively, signified by the hard truth that there’s a broad gulf between ironically wearing a work shirt for an air-conditioner company with the name “Gus” stenciled on the left breast … and wearing the same shirt 10 years on, and people assuming your name is Gus, and that’s where you work. It’s the hammer of adulthood that comes down in one’s late 20s/early 30s, if not sooner.

The Replacements didn’t “fit” me anymore, surely not in that same, intense, passionate way I felt about them when we were in perfect lock-step circa 1986. And Westerberg solo albums did little to bridge that gap. I should note that I have all of them, and still buy everything the man does. He’s still good. I sat down a few months ago and put together a compilation of his solo material, which made me realize, sure, you cherry pick songs from each album, and he’s still got it. Just not in the same way. He grew up, too. Stopped drinking. Got married. Had a kid. A lot of his songs followed him along the path. One of my favorite songs of his is “It’s a Wonderful Lie,” a basic acoustic number in which he admits that he still gets by on those things, wonderful lies, and that he still feels as dislocated as ever from the music business, just something he does because he doesn’t know what else to do. Feeling that way at 40 is a lot different than feeling that way at 20. When you’re 40, you tap into feelings of failure and some sense of lost direction that you can’t possibly have at 20. The thing is, obviously, you’re not a failure – you’re doing what you should be doing. But when what you’re should be doing finds you in the same place you were in circa your 20s – still struggling – you sometimes feel like an asshole. In moments of clarity, you recognize that you should still keep moving, because that’s what you do. And other times … you just feel like a horse’s ass who never grew up properly.

I note all this, because I’m starting to have problems with Westerberg as a recording artist. Not necessarily him alone – his fan base is grating on me, too. As all fan bases do for recording artists. I can rarely stand to be around hard-core fans of anyone – these people tend to be nuts, and clearly never in any mental state to grasp or understand any sort of valid criticism of their favorite artist. Everything the guy does is gold, the best thing he’s ever done, so that his artistic life is a glowing yellow brick road of success, one gold brick after another, he never “lost it” or sold out in any sense. If the rest of the world hasn't recognized this, it only underlines their superior sense of taste that transcends all the dreck the masses eat like enormous shit sandwiches.

I’d bet Westerberg doesn’t see himself this way, but his fans sure do. They’re fanatics. I don’t like them. These weren’t the same people I’d attended numerous Replacements shows with in the 80s, where the object was drunken revelry and fun, a real wild night out. Not the fucking bizarre form of church his shows have turned into, where the assembled gather and shout every lyric to every song and gaze reverently at Westerberg, who always seems to play alone these days, whether it’s because money’s grown that tight, or he simply can’t stand playing with other musicians, I don’t know.

Part of the problem I have with him is his recordings, since abandoning the major-label system at the turn of the century, just seem to grow worse with every album in terms of production … because he records the whole album by himself in his basement. Sometimes this works to great effect on his more rocking songs, but his vocals almost always sound like shit, and I can’t help but think he’d be better served working with a solid producer and musicians he can get along with. As ever, each album has a few good-to-great songs – this never changes – but it feels like he’s losing the thread in terms of progressing in any sense as a recording artist. Whether he’s playing to himself in his basement, or this asshole breed of cult fanatics who worship his every move, I have no idea. But every time I hear another claustrophobic sounding album coming over the speakers, I can’t help but think something's off.

He just put out an album a few weeks ago called 49:00. You can’t buy it. For awhile, you could buy it – as one huge MP3 file from Amazon.com. But about two weeks after its release, in which it was selling like hotcakes probably due to good buzz and the cheap price (49 cents for the whole thing), the file was yanked from the site with no explanation, and still none from Westerberg. Although he has released a coda to the album, a song called “5:05” that represents the missing amount of time that would make the actual album 49 minutes long, and the song is a “fuck you” of sorts that fans have come to take as an explanation of why the 49:00 album was removed from Amazon. (One of the songs towards the end is a medley of various cover versions of 60s and 70s pop hits – the assumption being that he never got permission to use them, and was thus legally required to stop selling the file.)

Fucking whatever. Even before it was yanked … the album is a collection of demos. Some showing real promise, others the usual so-so material. You would not know this to judge by the fan reaction. Paul Westerberg just put out Exile on Main Street to judge by their estimation. He always puts out Exile on Main Street. That’s probably the main difference between me and current Westerberg fans. I realize, rightly, that he’s continually putting out Goat’s Head Soup: a much-maligned Rolling Stones album that actually has a few good songs, but isn’t one of their best offerings. Westerberg is like a baseball player who bats .260 and has a good glove on the field. He does all right … but he’s capable of doing a lot better. And rarely does.

None of which would bother me, save for a few things. Westerberg is closing in on 50. (“49” also represents his age.) These sort of bizarre head games he’s playing recently only serve to obscure and bury his career even more than it’s buried now. How buried is it? Four legendary Replacements albums were reissued earlier this year on the Rhino label with the full treatment: remastered and bonus tracks, nice packaging, a huge press push. (The final four are set to be reissued in September.) I don’t have the exact sales figures for those albums, but I’ve read in a few places that the total sales for all four albums is well under 30,000.

That’s what you call a radical failure – it was shocking for me to read that. And if The Replacements, i.e., Westerberg in his prime, can only generate sales like that now, it makes me wonder just how many albums Westerberg has been selling over the past few releases on indie labels. I’d wager it’s a case of diminishing returns all along the way. It doesn’t help that he created an alter-ego, Grandpaboy, under which he sometimes puts out material. The guy seems to be barely getting by using his own name … a side project isn’t such a good idea in that circumstance. (Besides which, the Grandpaboy material is not recognizably different from the material he releases under his own name.)

I gather no one is guiding his career at this point in his life. If Westerberg has a manager, he’s obviously telling the guy what to do, as opposed to the manager trying to guide him in a direction that will get the word out and make him more visible and relevant as a solo artist. The exact opposite seems to be happening. Westerberg, and The Replacements’ legacy by extension, is shrinking into cult status. An entire album of material disappears. Hey, whatever, fuck it. I’ve been hoping all along that Westerberg put out the album as a preview of songs he’s going to actually record and release properly, but I suspect this may not be the case, and that these tracks on 49:00 may just sink without a trace, now that they’re no longer commercially available, and whatever heat was generated by two weeks kicking ass on Amazon.com will surely dissipate in a hurry – it feels like it already has. There's been no hue-and-cry over the disappearing Westerberg album: no one gives a fuck.

In short, I don’t know what the guy is doing with his life. Again, at 20, this is some real cool shit to pull. Pushing 50? It just seems incredibly stupid to me. I don’t get it. I guess The Replacements’ original ethos, to be a bunch of fuck-ups at any and all costs, is something he might still believe in. Again, this shit just seems old, trite and wrong at this point in his life (and mine), especially when all along with his solo material, you could hear the wheels clicking in Westerberg’s head as he aged, the understanding of who he was, that he was good, and that life was moving along, and he was moving with it. The antics of the past month or two have me thinking he’s going through some bizarre mid-life crisis which will only serve to bury his name even deeper in the recording industry, the one place where he has fans all over the place willing to give him a chance that he rarely takes.

What especially grates on me is his fans seems to view this regrettable scenario as “cool.” Fucking A. When I see people my age and older fucking up in life, I don’t pat them on the back and tell them they’re cool. I tell them they’re fucking up. Sorry to be so coarse, but I’ve seen enough people throw their lives away over stupid teenage obsessions they never grow out of that I no longer humor that sort of bullshit. If there’s one ugly, bizarre form of cancer I see flourishing in our society, it’s the inability and/or refusal of people to grow up. I see it in myself in small ways – believe me, nowhere near as badly as I see it in millions of other people. Who never learned how to save or spend money. Or be responsible in any sense. Or stop getting stoned and drunk so much. Or take care of themselves. Or just basically give a shit about other people.

I get the feeling a lot of Westerberg’s fans are locked-in emotionally at 19, that same place I was when I was a huge fan of the band, and this sort of senseless, self-destructive stuff Westerberg pulls occasionally in his solo career is, again, still somehow “cool” to them. I give up. Not on Westerberg himself – I’ll never give up on him, and I’ll never forget how much the guy’s work has touched me. But I give up on trying to figure out what in the hell he’s trying to do with his life, and why so many people who supposedly enjoy his work seem to have their heads implanted so firmly in their own asses.

The truth isn’t that he’s some legendary recording artist routinely tossing off masterpieces that the rest of the world, sadly, seems immune to, poor lost souls. The truth is he’s a deeply talented artist who must be surrounded by yes-men and assholes who can’t tell him the truth, that he’s slowly burying himself in irrelevancy by making wrong choices in his career, putting out too much sub-standard material and isolating himself as a recording artist. Again, I can see the roots of that, way back in the 80s, when that attitude was cool, and served a recognizable purpose. Those days are gone, for all of us past a certain age, and I can only hope the guys snaps out of this stage he’s in, whatever it is, wherever it’s going. Purposely burying an entire album seems like commercial suicide to me – then again, putting out demos in the first place and calling it an album – if that’s what he’s doing (no one seems to know, and he’s apparently not talking) - didn't seem like such a bright idea either.

As a coda, and an example of why Westerberg is grating on me, here’s my favorite track from 49:00, “Goodnight Sweet Prince” – an astonishing song about the passing of his father. Which sounds like a rough demo, and has another song cut into it towards the end, like an eight-track tape bleeding into another track. Cool? If you think that sort of forced sloppiness is cool, I think you’re an asshole. Westerberg, wake up! Record great songs like this the way they should be. Stop playing games. We're not the fuck-ups we pretended to be way back when.

The Flop House

My near-decade in the Bronx, spanning the fall of 1987 through the spring of 1997, was spent in a boarding house. I recall while working in advertising in the early 90s, one of the guys in the office who knew my set-up, asking me about my life up there, with the introductory question: “So, how are things going back at the flop house?”

I’m not even sure how much boarding houses even exist now, but that was the image of many of them: big old mansions that had seen better days, an elderly owner who rented out rooms to drunks, traveling workmen, shady characters who paid in cash and lurked in shadows. The guys at work could have thought whatever they wanted. My rent, at first was $180/month. By the time I left, after living about three years in the largest room, was $320/month. I was saving money there hand over fist. My last two years there, I was making over $50K a year … do the math on how much money I was banking.

(Of course, I’d burn through nearly all of it a few years later when I ditched the ragged corporate job I was at and took an entire summer off to get my head on straight. Money flies out the door when your rent goes from $320 to $640/month plus utilities. It’s just now that I’m starting to surpass the amount of money I had saved up by the spring of 1997, which is a good feeling.)

That boarding house was hardly a flop house by traditional standards. It was run by Eddie, a Puerto Rican guy in his mid-30s at the time who had lived in one of the rooms himself and bought the house from the old Irish woman who had owned it before him. He lived there on the ground floor with his sister and son, gather he was divorced although I never saw his ex-wife. He had two floors of rooms above him he rented out, four on the second floor, two on the top, bathroom on each floor, a kitchen on the top.

You’d be surprised how little a kitchen and bathroom mean to you when you live in a situation like that. I’m sure a kid in a dorm room or sharing with roommates could tell you the same. That seemed to be the sticking point with people when I told them how I was living: but you don’t have your own bathroom and kitchen. Well, you take a few minute to shit every day, a few to shower, and probably no more than half an hour in a kitchen, unless you’re into cooking. It wasn’t that big a deal.

The house was high on a hill overlooking the Harlem River and northern tip of Manhattan, of which there was a great view from the kitchen window. Eddie also had a backyard, although we never used it as it had fallen into a sort of storage area for various tools Eddie used for his job working for the parks. That part of the Bronx, the northern part of Sedgwick Avenue, was once a ritzy Jewish neighborhood in the 20s and 30s, mansions and apartment buildings, that had fallen into disrepair over the years, particularly after the white flight from the Bronx of the 60s and 70s. Physically speaking, the lay of the land in that area was beautiful: rolling hills, wide streets, a lot of vegetation. It grated on me to see it covered in graffiti and junk, just a real negative sign of what was allowed to go on there. Broken glass and dogshit was the norm, and through the early 90s, crack vials were all over the sidewalks. They were harder to see, but you’d often hear them crunch under your feet as you walked.

Despite not being a flop house, the boarding house had its fair share of characters. There was Mikey, who lived in the big room upstairs, a Dominican cab driver with puffy eyes and a butterfly tattooed on his chest. You could see the tattoo because he’d often walk around in a red silk bathrobe opened just enough to show it off. I was never quite sure what Mikey’s story was, but he seemed reasonably responsible and had a slew of girlfriends he worked his way through before moving out.

Next door to him was Manny, who I wrote about years ago in this Leisuresuit.net piece. Manny Upstairs. Old Irish guy working for decades in various subway token booths. (For those who can’t recall, this used to be a very dangerous job, with a very bad spate of incidents of token-booth workers either being set on fire or shot in various robbery attempts. This sort of brazen crap hasn’t happened in a very long time in NYC, or at least I haven’t been aware.) As the story referenced notes, Manny was prone to drinking too much and becoming an oddly-annoying drunk as opposed to abusive and weird. A gentle, old soul who valued his privacy and seemed, to me at least, to be pretty happy with his life despite any number of negative readings one might be tempted to apply to him. I learned a lot from Manny about personal happiness: that it’s yours to define, not anyone else’s. And if someone’s trying to define yours for you … that’s someone who needs a new hobby. I’ll always remember him striding down the sidewalk early in the morning as the sun rose, coming off his graveyard shift in some godforsaken subway station in the Bronx, smiling, whistling, carrying a copy of The Daily News and tipping his cap, an old white guy walking alone without fear in a place where no one would have expected it.

Annie lived across the hall from me for a long time, a woman from Trinidad who was milking her student VISA for as long as possible, doing nanny work, and hoping to find a real job that would allow her to stay (she eventually did) and bring her son over. We had a minor fling – she looked a bit like the singer Sade – but probably thought better of it since her situation was up in the air. A good person – kind-hearted, friendly, from what I’ve gathered a very Caribbean vibe about her in a good way.

The room next to me at first was a young white guy who smoked a few packs a day: I had to have Eddie put on an extra wood barrier through a boarded-up space between our apartments that cigarette smoke would sometimes creep through. Not a bad guy, save for the incessant cancer haze around him. Thankfully, he simply disappeared one day. His girlfriend somehow got my phone number and called me a few weeks later, asking if I knew what had happened to him, and I surely didn’t. Either he met with a bad fate, which should have produced a body, or he just skipped out on his life, maybe the one guy in the place who had the true boarding house spirit.

He was replaced by an old guy who wandered everywhere during daylight hours. Another salty old Irishman like Manny, save he never drank and was living on some sort of military pension. I’d occasionally see him walking miles from the house in places like Inwood and parts of Harlem, where I’d be riding my bike. Like most old people, and the sane, he avoided sundown in the Bronx like a Transylvanian villager, making sure he was safe at home by this time. I generally found it a good idea to get home before 10 or 11 at night. At which time, the Bronx became populated with kids who were either up to no good or simply should have had better parents. The sundown rule wasn’t a bad one to follow.

A few strays passed through the house, too. Like the Indian cab driver who seemed like a nice enough guy, but when Eddie kicked him out due to his inability to make rent for a few months, he found three pots filled with rotting/decaying rice under his bed that were just about to enter “where’s the corpse” levels of odor emission.

The oddest by far was a white guy from Boston in his 20s who hit New York to make it big as a comedian. He looked and acted a lot like Keith Moon, a basically friendly person, but he seemed desperately irresponsible. Much like a real rock star, he had a staggeringly beautiful, ethereal girlfriend who visited him every other week, generally to fight tempestuously and make-up via long-distance phone calls. When I say fight, I mean to the point of him bolting off an exiting subway train and leaving his Snow White-style girlfriend to fend for herself in terms of finding her way back to the house, which was a cruel, stupid thing to do. Don’t think this guy realized how foul the Bronx can get circa two in the morning for someone lost, especially a white girl who looked like she just walked off the screen of an animated Disney flick. I recall him being despondent one night as he listened to Al Green’s version of “Unchained Melody” on the radio. Like most comedians, the guy was morose when not engaged in the act of being funny. He ended up living in the back cab of his pick-up truck for a few weeks on the lonely, crack-whore stretch of highway behind the house, which was another dumb/dangerous thing to do. I was grateful when I was saw his pick-up finally gone a few weeks later.

I look back on those years as one big learning experience. I learned a lot about race relations, the kind of things you can’t learn until you’ve lived as a minority in a given place. Most white people won’t ever forfeit their unspoken/unacknowledged "safety in numbers" vibe and do that – I did it simply by chance. Bragged about it at the time, but I can see now that you peel away the layers, and it’s mostly learning how to read people and situations and respond accordingly, whatever the racial set-up, often with race used as a mask to inspire or hide fear. And living smartly, i.e., recognizing opportunities for stupidity and avoiding them. (And recognizing street trash, who are legion and every color of the rainbow in the 718s of New York, and avoiding them as well.) Call it “street smarts” – you can’t live that long in a place like the Bronx without developing them. (I see white folks new to Astoria all the time who don't have an ounce of street sense and make me cringe with their stupidity, despite the college degrees.) After awhile the “cool” factor of being a solitary white face in a rough inner-city neighborhood wore thin. I’d say that was by about year 5. At which time, I was still saving money hand over fist. It took another five years or so to finally unhinge myself from the desperately cheap rent and realize I wasn' t learning anything worthwhile and had to go.

But I never tired of the boarding house, just the draggy neighborhood around it. I tell myself all the time, yeah, let’s go back, some weekend morning early, before everyone gets up, like it was for my morning runs when I’d do a few miles around the neighboring reservoir and hardly see anybody along the way. But I’ve only been back once since then, and that was within the first year of leaving. I just have no urge to go back there. Which is odd, because much like my college years, there are certain large chunks of my life that are growing increasingly vague in memory because I no longer have a physical connection to the place. With the Bronx, we’re talking almost a decade, most of my 20s, into my 30s.

But I can tell you something about New York, at least for expatriate rural Americans: you rarely get that nostalgic sense of home for neighborhoods you’ve lived in, probably because they’re always such a mixed bag of positives and negatives. I also can’t stand being given the redneck vibe from the locals when I come from a place that blows their moronic faux redneck vibes out of the water in terms of bullshit territoriality. Tom Waits has a song called “Anywhere I Lay My Head” that pretty much sums up the feeling of calling New York “home.” In a lot of ways, it just will never be. Not a bad thing, just different, and takes some getting used to, if you ever do.

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.