Kiss Off

The summer of '83. I drove around all summer just reeling with how in love I was with Leslie. Leslie, who I barely knew. I met her through my friend Darren who was dating her younger sister Marion. She was just this spectral angel flapping in the background whenever I'd wrangle myself a trip over to their house with Darren, hoping to see her. But she was older, and I was a shorts-wearing chubby kid with glasses and homemade Meat Puppets shirts. But she had this wild black hair that defied gravity and curled and swayed in all manner of acrobatics, just begging to be grabbed and swirled in sweaty hands and wet tongues. She was always in a short black mini-skirt and a homemade white t-shirt with illegible hieroglyphics etched into the cotton with thin Sharpie points.

            I listened to that first Violent Femmes record on repeat all that summer with Lou Reed's Berlin on the opposite side of the cassette. The Violent Femmes perfectly put into words what I felt about Leslie. "Why can't I get just one fuck? Guess it's got somethin' to do with luck." The cassette would flip every 45 minutes or so, and I'd just drive every day after a hot summer job drinking beer and listening. My brown Chevette gliding through Maryland country roads, growing darker and drunker before sliding home to start all over again. These nights were most powerful when I was alone and not afraid to cry or just feel anything out loud. Driving down the dark country, tree-canopied back roads, tears ran down my face with how real it all felt and how distant I was from her. But I knew. I knew I'd get her.

           I couldn't imagine any other future which didn't involve me in her bed and telling her I loved her, as awkward and pathetic a lover as I was at that age. She once asked me, "why are so so timid? Just fuck me!" It cut like a knife. It ultimately led to the almost sex-offender style of connection I've forged over the years; it hit so hard.

        These big strong feelings were uncaged, which allowed me to fall asleep to fantasies of sex and heroin and love. By my teenage years, I'd become obsessed with heroin. I'd never seen it, but I knew it was the magic substance that led everyone I looked up to create the things that yanked at my heart. Lou reed and Keith Richards, and Nick Cave. Surely heroin was the secret. And so many purloined painkillers from my parent's medicine cabinets clued me in on just what substance filled that God-shaped hole in me. Opiates. Narcotics. Dope. Falling in love with Leslie. This record changed my world.

          I thought of only Leslie and my lack of Leslie. The first VF record was perfect for this, even after the 1000th time. This record wrapped around me like a bandage and like armor. This record. This record became everything I dreamed about Leslie and where it might take us. And here we were in some backwoods Maryland farmland dreaming of anything other than what was offered us and hardly the same things as each other hoped for. But we got there. Somehow we would up sitting on the roof of my Chevette in the dark parking lot behind Hickory elementary school, and we kissed, and other things happened, and she started to cry. I disintegrated. I can't remember what she said, but it pulled me together, and we went and forged ahead like a team of two against the world. At least, that's how I imagined it.

       Four years later, and a million playings of that first Vilionet Femmes record, I graduated college with two fruitless degrees and Leslie, and I moved to Hollywood, and whole new worlds of wonder and pain awaited us. Life dispensed with country roads and the simple power of a song like this. We were free to fuck like we wanted and to feel things we'd only dreamed about. If on;y we'd dreamed about the same things.

Welcome to the Jungle

Leslie flew out while I drove with Paul, his little brother, and one of his friends. We had all of the stuff that five people couldn't stand to leave behind. Jammed into my Chevette and Leslie's Ford Fiesta, we were a little laughing circus. The Chevette had the better stereo, and that was important, so we took turns and explored. There was a drunken night kissing strippers at a club outside Parris Island surrounded by Marines. At some point, we followed Birmingham, Alabama bikers to some shack in the woods. That's all I remember. I guess we wanted drugs. Or sex. Or something we'd only wondered about. It was always about drugs for me. It took us a week to drive straight across. Later I'd make it from Boston to Echo park in less than two days, but in '87, we were still kids and mesmerized by each new state sign. 

Leslie got there in hours and swung into action, based from her big sister Lynn's apartment off 3rd somewhere around Western. Lynn was the first of us to make the giant leap from horse farms and humidity to vague celebrity proximity. She'd fallen in love with Nigel, who was a big deal. A director of music videos when music videos meant everything. An Englishman and a truly good guy with an unfortunate last name.

I remember approaching LA on the 10 and sorta recognizing various exit signs. I kept telling Paul that we were so close for what seemed like hours. It took forever; the 10 never ended. The sun was setting into that beautiful tie-dyed haze that only smog can produce. We drove straight into the heart of it. God forbid we ever end pollution. Such a sight.

We had an address to find. Leslie was already in our new apartment in the Via Carlotta, right across from the Scientology mansion on Franklin. Only took her 4 days. We landed and fell about the place. A storied building from the 20s with floors and floors of aging fat grandmothers who all knew Andy Warhol, gay guys wanting to be painters and painters wishing to be anyone else. And a beautiful interior courtyard that our studio apartment opened into. All of us drinking and laughing and waiting to slay our dragons.

I think it was a Tuesday. Maybe not, but I know that whatever day was next was my first day on a film set. 

I was supposed to get a job as a newly graduated electrical engineer with a backup physics degree. I was supposed to waltz into TRW or Hughes and pretend this is what I wanted to do. Just make my dad proud. We weren't so close then. Not like we'd become before he left. Calamity brought us together, but that was a year away.

Leslie told me we had jobs for the next day. She would be doing craft service on Nigel's next video, and I would be a PA. That was it. I had no idea what any of that meant, but I swallowed the tab and barged right into it. And on this second day in LA, I found myself standing on scaffolding in the Park Plaza ballroom, waving a spotlight onto the top-hatted guitarist of a band I'd never heard of. At some point in the next year, I'd fall asleep with this character in an unlocked car in the parking lot of a 24-hour shoot. And we'd never say a word to each other. Such culture shock. Such exhilaration. And it just kept going. We all found our way to working for what seemed like a small fortune. 75 dollars for prep days. 100 for shoot days. Rent was 400. Heroin was yet to be found. Life was weird and idyllic. Leslie made potato salad, and I made egg rolls. And we fucked on the roof outside of that odd little hut that we never knew if anyone lived in.

About a week in, I got an interview at TRW. I remember going and just feeling like a fraud. Who would want to hire me? I seemed to remember nothing from five years of college. I sat in that cubicle fielding questions from some guy in a suit like a dog being punished. I made a choice. I told the next guy calling for another interview that I was sick and never returned. I was free. 

Fool For You

Geoff Nightingale was as beautiful as he was catastrophic. Beautifully catastrophic. He was one of the other PAs that formed our little tribe in those early Propaganda Films Days. When we were still in that little house on La Brea. Geoff rode some sort of huge European motorcycle; I never knew about those things, but it seemed like he lived on and almost in the bike. He was English and had what sounded to a kid from Maryland to be a classic cockney accent. He was the first person I ever knew to refer to drugs as "gear." He said he was part gypsy in a way that you just knew didn't impress him much. It was just part of him.

At some point in that first year in LA, I got a call to work on a video that was shooting in Las Vegas. And with Geoff, no less. I looked up to him. He was easily the most mesmerizing, coolest guy I had become friends with in a place where virtually everyone was some unhinged character. Christ, what a difference a few days can make,

So, Geoff had me pick him up, and we drove to the producer's apartment. I can't remember who it was, but she lived on Willoughby, and our first job was to get some coke for her and ourselves. This thing seemed to be in full gear. This was not how these things usually went. It was dark. We weren't at the office. We weren't waiting for petty cash. We were moving. I remember going home at some point and grabbing some t-shirts while telling Leslie what was happening. She knew the drill. We kissed goodbye. All giddy and excited, we got the gear somewhere, and then we were off to meet a couple who was renting us their car for the shoot. Evidently, they had a pristine early 70s Cadillac that we would be taking to Las Vegas. At first, it was just Geoff and I and a bunch of coke in this incredible Cadillac convertible. God, if they only knew. Well, I suppose they did because they suddenly decided to drive the car themselves with the two of us in the backseat. This was definitely getting weird.

Turns out you can sneak a lot of cocaine into yourself in the darkened backseat of a car with a slightly worried middle-aged couple up front. Geoff charmed them, and we took turns bending over "to get something out of our bag." But Vegas is a long drive from LA and cocaine is not really the best drug for this sorta trip. Cocaine is best served with some sort of rounding agent, I always felt. Alcohol, at least, and preferably some kind of opiate. We were two teeth-gnashing,  miserable bastards in that back seat trying to recapture the initial promise of the night with more and more sneaky cocaine as we hurdled slowly and safely through the desert. Geoff and I were in desperate need of a drink and more coke.

Las Vegas is, at best, a blur. It's some overheated and silly-shaped paragon of plastic and faux awe. I think we were in the Aladdin. The couple valeted the car and gave us control, and off they went, their rides home already sorted. We'd take care of their baby. The Aladin rang some bell. Some Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr entanglements thrilled me. I was here! Let's go, Geoff. Let's let this place swallow us whole.

I wish I had more concrete memories of the next few days. I remember chasing Geoff around after wrap as he had all the coke, and every girl in the casino was trailing after him. I gave up and drank and probably ordered porn. I remember watching David Johanson sing this abysmal song to Beatrice Dalle in a pool room and wanting to take her all away from there. Just grab her and free her from this nonsense. I'd love her until the end of the world. And a "Cut!" sent everyone back to bothered, hammered, annoyance. I watched. I felt so young. I felt like a ten-year-old in Bel Air, MD, trying to learn how to do a 360 on my skateboard on the day Elvis died. I remember that. I don't know why that came to me, but the paneling of this Vegas low-rent hustler bar reminded me of my homemade skateboard and Trucker trucks and orange, OJay wheels.

The shoot just devolved into drunken guerilla shots wherever we could get them. I just watched and hoped for drugs. The Cadillac was getting beat up. The crew was near mutiny. Geoff seemed to have found his her and still just wanted to be home. This was turning to shit. David Johanson. David Johanson! He was flailing about with his two weirdly large friends/executive producers in a constant search for Bushmills. At one point in an exhausted and dry desert afternoon, Philly pulled me into the production trailer. His name wasn't Philly, but that's what he is in my memory. A 6-foot plus guy in a black suit well over 300 lbs. "Mike," he says, "Mike, there's a bottle of Bushmills in the van under the back seat. Get that for me, will ya?" As I stood on that springy RV step, I said, "Alright," and slumped over through the sun and the heat and the ridiculousness of this whole scene towards the light blue Galpin van. Always a rented Galpin van. I fairly pushed lackeys and extras aside as I climbed in to get the bottle. I emerged and marched over, thinking about everything/anything but this and opened the door into the RV with this fifth of Bushmills in my fist. "Jesus, Mike! You're as fuckin' subtle as clubfoot!" Philly barked. Who knew he didn't hold all the cards? Who the hell was he trying to keep secrets from? Pffft. I handed it to him and winked at Buster. We smiled together. I remember that. We both knew Philly was too much, but we loved him.

All along, I kept trying to stand near Beatrice. I'd seen her movie "Betty Blue" with Leslie a year or so before and had been transfixed. I couldn't tell you now what it was about, but I know it formed my ideal of what love was meant to be. I've always gravitated toward the Borderline Personality Disorder level of passion and the Us against the world depth of love I saw in that movie. All I ever wanted was intense soul-stopping love. Just love someone until all the wheels fall off and the world collapses. Die in the flames of obsession and passion. And so I tried to stand near her. She was made of sweat and skin and beautiful black hair and perfect lips.

As all things do, this thing ended. It ground to a halt. The Cadillac was fucked. It barely moved. There was very little coke around. Philly had had it. Geoff was gone.

Someone better than me told me to drive Beatrice to the airport. She was done. Take her to McCarran.

Be still my beating heart.

We hopped into the Galpin van, and she was all smiles and erotically charged French accent. God! To have just tasted her then. She was still wearing that sweaty tank top she wore throughout the video. Maybe that's where that fetish comes from. Maybe it's from her! She pronounced my name like "Meechelle." Fuck! You should be so lucky at this age. She asked if we could stop at a shop so she could buy some underwear. Underwear! In a fever dream we went somewhere, and I remember giggling as she chose panties and hurriedly bought them, doing that French cheek kiss deal on the girl behind the counter.

Not so long later, we parked in front of McCarran. I walked her in. I remember how bubbly and happy she was. Like she'd just seen the circus. She stopped and spun around. She gave me something hidden in her bag. She looked down to find it and pulled it out. It was a garish lollipop in the shape of kissing lips. "Goodbye, Meechelle!" I love you!" No lousy French cheek deal here. And she stood on her toes to kiss me goodbye on my mouth. And I watched her walk away and fantasized about a million lifetimes with her.

It was over. I went back to the Aladdin and looked for drugs or Geoff or petty cash. I fucked around the casino for awhile looking and slowly went to my room. I called production. Nothing. I fell asleep.

I woke to a dry miserable Las Vegas afternoon, hungover and bewildered. No one was around. I called and called. Geoff was long gone. Beatrice was in France. Philly and Buster were likely fucking 500-dollar whores in Santa Monica. I was in some shitty Sinatra-panelled room in the Aladdin. Finally, I found someone in production who told me I had to drive the Cadillac back to LA.

This car was ruined. It banged and clanked like a metronome. It felt like there was a signpost caught up in the axles just slamming and slamming to some hypnotic tone that I fell into. I hallucinated all the way home. I stopped every 15 minutes to look around and touch things that were real. I was alone. This car was fucked. I told myself to let production take it back to the couple. I was going to Propaganda and parking it. I was through with this.

But you know what? I'd kissed Betty Blue. I won, you motherfuckers. I won!

Union Street

It looked like some sort of psychedelic pile of laundry, this album cover I held in my hands in the one record store in State College, PA. I was months away from graduating and simply transfixed by this album cover. I'd taken to buying records based purely on the cover art. I'd found 100 Flowers, DNA, and, as it happened that day Thelonius Monster. That was the moment two very disparate paths crossed and slowly lurched forward to their inevitable end.

Leslie and I made it through the end of college and the move to the Via Carlotta. We were working on music videos. Me charging walkies and picking up Kino Flos and Leslie filling her car with mindless snacks and cigarettes. Back then, craft service had cigarettes on offer. Singles or packs, although the packs were kept under the table and reserved for special people. Sometimes I was special. We were civilized then. I'd visit Leslie on whatever set she was working on and eat lunch with her. The crews were usually the same people I'd work with on my jobs. There seemed to be a handful of self-contained crew universes all centered around various production companies. You'd see the same people a lot. It was nice. There was much less a sense of clear hierarchy than what was very apparent on the commercials we would all eventually graduate to. Everyone drank from the same cooler of wrap beer.

We'd created a cool little life in that courtyard apartment on Franklin. Paul and his little herd found a place down near Gower and Sunset. It was a glorious cacophony of empty beer cans and tinny heavy metal. I'd started playing music again, that's its own story, but it brought new characters into the mix. There was Aaron and Johnny, respective guitarist and drummer for the band, pulled from recycler ads. Remember finding bandmates that way? The slow catastrophe hadn't begun yet. But I was certainly looking for it.

Once I started as a PA, I had to get a car. I know I've written that I drove to LA in my brown Chevette, but that memory was flawed. I'd actually sold that to my friend Drew the day I left college for the last time. I sold it for a hundred bucks. I felt horrible about it. I get attached to things, and I imbue them with human qualities. And these qualities are always the best or at least the saddest of the human condition. When these things go, I feel like I've betrayed them. I'm that way with all kinds of stuff. When I empty a bag of, say, frozen peas I have to make sure every single pea is out of the bag. The idea that I would break up this family and that one pea might find himself alone in a crumpled plastic bag is intolerable to me. I do this without fail with almost everything I come in contact with. I've gotten good at it. I cause as little inanimate suffering as I can. So, I felt sad that Id abandoned the Chevette, but I knew Drew would be kind to it, so I left State College with a somewhat lighter heart.

I went to the recycler again to find a car to buy. I needed one quick, and I think we had around a grand or so to spend on it. I found an ad for a yellow Toyota Tercel. It seemed like it would do just fine, so Leslie and I went to check it out. The apartment was somewhere around Western and Santa Monica, I think. Just a little apartment in a typical sunny little LA apartment building. The couple who was selling it was a young Asian couple. I think they may have been Thai. I remember thinking that at the time because the guy's last name seemed to be a very long series of all consonants with one or two vowels thrown in seemingly randomly. Lots of Ss and Ws and Ks wrapped around an A or two. In any case, they were a nice couple and had what I still consider one of the oddest and heartbreakingly innocent décor choices installed perfectly in the apartment. The main room was a fairly large living room which shifted into a dining area before a doorway leading into the kitchen. The walls of the space had picture railing wrapped around the entire perimeter and along a support beam deal that bisected the ceiling. Just enough room to hang framed 8 x 10 photographs above the rail. And so they had. The entire apartment, or what we could see of it, had perfectly spaced photographs of various desserts hung every 6 inches or so. That is to say, they had an awful lot of pictures of food on their walls, like any and all kinds of sweets. Cookbook-level photos of pieces of cake, ice cream sundaes, pies, and more, all beautifully shot and lovingly hung. And there wasn't a single detectable note of irony in any of it. There was nothing else odd or in any way different about the rest of the apartment. Just these pics of dessert. They just loved desserts, and these images made them happy and warm where they lived. At least, that's what I told myself. I didn't think to ask them about it at the time. Leslie and I just left after buying the car and immediately said, "What was up with the ice cream stuff?" I've thought about those two and their desert art so often over the years. It's become a regret that I didn't say anything to them about it. Because even then, despite how odd it seemed, it also felt so pure. I wish I'd told them how beautiful they were for this and how much I'd hold them in my heart forever. Which I have. The ice cream couple and the little yellow Toyota they sold me. I hope they are forever surrounded by the things they love.

Working as a production assistant in LA during the end of the 80s meant one thing. The Thomas Guide. The Thomas Guide was this huge, unwieldy spiral-bound book of the map of LA. Well, maybe it wasn't so unwieldy as it seemed pretty easy to use, but it was definitely huge. It lived in the backseat passenger floor in my little car, so it was easy to reach back and grab when I needed to figure out how to get to Castex, Or Roger George or that garage in the valley where we got the first Xenon lights from. Xenotech? Was that the name of that dude's business? In any case, you couldn't be a PA without one. Or at least you'd be a very shitty one. You could tell where anyone who mainly drove for a living in LA worked by seeing what pages were tattered and hanging on by a scrap. There are certain chunks of the Valley and Hollywood that will forever be my sense of what this city actually is based on that first year and where the Thomas Guide led me.

I'd gone all-in on being a PA and playing music. I was no closer to becoming an electrical engineer than I am now. Five years of college were drifting off into the ether of this drug-addled rock star fantasy I was cultivating. A rockstar in a little yellow Tercel no less. We called the band Sleep, and we started working at it. My friend Rob who I played with at Penn State, somehow showed up in LA and just walked into the band. He just appeared, mumbling something about a chemistry doctorate at UCLA in his very, um, spectral way. Flat affect and all. But he could write a pop song!

And so there we were. Rehearsing, hanging out and drinking, occasional hits of acid at Butthole Surfer shows (the one where Rob got his head busted open by a flying folding chair and wanted us to take him to the ER. He was fine. He looked fine, at least. Kinda bloody, but with the intense noise of the Butthole surfers and the giggly LSD, his wound seemed sort of beautiful. Anyway, we stayed, and he was fine. Rub some dirt on it, the Little League baseball coach in me would say.) Leslie had moved on to Art Department and was working with Jose. She should have been there, to begin with. She's an amazing artist, and while Art Dept was hardly fine art, it was surely more creative than handing out Twizzlers and cigarettes. Eventually, I'll tell you about the shirts. The lyric shirts that pulled me into her orbit, to begin with. I was working a lot. Life was actually all but idyllic in a weird 24-year-old kind of way. This whole huge transition for all of us was happening. It was time for me to start fucking everything up.

I hadn't, in any way, lost the aspiration of becoming a heroin addict. I was in a band, so that checked out. I was in some slightly romantic city of debauchery, so there was that. I had a beautiful artist girlfriend. Check. What I didn't have was heroin. Everyone in my extended family was decidedly not at all interested in this drug, to put it mildly. The sway it had held over me since I first heard Lou Reed or The Stones or, the big one, Nick Cave, had bounced off everyone else like flies in our sleep. My idea of what heroin, or more succinctly, heroin addiction, would do for me was so wildly inane that it's almost embarrassing to tell. Almost, but not fully because it existed, And it was me. And it was true. I thought of heroin addiction as a means to a better life like Rob felt about his doctorate. Like someone might consider starting a family. Like a carpenter might consider the perfect hammer. I was so romantically delusional, but fuck, I was driven. And so, I set about to figure it out. Alone.

There was no hot goth girl connection anymore. I hadn't even remotely penetrated the music scene in any meaningful way, meaningful meaning finding other junkies to help me cop. I was just me, surrounded by friends and a family who assumed I was "living my best life." All the while wholly consumed by capturing that feeling again. That feeling that I felt when I snorted the "official dope" from New York that last week of college.

Look. To almost any sensible person, there's just no way to convey why a "feeling" brought on by a substance should be anything more than a selfish indulgence. And that heroin certainly is. People talk about self-medicating, and trauma and pain, and God knows I do too. It's my stock in trade now as a therapist, but at its core, for some, for me, it was something altogether more… or less. It just made me feel like someone else. Maybe that's the same thing, but it was so acute, this feeling of being relieved of being ME and somehow still just a slightly better version of ME. This is the feeling heroin gave me, and it gave me this feeling in fucking seconds and in a predictable way that never, ever failed short of getting burned and shooting a chunk of Tootsie Roll. Imagine doing something that, within 3.5 seconds, made you exactly the weight you wanted to be. Made you as precisely funny as you wanted to be. As talented in any field as you ever dreamed and as far away from loneliness as you'd ever imagine. Forget that none of it's real but imagine feeling in your heart that it all exists! Right! Now! And imagine that once it's available, only choosing NOT to feel any of these things is the only way to stop. Imagine having to truly choose this. This is what people don't get. And none of this is an excuse. I did all of this for purely selfish reasons. I found a way around discomfort. Demanding comfort in this world is selfish. But this is the mechanics of how junkies operate. Once we're in it and we glimpse this false but perfect version of ourselves, the very notion of walking away feels like dying. Actually physically dying. Scoff away, and I understand, but this is how screwed up this life is. Look, something must explain all this opiate addiction to you. And I was looking for any way into this life.

I was not thinking clearly.

I found a way in. It's not like there was some Eureka! moment or a long slow solving of the puzzle. I think it was just a matter of thinking about heroin a lot and listening to a lot of music. We had the turntable and the receiver I had in college. We bought new little speakers. The college ones were too big to bring. We bought cool little bookshelf speakers that sounded pretty good. We bought them at Circuit City. When we paid for them, we were told to pull around back, and they'd bring out the merchandise. They gave us two pairs. They made a mistake. When we got home and realized this, we were a bit flummoxed. What to do? All I remember is taking them back and being made to feel like a chump. By Circuit City. Well, where I was going, I'd need all the Karma I could muster.

At some point, the Thelonius Monster record wound up on the turntable. I liked a lot of this record. Not all of it, but overall I dug it. I was and am a big lyric guy, but for whatever reason, certain lyrics of this record hadn't pushed into me yet. And then I heard Union Street again. Like I had many times before. Bob Forest, the singer of the band, has a voice like a thin sheet of acetate on a windy, hot summer day. In the desert. God knows what that means, but it's a wholly unique voice, and I love it. In time that voice would just flat out tell me to grow the fuck up and stop getting high, but on that night, he sang Union Street, and I heard the lyrics. "Down on Union Street. That's where my Baby gets her Dope."

Hmmm. Union Street? Let's check out the Thomas Guide.

I remember looking down on a page that Union street bisected. In my little yellow car. All intent and investigational. Union street figured on multiple pages, so I started at the top and went south. I think It starts at 3rd street, but at least that's where I started. I drove south and just took in what was happening. Lots of low-rent apartment buildings, cars held together by duct tape and kids, so many kids running shirtless about the place. I was on to it.

Eventually, I hit the intersection of 6th and Union (later 6th and Bonnie Brae). There was a shopping plaza on the left. There was a "dentista" office. A mercado. I pulled in and went into the market to get a drink and look around. Very Mexican. More kids. Bright fluorescent lights. Meat. Mothers. Tattoos.

I walked out, and some teenage guy asked me, "Chiva?” "Dope?" I asked. "Chiva," he said a bit more emphatically. Christ, work with me here. "Heroin?” "Si! Chiva!".

It's hard to describe the feeling. The relief. The wonder. The excitement of maybe having found it.

"How much?"

"45 quarter"

I said ok and pulled out the cash that I had ready to go, and he looked down and spit a blue balloon from his mouth into his hand. I gave him money, and he gave me the balloon. That was that.

I'd paid 45 dollars for what was supposed to be a quarter gram of black tar heroin. I had no idea of the economics of this stuff yet. But I'd found it!

I got home and was alone. Leslie was working. I cut open the balloon to find a little ball of tar wrapped in a small piece of wax paper. It smelled like vinegar. I looked at it and considered the next step. I knew spoons were part of this deal, so I put some in a spoon with a few drops of water. I was careful to just pull a small piece away. I was always careful. I lit the stove and held the spoon over a low flame until the brown blob dissolved into the water. An amber bit of liquid slowly cooled in the round of the spoon. I could see it cool. I was in wonder and excitement and remember feeling a sharp pang of guilt. I knew for a second what this meant. That went away quickly, overpowered by a rushing feeling of relief. I set the spoon down and found a pen and, with a kitchen knife, cut off about three inches of the pen's tube, the ink cast aside. I bent over, and with the pen in my nose, I pulled it in to me. Into Me.

It worked.

Where is My Mind

Memories are like snippets of film from a movie shown completely out of order and in which the same people play all different roles. At one point, she’s with you in Baltimore and then inexplicably, you see her in the hallway outside of the Wilshire office where you pay to get the boot off your car. She’s just there, smiling but bewildered. People get stuck in our memories. There’s a girl from high school that is forever attached to the act of tuning a guitar. Her name was Renee Souther and she was just a beautiful and kind girl from my senior class. I didn’t even know her particularly well and never played the guitar around her. And yet, every time I turn a machine head, I see her smile in the haze. And what’s more, she’s in the liminal space of an empty classroom of some forgotten elementary school where I painted gym floors during one hot summer vacation job. It’s like little lines of whatever it is memory is made of get crossed and tangled and are forever fixed. So many twigs and branches and bark from a lifetime trapped in amber.

I’m sitting here trying to sort out these little piles of life that I’ve managed to hold on to. It seems the only real proof of existence is our memories. And these are fluid at best. How much of my life do I actually remember? Ten percent? Five? I think it’s closer to one percent or less. So much of my life is completely and forever unaccounted for and what remains is all tangled up. It occurs to me to try harder. To pay more attention. To try and be in the business of making memories.

What started out as a simple return of a text on Monday night has turned into something altogether different. The impulse to share the memories connected to a few Violent Femme lyrics a friend had sent me has taken on an almost frantic air. How much of my life have I forgotten? What happened to me? What happened to us, to them, to all those things that seemed so important so long ago. I think this, this thing I’m creating, this thing you’re reading, is an attempt at trying to regain life. Not relive it but retrieve it from some vault that seems to require a whole lot of effort to unlock.

I started with songs. I started with something that was precious to me and looked for what they were connected to. These songs I’ve used are little pins in the map of my life. The hold up faintly scribbled and boldly Sharpied Post-it notes which form a life. I see my life like the whiteboard in the detective office with pieces of yarn stretched between so many photos of criminals. Just trying to see what connects and what sort of order my life has had. The songs help. I remember where I was at precisely the moment I first heard “Where is my Mind?” and during the same memory first heard the Paris Texas soundtrack. I can prove this little part of my life exists because of the attachment to these two pieces of music. And still, it’s such a tangled memory. I know I was working on some video in some desert far from LA. I remember driving a car which wasn’t mine back to set. Or back to the hotel. I just remember sitting with my hands on the wheel and the presence of a cassette tape sitting next to me on the bench seat.

My memories are always in second person. My point of view is from over my right shoulder looking at the seat and the cassette. I move up to see this overwhelmingly beautiful and iridescent sunset looming over the vast stretch of the desert. There will never be a moment like this again I thought. I say it out loud, “Look because you’ll never be here in this moment ever again.” I say it to Camera-me as he’s looking over the shoulder but the Camera-me can’t respond. It can only try and keep up and document. “Remember this moment and try and pay attention.” I tell Camera-me. “The day will come when you’ll pay everything you have to be here again for even a one minute. For even a second. Pay attention. Please.” And so, it does. The camera mind looks out and pans across the scene seeing the far-off colors coalescing in the evening and the near-field detail of the car antenna and imitation wood paneling of the front doors. It captures how preposterously flat this world can be in places. Nothing is as high in the air as I am for hundreds of miles around and I’m hovering maybe four feet above the road. The asphalt of the state highway glides next to the sand of the desert as we drive…perfectly… lubricating each other. Zero friction. Camera-Mike tries to get as much as possible in one master shot but the scene switches to the stereo with my right hand pulling away as the click of the mechanism and the soft spring-loaded collapse of the cassette slot door do their thing. They have parts in this movie as much as anything. I can see the movement and the sound of the tape right before any recorded music plays. Future me…Now me is trying to find more footage.

  Look, there are three of us. Three different Me’s. One the subject of the memory. Another the recorder of the memory and me, here now, the one who is trying to cobble it all together for us.

“Ooooooooooooooooooooooooh!stop” That’s what comes from the stereo and into my memory. It’s not something you can’t pay attention to. Immediately followed by a sharp little “aight!” Maybe someone is saying “alright” maybe someone has just been pinched and is yelping. Whatever I hear it is the very first time I’ve ever heard The Pixies and this song, “Where Is My Mind”

At this point I beg of you to find and listen to The Pixies “Where is my Mind?” Go here now: https://youtu.be/49FB9hhoO6c

As you listen, consider this: this moment happened. Somewhere and at a certain point in 1987 or 1988, in the early evening hours in a California desert, I was here doing this and you were somewhere else doing something else. Maybe you were giving birth. Maybe you were driving home from work ruminating over some turn of phrase you uttered and regret. Maybe you were giddy with the love of her. Or him. Maybe you were hearing The Pixies for the very first time too! But this moment happened, and I have a shaky 16mm account of it which has to last me the rest of my life.

The acoustic guitar strums in and shimmers around the sunset. From somewhere off on the right, long, long miles away, the lone vocal comes out from the backseat speakers.”Ooooh oooh” a first note and a single half-step down for the second. Plaintive. Mournful. Hovering above the song like a duende. This thing is full of duende. The little ghost that lives in the dark notes but is responsible for all of the beauty. Camera-me films me looking out through the windshield knowing this is a special moment. I’m struck dumb by how different this sounds from what I expected. I expected crap. Discarded cassettes in other peoples’ cars are always crap. Whose car was this?? How am I even in it?? I never found out and if I did, I didn’t pay attention. It’s gone forever. Someone did me a huge favor. If you’re out there I hope you have armies of people to love.

Fast forward the video to 0:13. It’s video now. We can move it back and forth to be sure of things and one thing is for sure and that is that the drums which Albini captured pound in like a little brother tapping your head with a hammer until you wake up! Wake up! boom, booM, boom, bOOM, BOOM, BOOM! It all falls into a groove and Camera-me films me silent and stunned. “With your feet on the air and your head on the ground. Try this trick and spin it, yeah” I heard it but didn’t hear it. It washed over me. But the voice! Alternating between some bipolar mania and flatlined catatonia. Back and forth. Back and forth “Your head’ll collapse if there's nothing in it and you'll ask yourself…where is my mind?”

This is what this is all about. Where is my mind? Where are my memories? What have I done with them?

I’ve been listening to this song for hours on repeat. I’ve been trying to exact every microsecond of memory I can pull from that moment. That night. There are scenes of a cheap motel room full of beer-drinking PAs with walkies charging next to one of the beds. There’s a shot of me crawling into the interior of the car to adjust something for camera. There’s the vague knowledge that I heard Ry Cooder slide his way into my soul with the Paris Tx soundtrack as it also appeared before me in that mysterious car in that opalescent desert on that long ago but atomic bomb of a moment that I’m so desperately trying to remember with more detail than I seem to be able to. Please God, just a little more.

These things happened. They count. They are a part of my life. Hearing a song from a band that I don’t even particularly care about anymore rivals all the big moments. Hearing that first Oooooohstop! in that perfect desert light on that perfect desert night compares with World Series ending outs. Compares to the first shot. The first “yes” she ever said to me. It compares to every scene of sadness and heartbreak and sheer relief. It compares to my Father taking his last breath in my arms. Fuck! Jesus Christ…fuck.

Memories are all I have left from whatever life I’ve led. At least, that’s all I seem to have. I want more. I want to keep looking. I want to be in the business of making memories.

16 Shells From A 30.6

We called Aaron “Little Hat” because, well, he wore a little hat. One of those Greek fisherman-type deals. Not always but enough to earn him a nickname. Aaron entered my orbit as a second guitarist for the band I was trying to form. I found him in the Recycler. The Recycler was a weekly classified paper in LA at the time. No matter what, if you needed something, were looking for someone or desiring some sort of service you’d go to any liquor store and grab one as you bought smokes. I think it came out every Thursday. It lasted until the internet swallowed everything up. My last engagement with a few of its pages came years later when I’d lie in my bed in the Echo Park apartment and read and re-read three torn pages of “freebies.” These pages were literally scraps blowing around this fucked apartment, but I needed the printed word and this was all I had. I’d spend days shooting dope, smoking crack and just pore over these long out of date offerings people had made. Lots of washing machines it seemed. Guess it was just easier to give the damn things away. In this state I remained wildly focused and fascinated imaging some sort of life outside which included caring about things and having enough to give some away.

Aaron was Scottish. I mean, he wasn’t from Scotland, but he was a Scotsman by blood and he was into it! He played the bagpipes and wore kilts sometimes. He also loved the ritual of drinking Laphroaig scotch out of a wooden cup he had. God, I hope that’s the right scotch. It’s what I remember. Could be anything I guess but I’m sure of the wooden cup. I hated it. I shiver like someone might shiver hearing fingernails on a chalkboard when anything wood touches my mouth. I have to be very careful around popsicle sticks. One false move man.

He was a much better guitarist than I was, so I was happy to hand over most of the heavy lifting to him. I just wanted to play well enough to sing to and hopefully make someone cry. We became friends right away. I’ve never understood bands who aren’t all friends. It happens but it’s so weird to me. I never wanted to play music with anyone I wouldn’t want to stay up all night with. I miss him.

He lived with a guy named Charles. They lived in a place in Silver Lake. Charles became one of the gang as well. Charles was, at the time, doing something in film in the production side of things. Definitely not a PA. He’s a big Producer now. He’s an epicurean. That’s how I see him these days when I see him post stuff about food he’s cooking for his family. He knows his stuff.

The band also needed a drummer and we found Johnny from the recycler too. Johnny was this weird cat who lived in Thousand Oaks. And I say weird in all the most beautiful ways. He wouldn’t tell us his last name for six months. I don’t even know why we’d even ask what his last name was but once we did, we were obsessed with trying to find out. Eventually he told us his full name was John Penny. Finally. We were relieved.

That wasn’t his real name.

We rehearsed at Hully Gully. A place in Frogtown. Run by this guy Bill. I loved that guy. I stayed with Hully Gully as long as I could. That guy Bill was a good guy. A bit of a beleaguered sad sack but he’d always let us slide if we were short on money. We were usually in the big back room that had rollup doors into the alley. That was the easiest room to load into and out of. That’s all that mattered. We’d learn crazy intricate British-esque pop songs that Rob was writing and my decidedly less complex songs about her and played all kinds of odd covers. Of course, we did “She’s Like Heroin To Me.” God I loved singing that song.

  RIP Jeffrey Lee.

We hung out a lot in our apartment. One night Johnny wanted to give himself a tattoo. I remember watching him jab himself in his hand with some sort of pointy object and some ink. The tattoo was going to say, “Step Away.” He gave up and if you meet him today, you’ll see “Step A” on his hand. I love that.

We’d hang out with Leslie and her younger sister Marion who’d also come out with us. Was she there yet? Was it later? Memories. I’m going to put her in. She was there. Ultimately, she fell in love with Aaron. They should write their own book about all that.

By this point, I’d found 6th and Union and a couple other spots. I found dope that was powder and snorted more gracefully than hot liquid. I hadn’t taught myself to shoot yet. That happened upstairs. In any case the powder dope was civilized enough that sometimes when I’d offer it to Leslie and the gang they’d take some. It was always such a big deal when someone would get high with me. It made it all feel less hidden and desperate. There were nights when we’d decide to get high and a couple of us would drive downtown to cop. It was only when we had trouble finding someone that the cracks would show. After a while everyone would just say oh well, fuck it and I’d be intent on staying. Those were the moments that separated me from them. Getting dope was already becoming a need. Not that I was necessarily strung out yet but the idea of spending an evening without it seemed awful and empty. If we couldn’t get any, which was rare, we’d go back to Franklin and just drink and listen to records and I’d be looking forward to the next day and going back alone until I found it.

I don’t think anyone picked up on what was happening to me. The truth is that they probably did but didn’t want to say anything. Hardest thing in the world is confronting someone you love about their self-destruction. It gets messy and weird and full of stuff. Better to leave it alone and hope it just goes away. Let’s just hope Mike gets out of the heroin phase. And not like any of them had the responsibility of saving me from myself and in time they all made it clear that they’d fucking had it with me but in those early days it was all just so new to us. All of it was. We’d all landed in LA from some faraway place and were feeling our way into it.

I wasn’t using every day. It was still like weekend warrior or special occasion stuff. You know, those special occasions hallmarked by heroin use. In time, simply being awake was occasion enough. It wasn’t everyday but it was building but still we rehearsed, and I worked and Leslie made potato salad and painted sets and things were good. They really were. I often wonder where we’d all be if I hadn’t exploded everything. I suppose that’s giving myself way too much credit, but it does seem like I turned into a problem to be avoided. Rightfully so.

Sometimes we’d hang at Aaron and Charles’ place. When that happened, it was just the three of us. We’d drink and talk about things we found fascinatingly weird. Like late night phone sex ads on TV. They killed us. Some hot troglodyte moaning into the camera urging us to call. We’d watch movies like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer. We likely watched Eraserhead. Stuff like that. Three fairly well-read guys into weird stuff and getting drunk. Aaron and Charles weren’t into dope. Hell, none of them were except for Dean but he comes into this later.

RIP Dean. I’m sorry.

They had a little house on Sanborn. Sanborn? Maybe it was Lucille. It was south of Sunset, I know that. Just a typical little LA neighborhood edging toward the slums. Today, Silver Lake is investment property and very hip. Lots of pronouns and cancellations. But it was still a place where some guys in a fantasy band could afford to live. Single family homes with dusty front yards and add-on apartments. They had neighbors.

One night Aaron, Charles and I had been out somewhere. I don’t know where. It might have been bowling. Maybe it was just another night of drinking at my place. I have few memories of any of us actually doing anything beyond our living rooms and rehearsing but we must have done something. It was summer. I remember it being hot and that stood out because it was past midnight and still hot when we parked and walked up to their place. This little Silver Lake neighborhood was shut down for the night. I imagine we were going to keep drinking and watching phone sex ads. Who knows?

I remember walking up their driveway and my attention being pulled to the left. Another innocuous LA post-war home. All the windows open. All the lights on. Past midnight. And booming from the open windows we hear Tom Waits sing “16 Shells from a 30.6” It’s loud. Someone is going to town with this beautiful racket of a song well past midnight and damn the neighbors to hell. It’s loud! Meet me by the knuckles of the skinny bone tree. And in that moment, they both react, and I remember something they told me about way earlier. It all happens at once and I put it all together and it’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, and inside I just well up because, fuck, this is love.  A Father’s love. I remember them telling me that in that house next door was Tom Waits father. He lived there. I had never seen any sign of him and still thought it was cool but to come upon this moment felt like such a gift. He was in there blasting his son’s album, Swordfish Trombone after midnight on a hot summer night. Is there any clearer example of a Father’s love for his son? Would my Dad so support his son? (it turns out that he would). I’ve held that memory throughout all my life as proof that love exists in this world and that nothing can ever truly vanquish it. I have no idea what sort of relationship Tom and his Dad had but in that moment it was about as good as it gets. I hope Tom knows.

Twenty years later I’m at a funeral reception for my girlfriend’s aunt. Altogether different girl and altogether different love. We’re at a little church in Sonoma and the place is filled with Origami birds. The family is Japanese. Thousands of these paper cranes. Everyone in the little town who loved Jana’s aunt helped make them. And there’s Tom. He’s standing there just a part of this scene. Turns out he lives there and his son is close to the family. He’s close to the family. He helped make the birds. I notice him and slyly follow him outside. We both stop on the little porch and pull out cigarettes. He says something like “nice service.” I answer “ yeah, it really is.”. I don’t say anything else. We smoke in silence and the moment ends.

After, I ask the family who’s stayed behind to clean up why was Tom Waits here? They’re all confused by my excitement. All they know is that Tom’s a guy who does some sort of music but he goes rafting with us when we take the kids. They have no idea who Tom Waits is. They only know Tom, the guy who does something in LA but helps make auntie’s cranes. I try to explain. They seem interested but their idea of Tom is what they cherish. They love the Tom who shows up and helps out and shows love.

I would give anything to be back in that moment and tell him about that night in Silver Lake. I’d give anything. But I blew it. I acted sensibly. I acted with restraint and I gave in to fear. And I fucking blew it.

Don’t blow it. The regret is soul-crushing.

New Mind

              I keep thinking about memories and memory. I have memories of some moments of huge impact in which worlds of detail have been etched into me. Things happened that were “important” and I can snap back to them, forever connected by thin strands of rubber band. (Thank you NC) These are memories made from things which made everything immediately not make sense. You might call them trauma. Everything that makes up a life in an ordered world gets jumbled all about in an instance. We can spend the rest of our lives trying to put our worlds back together. I had some of these moments. You probably did too. Someone did something to me when I was eight or nine and I’ve been alternately dismissing it and trying to sort my world out ever since. In this memory I can see every detail of the space, every feeling I had, every movement of this person and my every reaction to it.

              There seems to be a wholly different type of memory, a much more ephemeral kind. The details flutter in and of focus. The timelines are fluid and disagree with each other. They span long periods and contain vast stretches of void. And they lead to intensely strong emotions when conjured in the presence. It’s the feeling that’s etched-not so much the details. My memories of Dean are of this second type. Dean appeared at some point in those days on Franklin and while his presence was titanic I can’t see his entrance. I can only reasonably imagine it.

              When Leslie broke free from the craft service table, she moved to the Art Department. Anyone with any sort of weird, creative bent wound up there. Lovingly, or not, called “Art Fags” by the shorts-wearing Grips, Art Department did most of the heavy lifting on all of these early music videos. Surely this would be argued by some but face it, they came in first, worked their ass off to provide a space, an environment, a world worth shooting and then dismantled and cleaned it all up after everyone else went home. A video without Art Dept. would be a fucking well-lit, white box. Leslie was one of these guys and she started working for Jose.

              Jose Montana was a cool, little gay guy who art directed most of these videos we all worked on. He’s certainly THE art director in the collective bundle of memories that make up this chapter of my life. Everyone liked Jose. They liked him because he was a good guy. I’m sure my take is benefited by not working directly for him very much as that’s a whole different side of a person on display, but overall people dug Jose I think. And so, by way of Leslie’s career advancement he came into our orbit. Not inner orbit but peripheral.

              Again, things get jumbled and timelines become very fluid and interchangeable but I don’t think I was strung out yet. Let me explain my reasoning. We lived in two different apartments in the Via Carlotta. Initially we lived in the first-floor studio apartment that opened onto the courtyard that the entire building wrapped around. Across from us was a guy named Tom. Nice guy. Queer as a football bat. Looking out of our French doors led straight across and into his. He was a painter. Well, he painted. It brought him immense pleasure and satisfaction I presume. But I don’t remember him being very good. At one point he gave Leslie and I one of his paintings. A beautiful and kind gesture to be sure. I just remember Leslie and I feeling trapped. It was garish or something. I can’t see it now, but I can see Leslie’s face when he left. A tangle of nervous laughter and the slow onset of obligation. We didn’t like it. At all. And yet we had to hang it up as our entire apartment was on view to him. And it was big! And so, we did. We hung it up and proceeded to explain it to stumped visitors for months. You do this for someone kind. You just do.

In any case I have separated recreational/rookie dope use with this first floor apartment and the strung out months to the second floor apartment we graduated to at some point. I think Jose came into things in the first-floor days. And so, with Jose came Dean although I have no memory of his entrance. No vision of first meeting him. I have no idea how we became so close. It’s like a child being born eight years old.

Dean was Jose’s boyfriend. Certainly that’s how Jose would describe him. I’m not so sure about Dean. He was a young guy, well hell, we were all young. I think he came from Portland or someplace like that. Maybe Austin. Maybe Providence. He was quiet with a quick snicker and jagged sense of humor. Not much into letting anyone really know what he was feeling but not entirely cut off from it. He was likely Bi but he always seemed entirely asexual to me. Gentle, subdued, and wispy. You just knew this guy had been really hurt at some point and all effort was put into laughing or denying it away. He lived in an apartment somewhere in the wilds of the lands west of La Brea. Maybe around Fountain and Orange. One of those streets between La Brea and Fairfax on the Fairfax end of Fountain. I think he quickly moved in with Jose, at least I know I’d go to Jose’s to hang with him and plan stuff. Planned to cop.

Dean was way ahead of me. He’d been getting loaded for a while. He seemed to be able to drift in and out of habits by pure force of will although he’d probably never admit to being sick anyway. Again, I have no idea how it came to be that we both shared this penchant for dope but once known we surely joined forces. Almost the entirety of my struggle with heroin addiction has been in a state of relapse. That is, I’d get sober, last awhile, sometimes quite a while and then give in and things would again spin out of control. Using after having been sober is wildly different from the first go around. There’s the guilt, the shame, the absence of any reasonable excuse. You just got selfish, made a really selfish choice and traded in everything to feel that feeling again. I know it’s a complex deal but it’s also pretty much that simple. That period on Franklin with Dean was the only period of using on the other side. I wasn’t stupid but I was still completely naïve about what I was getting myself into. This period was really one of the very few times that I ever got high with anyone. I’ve been living secret lives my whole life.

              We started hanging out more, often when Leslie and Jose were slugging it out on some set. We’d get some money out of the ATM and head to 6th and Union, or the house on Hoover or 8th and Broadway and cop. I have no actual memory of us actually doing dope save for the New York trip, but I know that’s all we did. We’d get high, listen to music and talk. See? This is what I mean about memory. My memories of Dean are all but devoid of detail but the feeling is intense. I think at the end of the day I just felt an overwhelming empathy for him. We never spoke a word about the things that happen to kids at eight or nine but we knew they’d been done to us. He just seemed to have been clobbered by them. He was a friend and we shared a solution to all of the kid stuff.

              I think Leslie and Jose were concerned. I think anyone could sense that we were probably egging each other on to some new destruction but again, who wants to say anything? It was still halfway out in the open. I’d still offer a balloon or two of powdered dope for every five Dean and I’d do. I probably wasn’t fooling anyone and over time everyone stopped saying ok. I know that at one point long after I was fully strung out and just destroying whatever life Leslie and I had created she asked/accused me of fucking Dean. Anyone would think that I suppose. We spent all of our time together in secret. I remember that moment in full detail. I see myself sitting on the bed in the upstairs apartment, the bedspread some pattern mainly of red and just looking at the floor as Leslie raged. We create so many questions in the ones who love us that it turns to madness. How can we possibly be doing this to ourselves? Something must explain it.  They need something to make sense. We kill them with confusion, I think. I acutely remember feeling that if I had put such an absurd answer into her than I must be some monster.  I’m sure I simply shouted “What?! No!” and I’m sure I tried to make her feel bad for even asking such a thing and I’m sure I tried to make her the villain in this thing. That’s what we do. But I couldn’t fool myself. I could see everything and how every choice I had made connected to everyone’s perception of me and all of these connected to all the poisoned emotions I’d manufactured in people and how I really was a selfish monster and so I’m sure I huffed and puffed and slunk off like a coward and stormed out to get more dope. I’m sure I used someone else’s pain for my own benefit. I did a lot of that.

              But none of that had happened yet. Dean and I were still just chipping. One night we had rehearsal. I remember it raining lightly as we pulled up the alley to Hully Gully. I didn’t feel so good. I had the beginnings of a cold or something. Dean was hanging out with us, and I was just looking forward to practice ending and maybe going and getting some dope. I really didn’t feel well and so when something happened that made us cancel practice, I was fine with it. In the pre-cellphone era, I’m not sure what could have happened that we’d know in the moment to cancel but suffice it to say I find myself standing in the rain behind someone’s little blue pick up truck and saying that I’m happy it’s cancelled, I feel shitty. I see Dean kind of snicker and ask, “you have the flu?” I answered “I don’t know maybe. Feels that way.” “You’re dopesick,” he says with a downward turned smile. The camera pulls out 100 yards and I stand there with this thought balloon of “Fuck!” over my head. That’s how I see it now. Fuck, he’s right, I’m dopesick for the first time. “Really?” Dean says, “Let’s find out.”

              I don’t remember copping or getting high but I remember the feeling of every symptom of what a normal person would feel with the flu washing away within seconds of getting the dope in me. I guess we found out. I’d graduated.

              Having done enough dope consistently over a period of time long enough to produce physical withdrawal symptoms happens only once. The next few decades and the relapses they hold are almost immediate snaps to dopesick. I swear the longer you fuck with this stuff the quicker you get strung out. If I got high today, I’d absolutely feel the first squiggly worms of dopesickness slithering through my head and limbs tomorrow morning. Just an echo but unmistakable. This first getting sick might go unnoticed or it might be seminal like it was for me. Dean helped usher me into it. I’m sure it sounds fully repellant and perverse to you as you read this but for me it was an odd form of achievement. It was certainly breaking the ideal I had imagined but it was a real part of this thing I said I wanted. I imagine that’s what Steve Irwin felt when everything he loved and protected turned on him and took his life. These things we think we love. And I don’t want to sully Irwin’s legacy by linking it in any way to my own but the instant turnaround, the instant realization that “Fuck!, I made a mistake” was maybe similar. In any case I was strung out with a Diet Coke habit.

              Time moves on. More rehearsals are completed. More jobs are wrapped. LA holidays come and go and still, life is fairly good. We humans have an incredible capacity of agreeing that the flowers are beautiful as we all know that the house is starting to smoke. At some point I got a rig. I got a syringe. Who knows where? The typical junkie rig of a BD ultra-Fine Insulin Syringe. Orange top. They’re spread bent and unusable all over the pavement of this world in all the bad places. Some dealers would have them hidden behind tires on the street. Some seventy-year-old homeless junkies would sell them out of their grocery cart, this their single hustle. They weren’t hard to get. Eventually I’d just go to drugstores and say I was a diabetic and demand them. I’d endure the look of scorn as I’d buy a ten-pack. They always knew.

              I sit in my bathroom. I’m in the upstairs apartment. I’m alone. And yet still hidden in the bathroom. Pants up but sitting on the toilet. The sun beams in ferociously from my right. Leslie is out. Likely working. Likely less than happy with who she’s attached her cart to, me this broken and diseased horse. I remember, I see the little glob of tar get surrounded by the water I squirt into the spoon it rests in. Little tendrils of dissolving heroin sprout from the ball. Almost imperceptible. I carefully balance it in my left hand and reach for the Bic lighter on the edge of the sink. I roll and flick and fire appears. The flame pushes and flutters around the underside bulb of the spoon. When I see bubbles, I retract. I move the flame in and out. Like I’m cooking. Like I’m making a roux. I want this to be right. Slowly and then all at once the two objects become one. Tar and water become heroin. I take the ripped off piece of a Qtip cotton I’d prepared and drop it in the liquid. I have to roll my fingers because the cotton fibers are so light and they attach to the nervous sweat on my fingertips. I gracefully lay the spoon onto the gleaming white porcelain of the sink. Leslie always kept everything so clean. So pretty. I reach over and take the rig from its resting place on the toilet paper roll tiled fixture. The point goes into the cotton and I pull up the plunger with my right hand thumb as I so very carefully balance the rig into this cotton. The brown liquid just appears in the barrel of the syringe as I slowly push up the plunger with my thumb. There’s no sense of liquid flowing; its purely space being filled. I pull it all up. Every drop. I hold the rig point up and look for air bubbles. Somehow, we always believe we have to get all the air bubbles out. We really don’t but we do it out of tradition. We let the liquid settle and the air float to the top and we gently push on the plunger until the slightest bit of liquid comes out. Stop! Don’t waste any. I transfer the rig to my left hand while pushing up my right shirtsleeve. I’ve already considered where I’d hit. This is it. This is the moment I’d imagined since being a naïve little kid in Bel Air MD keeping everything secret. Everything that people do to eight or nine-year-olds. Keeping it all secret and wanting to be anyone else. Here in this Los Angeles afternoon on 1987 or 1988 in a bathroom on Franklin Avenue I push the point of this BD ultra fine insulin syringe into my arm. I get lucky, So fucking lucky. I’ve seen enough movies and read enough books to know to look for blood. A little rose of blood appears in the barrel. My body is joining in and doing its part. The flower of blood tells me I’m in. I slowly pull back the plunger sucking more blood into the barrel. I’m registering. Decades later nothing feels as good as registering. It’s like God telling you That “I’ll take you in for one more night.” I pause and push. I push the blood swirled brown liquid into my arm. All of it. I pull the point out and wait. I don’t wait long. Something washes over me that I couldn’t even imagine. Nothing could have prepared me for this. I’m home in a house on flame. But I was home.

              Dean and I carried on.

Jesus

Working on music videos in the late 80s and even into the commercial days that followed were fun. Fun in a broad sense. Certainly, not all jobs were anything less than torturous. If you got off in ten hours, you celebrated a rare half-day. Working for twenty-four hours wasn’t unheard of. And every job ended with “wrap beer” that we’d all celebrate with before we jumped behind the wheels of huge, rented trucks and pulled out of dawn-lit lots, into the early LA traffic. Christ, the liability. But little things like “meal penalties” started to exist as we moved into commercials. They had to feed us a fairly lavish meal every six hours on the dot, or they had to pay us all some penalty based on some arcane equation. It wasn’t a lot but when all forty or fifty crew members were getting it well, the meals were usually on-time. If they thought they were going to be late; if they thought they just needed an extra ten minutes to get this shot of Tiger Woods juggling a golf ball on the face of his putter they’d go around and have everyone agree to “grace.” Ok, alright. Get the shot. But don’t let it happen again. How many jobs have you had that your employers fearfully made sure that they fed you prime rib, sushi and Caesar salad every six hours? I worked on a Nike spot once which featured two TV sets come alive in a TV shop and start playing tennis with each other via the images of Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi on each screen. We shot for thirty-six hours. That’s seven meals.

You’re forgetting the breakfast they had to have for us.

              But all in all, it really was fun. It was generally the same basic crew. You’d start to know all the grips and that guy who wore sandals. You’d know how each of the handful of DPs (Directors of Photography) all operated and how important having an onset dresser would be. And you’d certainly know your own crew pretty intimately. But you worked. No matter that most everyone was dreaming of doing something else and half of us had some sort of addiction, we worked. We worked hard.

              I think the part of working in those early years as a PA and the years and decades of Art Department that followed that I cherish the most is the simple idea that we could do anything. We. Could. Do. Everything. Once this behemoth of a production started rolling downhill there was no stopping it. There were no options to counter failure with. You just had to fucking make everything happen. The wildly innovative and imaginative solutions to ridiculous demands are as legendary as they are commonplace. I remember being on set for one of the “Can you hear me now?” cellphone commercials. Who was that? Sprint? T-Mobile? But you know the guy. That little guy who wore that little conservative suit and walked around saying only “Can you hear me now?” and once fucked a PA in the back of a 5-ton and it became legend. We were in some dilapidated main street location up near Ojai I think. There’s an army of set dressers. KK, the Production Designer and thus top of the Art Department ladder is telling guys what to do. It’s frantic. There’s a normal person’s concept of a month worth of home repairs and additions to be done in three hours. He spins and looks at Pete Foley who I still love today. He spits out some edict for Pete to hang some fluorescent fixtures across the span of the ceiling. Before Pete could even finish his sensible and responsible counter concerning his having no knowledge of the electrical wiring required, KK just barks. “Do the research! Become an Expert!” Jesus! That’s brilliant! Like a diamond cutting through molten glass. I still use that line today. That’s what I loved about that work. The complete absence of any sort of safety net. You either figured it out or they pushed you aside and threw money at another guy who could. Beautiful.

              All of this makes you feel like you can do anything. At some point Dean asked me to help him on a job. It may very well have been me asking him or Leslie asking us or God knows who else but I found myself with Dean in front of a vacant courtyard of little empty bungalow apartments. We were somewhere above Hollywood near La Brea. I think. Years later I’d wind up living in a similar bungalow on Fairfax below Sunset. Pat, the clear matriarch of the courtyard who’d been there for decades and was friends with Warhol and assistant to Halston and had the fucking paintings to prove it told us that we were living in Pam’s apartment. Pam of LA Woman. Pam of Jim Morrison. Who knows? I certainly believed her. When Pat passed away there was a memorial in the courtyard for her. Given who showed up I believed everything she’d ever told us.

              And speaking of Warhol, Dean and I stood before this ring of empty bungalows and found out we were being hired to redo the hardwood floors of all the units as they were now the offices of Interview Magazine. Andy’s Magazine.

              Now, I don’t know how many of you and I’m not presuming there’s a lot of you reading this, but I imagine not many of you have any expertise in refinishing hardwood floors. God knows we didn’t. Like we had zero knowledge or even the slightest interest in this trade. But we were getting paid some ungodly amount, maybe 150 cash a day and so we just figured it out. I just remember feeling like we were fucked and then – flash forward - having all of this rented equipment in front of us. Floor sanders, edge sanders, a grip of various grit sandpapers, smooth squeegees to apply gallons of finish. And more. Somehow, we figured it out and set to work. I seem to remember there being maybe four or five bungalows to refinish. I have various snatches of memories throughout, but I absolutely remember the finish. We’d done it and it looked beautiful.  We figured it out. We’d done the research and we’d become experts. I could do that shit in my sleep now.

              So, there we stood with a bunch of cash and nowhere to go. When you hand two junkies a wad of cash you can read their minds. They can’t conceive of anything else. The machine starts and equations involving price per gram, discounts for quarters, added flavors (crack) and maybe, MAYBE bills roll into action. But really, the bills get pretty pushed aside fairly quickly.

              I think Dean mentioned it before we’d actually finished the job. He slyly floated the idea that we could go to New York and hang out. He had friends from when he lived there and you know, we could do that. But you can’t just up and leave your girlfriend or your boyfriend like that. But it just floated there. This idea of being in New York. At some point we, as if indulging in fantasy checked plane fares and jeez, um, this was pretty doable.

              I truly don’t remember any conversation with Leslie about my desire/decision to go to New York with Dean. I truly wish I could. I wish I could tell you Leslie was all for it. That maybe even Jose was all for it. That maybe they both had some crazy, cool project to do and they’d be working around the clock and this was perfect timing! I wish I had anything to tell except we just went. Like we just went the next day.

              I doubt we ever called it what it became but we both knew we were going on a drug vacation. I remember the flight there for a moment because it’s the only time I’ve ever smoked on a plane. They jammed us in the back, us smokers and we smoked into little air-sucking armrest ashtrays and vacuum dotted ceilings pulling our foul air out of the cabin and into charcoal filters and the stratosphere. I’m up there now!

              It was fall or maybe early winter. I wore a cardigan sweater with a plaid trench coat over it. Likely a t-shirt and some sort of pants. I’m sure I was still wearing some type of surplus combat boots. That was my deal. Sometimes I wore a hat. But if I thought I might be somewhere to have to take it off I’d leave it at home as I knew I’d forget it and lose it. I bet I didn’t wear a hat to NY but maybe pics will emerge. I know everything I took for the trip fit under myseat. We landed and pushed into the whole airport frenzy of deboarding, moving to luggage, swirling out to taxis and dumped into the city. It was like an amusement park ride. Whoosh! Get out! You’re here! We jumped into another taxi. I followed Dean. I saw my first window washer. Those guys that would run up and throw water all over the windshield and feverishly start to squeegee it off while demanding money. I was taken aback. The need was clear. I was completely disconnected from them, and the Taxi driver considered them potholes. Something to be avoided. But I think that’s the first time I was ever face to face with desperation. I looked down. I remember feeling embarrassed. We drove on.

              Dean didn’t seem to have a really clear idea of where we were going. I guess I just assumed he’d sorted this out. I hoped at least that we were headed to dope. He mumbled answers as I’d ask and eventually, we stopped and got out. This was to be our basecamp for the next week. There was a place called Veselka. There were other storefronts with dirty awnings screaming Cigarettes! Candy! Luncheon! We started walking and so our adventure began.

              I was in an entirely different world. It was manic and cold and vibrant and fog came out of my mouth. The sun was setting into that winter orange, at least where you could see it between the epic shadows of these puny buildings. I’d only been to New York one time before. I was in fourth grade, maybe, and one morning my parents, full of glee said, “let’s go to New York!” this was so wildly out of character for my family but this happened. I was allowed to miss school and we drove up and into the heart of the city. I think at some point we were in FAO Schwarz. They thought to take me there. I think we had deli sandwiches. It was such an incredible day so full of spontaneity and out of character abandon. I’ll love my Mom and Dad until the end of the world for loving me this much.

              And so, I tried to reconcile this new input with that vaguely remembered kid stuff. We stopped in front of a building. A building like all the others. Sort of run down. Well, definitely run down but just like all the others flowing from it up and down the block. Dean pressed a button and after some giggling muttering which I couldn’t work out we walked in after a tinny buzz punctuated the air.

              Meet Durwood Wiggins. I guess this guy was a friend of Dean’s. What a name! To this day I search that name and while there are a whole helluva lot more Durwood Wiggins than you’d imagine, none fit my concept of this guy and what he would have aged into. I can’t imagine my Durwood is even still alive he was so far down the hole. And so he let us in but it seemed odd. It seemed off. I mean, he let us in and there was some sign of recognition. But they were both so spectral, so flat, so fucking autistic that I couldn’t tell what the hell was going on. I just stood back and prayed for drugs. As it turned out, Durwood lived on the ground floor of a building on 2nd and B which was populated above by wonderful people selling drugs out of various contraptions and conceits all about the place. Little holes here. Little lowered pails there. Fuck! It was the Willy Wonka of drugs. Now this is my memory. The truth might be that there was one old woman in the evacuated rear of the building with one last bindle to sell. But I remember it like Wonkaville. Dean gave him some whispered cash, he left the apartment and returned in minutes with ten marked glassine bags wrapped in a rubber band.

              I remember his apartment being really long and skinny. And dark. Just tight narrow spaces with dim bulbs slighting illuminating. His apartment could have gone on for miles as it stretched back into the darkness. All I could see was this little dirty kitchen which led into a narrow and thoroughly lived in bedroom space. Clearly this is where Durwood spent the majority of his life. A bed against one wall. A narrow path between it and the TV on a crate pressed against the other border wall and again, the depth trailing off into the void. Everything happened here, where only this one light could shine.

              There was chat and nervous, anticipatory mumblings between Durwood and Dean. I felt like they were speaking a different language. The TV had the news on. So that meant it was about 6PM give or take. I waited. Eventually I saw Durwood lean over and pull a drawer from a little bureau across from the head of his bed. He pulled out a needle. The same sort of needle, or rig, or works I’d write about from my upstairs bathroom.

              Dean giggled a question to me. He was so nervous. But I was so intent on the dope I didn’t care how anyone was acting. If you’re a junkie and there’s dope in the room, your mom can burst aflame and start screaming Shakespeare while twisting snakes around her day-glo pelvis and you just go with it if you think it’ll lead to dope. The focus is so fucking intense. What he asked me was, “Do you want to take a shot?”

              So here I was, wrapped in a thrift store plaid trench coat, an olive green cardigan my grandfather had left behind and no idea of what was going on beyond the presence of heroin. Who wouldn’t say yes? Earlier I wrote about my first experience shooting dope in that ferociously sunlit bathroom. That was after this. That was the first time I did it on my own. And earlier, in college, some nameless person injected me with a quarter gram of cocaine while SWANS pounded in the other room and I said Yes! Yes! Of course, I’ll cover your 5am shift at the College diner in 3 hours. I WhamWhamWhamWhamWhamWhamd for ten minutes and they left and I sunk. But I covered their shift. Horrible

              But here in Durwood Wiggins’, 2nd and B ground floor apartment that felt like a sarcophagus and in which only the spectral souls of Dean and this little hobbit of a fellow inhabited I said yes and pushed up my trench coat and cardigan left sleeves, turned them away and just focused on the TV screen.

              I felt someone holding my arm and fiddling with its orientation. I felt an almost imperceptible prick and then.

              The Billionaires Boy Club were everything! Remember that whole thing? These douchebags from the valley trying to take all of their rich friends in some ridiculous ponzi scheme. It had such a catchy name. The Billionaires. Boys. Club. Eventually one of the man guys killed some of the other guys and God knows what happened next. It just all fades away.

              But on that TV screen in that tomb-like apartment in Alphabet City, Durwood Wiggins injected white New York dope into my left arm as the news flashed headlines of the day’s court proceedings in the BBC trial. It seemed so important, and I fell in love with it as the heroin pushed into me. There’s no TV gasp of air or Hollywood eyes rolling back. There’s just intense focus and euphoria and I love these faces and I love this TV and I’d love to live here. Imagine what you could do with this space. You could build out a whole patio and you. Could……Oomph. ..You could take a nap…. In love… You. Could. Just. Hug. her. and…and..you can…you..can..just smile..she knows…she…..knows…….you love her……….and…….it’s ok…… ………                      it’s                  ok                                she                                  loves                                       you

To be continued

Caroline Says Part 2

Caroline says
as she gets up from the floor
You can hit me all you want to
but I don’t love you anymore

              This verse has haunted me for most of my life. I first heard it somewhere in those first years of college or maybe even earlier. Maybe Jack Lenert turned me on to it in one of those high school afternoons in his bedroom with all of his records and that little stereo he had. Pretty much anything I knew about that was remotely cool came from Jack. We followed similar paths in very different places. Jack didn’t make it. He played Lou’s Rock and Roll Animal for me one afternoon and I think that’s where the whole romanticism of heroin started. Certainly, we were already getting high on whatever kids in the sticks in the late 70s could get their hands on. But that there was a song - a really long song - about heroin on a record seemed so wild and forbidden. Lou Reed was a distant light in a fog of teenage confusion and wonder. I didn’t take him on as my sole focus, but he was what I’d pull out when I was alone and wondering about how far can you take this thing. How deep can you go into turning away from normalcy?

              And so, at some point I heard this verse. I probably heard it well after I first listened to it. The way he so haltingly speaks as Caroline just made me so sad. Lou as Caroline in this song is so okay with whatever her tormentor can possibly do to her. He’s Caroline in a way that feels like she’s won the war by simply embracing defeat. The very act of claiming defeat has rendered the attacker neutered. But even with this victory it’s such a heartbreaking moment he sings about. Christ, to write a song like this. How far is Heaven? I’ll go tonight.

              At some point we left Durwood Wiggins apartment. We may have gone back now and then to cop but I think we only stayed there one night. And it’s not like we slept in a guestroom or even on a bed. We just sort of sat there high and maybe dozed until the day came and it was time to leave. It was that moment when people have nothing really to do but it’s clear the moment has come to separate. We walked around those caverns of the lower east side and I remember wondering if this was some place Lou Reed ever came to. The way the sky was so bright directly above us but the steep faces of the buildings kept everything in shadow. Light could only spill into these gullies for such a short time each day. I’ve always heard every Velvet Underground and early Lou Reed song as if they’ve been sung in the winter. There’s not a single aspect of summer in Lou Reeds music. Not for me. And here I was, in his winter chasms full of dope and wandering imagined paths that he’d walked. I’m such a tragic romantic.

              The rest of the trip seems so disjointed and improbable. We’d walk and get some idea of where to go and who to meet and poof! We were there and then memory fades and we’re back walking these cold, impossibly bright New York streets. Winter sunlight is so stark. Such a bright light so devoid of heat. Winter sun is like everything in the first phases of breaking down. The sun loses heat. Here it comes.

              My mind registers the next indoor moment in some girl’s apartment. I feel like she was someone I knew from college but it’s also entirely possible that she was Dean’s friend. Both seem to be true and that can’t be. But I remember sitting on the floor of her crazy apartment in the same neighborhood as Durwood and drinking beer. I still had on all my clothes and sweater and plaid trench coat. The feeling was light. There was laughter. We were snorting dope and drinking. She was my friend and she’s also unknown to me in my memory. And Dean’s gone now and there’s simply no way for me to ever know who she really was. She’s just a spectre who let us spend a night in her NY apartment and got high with us and laughed. I remember leaving at some point to get food. We went to what I’ve always remembered as “Basilica” but I think it was actually called Veselka. We had pierogi. I remember there being another restaurant nearby that served mainly pierogi and that’s all we ate. The entire trip is wrapped around images of pierogi and a faint feeling of connection because of my half-Polish blood. My mom’s Polish. Fully. Whether we were in a Polish or Ukrainian or Russian joint it didn’t matter. I thought of my mom. I felt warm.

              We’d eat pierogi, snort white dope in the restroom and wander towards some other night. Someplace out of the cold. And this wasn’t a trip gone south this WAS the trip. This is as deep as we’d planned it. I don’t think I’ve experienced a period of time so full of pure leaps of faith and come what may abandon as that week in NY. And still, it was just a little speck of time in a life and one which I have great regret about despite its otherwise magic.

              We got onto a train and went to Hoboken. Dean knew someone there. What I’m left with after a lifetime of other moments is a memory of a scene in which I witness Dean returning home to see his mother after a long sad period. His Mom was so beaten down by his continual bouts of recovery and self-destruction that she forlornly welcomes us in at the top steps of the little front door porch in a row of New Jersey little houses. We go in and are served cereal. Dean wanted cereal. I feel so out of place seeing them circle around each other, dodging so much pain and so many questions. “How are you feeling?” she asks he mumbles a “fine. Good. I’m good.” No one is fine here. There’s nothing fine about this scene. We have the stuff of her nightmares and dashed hopes in our pockets. Little folded envelopes of powder we’d traded our entire lives away for. Dean looks into his cereal bowl and lifts another spoonful into his mouth. This is horrible for him too. He’s not so loaded or beyond hope that his Mom’s heartbreak is nothing to him. I’m in a room where everyone would rather be dead.

 And yet. None of this really happened.

              I don’t know why we went to Hoboken. I just followed Dean and the adventure. All these years later I realize I’ve superimposed a scene from an HBO doc I’d seen called “Dopesick Love” over our night in Hoboken. We see the subject visit his crushed mother and pretend to be excited by cereal and slyly ask for money. He leaves for what might be another month. Or year. Or more likely, forever. I’ve remembered this Hoboken trip as that scene. I’ve seen the side of Dean I’d so often wondered about. Where’d he come from? What was his kid-life like? Did his parents love him and stick around? I never knew any of these answers. I made them up for myself within the memory of this one night during a trip to NY. That’s where I put it all together. God, if I could only see him one more time. If I could only break through the veneer and hug him and actually say I love you. But he’s gone. He’s gone.

              We walked to the train station to go back to the city after whatever actually happened that night in Hoboken. That much was real. We spent a night indoors somewhere in Hoboken. I know because I realized we were where Frank Sinatra came from. These little funny markers we have in a life of jumbled memories and wished-for outcomes.

              We ate more pierogi. We snorted more dope. We were without Durwood and his outfits so we snorted. It was fine. We had plenty. Andy Warhol hardwood floors were more than enough for this weeklong daydream.

              Thoughts would puncture the dope glaze now and then and I’d stumble over them. We were in the days long before cellphones. Before pagers even. I don’t remember calling Leslie to check in. Maybe I did but I don’t remember it. What I remember is being wholly selfish and rotten. We kept walking towards new people and new interiors.

              I called and connected with friends from Penn State. Andy lived in New Jersey. He lived in Linden and having gone to his house once during school I knew he was near. He was close to the city. Somehow, I knew other friends were nearby as well. I connected. Eventually I made plans to meet the whole group at a bar in the city. Here we are at the moment of the great reunion. Dean and I walk up with some sort of luggage in the cold air and embrace Andy, John, Drew and Nancy and maybe some new people they were loving at the moment. Some of these people are still in my life and maybe they might read this. Maybe they’d say, “Huh? I was never there.” And I’ll defer but, in my memory, such a vivid memory, we’re all hugging and exhaling frost as we walk into some bar in NY. I think it was the Pyramid Bar or the Apex or something which had a point on top. Just a little place which seemed like the place to be. We sat and drank and laughed and took turns doing dope in the bathroom off the graffitied porcelain toilets. It lands now as a great night. Certainly, the very last time I’ve ever seen these people.

We wound up, at least some of us, back at Andy’s house in New Jersey. I see us all in chairs and couches in his parents living room. The lights are low but we’re so happy. God, if only that moment could have lasted forever. I remember them knowing what was going on. The dope was out in the open. At least the idea of it was. I didn’t feel dirty. We ate sandwiches which Andy drunkenly made. They were exquisite. We were just kids again sleeping over at each other’s’ houses trying to stay up all night and fearing the morning. Fearing the end of this moment. At least that’s what I feared.

Morning always comes no matter how much you love the night. Morning slammed us back into the city, everything good and clean hours behind us. Maybe we had days left. Maybe hours. The whole trip is such a fragmented remnant. I remember being in a garage. A car garage. A mechanics place. I can’t imagine why we would have been in such a place but I see us standing as the central- casting-New Yorker with the accent and the grimy visage is on the phone barking at someone. Another guy enters the room and starts laying into this guy on the phone. We watch him yell at him and it’s clear they’re brothers. The new guy. The clean guy screams. “And you, always in the fuckin bathroom getting high. You don’t do shit!” I see that so clearly. Did it happen? Am I confusing it with a movie? Does it matter? These moments surely happen. Maybe I’m just witnessing moments of real familial pain floating aimlessly around our world. Maybe they land where people who know can recognize them. Somehow, I saw this. I knew the shame in the junky brothers face as he took another beating from his brother. And I knew the pain and heartbreak in his brother as he tried anything to get through. People have been trying to get through to me forever. I knew it when I saw it.

Eventually we went home. We’d had our drug vacation. One thing that I remember clearly is sitting in Andy’s house and starting to drift off to sleep as the night gently faded away. I remember feeling the sweater and trench coat wrap around me in lieu of a blanket and feeling warm. I also realized I hadn’t taken them off for days. I never took them off the entire time. I stayed fully dressed for the six or seven days I was there. We just walked and landed. Walked and landed. Vagabonds in some hardwood floor paradise. Only pushing up our sleeves to get high.

But what I think about most now, what I’ve always carried with me, what the true cost of the trip was is the shame I feel for just up and leaving Leslie like that. Dean and I just zeroed in on ourselves and ran towards it. We never gave a thought about who we were leaving if only for week. I know Leslie will read this. And maybe she remembers it as no big deal. I doubt it. I think I hurt her. I know I hurt you Leslie and I’m so sorry. That I could be so incredibly selfish to go away like that just baffles me. I hurt you in so many ways. I want to think I don’t have that in me. That willingness to make someone else suffer the cost of my pleasure, my comfort. But I did. I did that. As hollow as it is, I’m sorry. I truly am.

I take the pleasant moments of these memories and I try to push the others away. I get confused and I wonder what’s real. Fortunately, we remember what we fucked up more than what we did right. We’d be fucked without this. It keeps us from forever causing pain and yet we often still do. Often, I think of how much money, and love, and heartbreak and support and how many resources have been spent over decades just to try and stop me from doing one thing. One. Single. Thing. And even now there’s no guarantee.

It’s something. It’s really something. This one thing.

She's A Rainbow

Our little band that eventually included Dean and Aaron and Jose and Geoff and Nigel and so many more formed in that last year of college. I was slogging through courses like Electromagnetism, Quantum Theory, Advanced Signal Analysis and Semiconductor design. I mean, they all had course names like this. I did well enough, but I’d truly hit the glass ceiling of my gifted mathematical aptitude. I just had these two semesters to get through, and I’d be free. Leslie and I had already visited Lynn in LA the summer before. We were intent on following her as soon as I graduated. So this gave us one more year to milk as much experience out of life before real life started happening. To be fair, Leslie was well into real life at that point. She worked full time at Aberdeen Proving Grounds, or maybe it was Edgewood. Creating all manner of art content for various publications. Please correct me if I’m wrong, Leslie, but I think that’s how I remember it.

              I lived with Greg in the first-floor front apartment of an old house right on College Avenue. A hop skip and a jump to the Engineering buildings, which were relatively close to us. Greg was in the same five-year program I was in but a year behind me. We’d met at California University of Pennsylvania, a coal-dusted little place outside of Pittsburgh. Three years there and two years at Penn State proper, and viola! Two degrees in five years. A BS in Electrical Engineering and a weird BA in Physics. Who ever heard of a BA in Physics? But you know what? When I needed a BA to get my master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy 30 years later, it came in damn handy.

              Upstairs lived Paul, John and Steve. Three Altoona bumpkins who formed the other half of our domination of this huge sectioned into apartments house. Our house was where everyone gathered. We’d spend most weekend nights sprawled around both apartments with a cadre of local kids and misfits drinking beer, smoking pot and sometimes lucky snatches of other stuff. But generally, it was   beer and pot. I hated pot. It’s like smoking a three-day anxiety attack. And, it makes people dumb. I’ve always called smoking pot “hitting the dummy.” Now I call it “schizophrenia-in-a-year.” The mob would straggle in, and a party of sorts would form, and we’d practice our scowls from the side. Greg and I had very effective scowls of silent judgment. When we wanted people to leave, we’d put on Einsturzende Neubauten – loud. The trickle-down the stairs and out the door would commence. They never even knew what hit them. From side two of Halber Mensch, Blixa proclaims, “This was made to end all parties.” Godamn right.

              Most weekends Leslie and sometimes Marion would come up. Sometimes I’d go back home to see Leslie. Sometimes I’d go home and stay with her in her little apartment and never say a word to my parents a half-mile away. It felt sneaky. It felt sexy.

              The drug scene at Penn State was ironically anemic compared to my four years of high school in little backwoods Bel Air. We had three main sources. Dave, Tim and I. Tim Hardwicke worked in a drugstore in Havre De Grace. An old-fashioned apothecary of sorts. Stealing pills wasn’t hard. Dave and I can’t remember his last name, but I know he’s since passed away and lived with a mother MD who practiced and prescribed out of their house. Primarily overweight patients, which meant speed. My mom was a pharmacist, meaning we had all sorts of samples in a bag in the guestroom closet.

Oh boy, the things that were in there. Black Biphetamines had 75grams of methaqualone and some amount of benzedrine in one little black, oblong ball. I loved those things. Sometimes my mom would cover shifts of other pharmacists around the area. Sometimes I’d go with her for the day. To keep her company? To keep her safe? I’ve never known why I was taken along, but I loved it. I’d spend the first hour or so surreptitiously casing the shelves and aisles while pretending to do my homework. Eventually, she’d have to go to the bathroom. And wham! I’d spring forth like a golem and fill my pockets with 10mg Valium, red Seconal tablets and Demerol. What teenage boy can’t have a field day with this kinda stuff?

              Penn State was fairly limited, but we got a steady supply of LSD. I loved LSD. I still love LSD. It’s like it just appeared. I can’t connect it to any person or transaction. It would just be there. The only other controlled substance of interest was the benzedrine or Dexedrine or some other amphetamine soaked into the innards of Vicks inhalers. Remember those? Those little white tubes you’d jam into your nose all camphor laced and mentholated. I’d read in Burrough’s “Junky” that in the 50s, people would break these open and suck the cigarette filter looking absorbent material and get a 3-dollar speed high from them. Hmmm? Maybe I’ll go have a look. I walked down to the local drug store and looked around. They definitely still had Vicks inhalers hanging on display wall metal hooks. I looked at the ingredients. I didn’t see benzedrine or Dexedrine, but I saw something ending in zine, so I bought one. I went home and cracked it open. A little tube of some sort of saturated material almost dripped liquid from it. I threw that fucker into a cup of coffee and pressed it against the side of the cup extracting every last bit. It floated on the top like an oil slick. It reeked of camphor. I gulped it down.

              Boom! I was on fire. I remember asking Greg if he had anything he needed to be typed. I was here to help. Whatcha need. I’m here for you, buddy but hold on, let’s put on that first Big Black record. Loud! Boom! Where is the fucking typewriter? No, no problem, I’ll do it for you. Fuck, you won’t believe what I just found. Boom! Typing in the sun on the front porch steps. Highly distracted. Highly energized. Highly high. It can not be this easy, this dose of euphoria!

              I shared this with everyone. Cut to two weeks later. I’m in the drugstore wanting to get more. I’ve been on this stuff for days. Empty hooks. I ask. “Damndest thing. We’re totally sold out. We can’t keep em stocked.” Ah, ok, so lesson one. Resist the urge to scream it from the rooftops.

              Finding little hidden gems like this was cool and passed some time, but speed is untenable. At least I only wanted to be driven to do extra work for so long. And there was way more laughing with acid.

              When Leslie came up on weekends, when we had acid, we’d usually do it late Saturday morning. I remember always carrying around a slinky as the LSD squiggled up my spine. Having something little and movable and shiny to focus on was perfect for LSD. Sometimes we’d all crawl into the Chevette and just start driving. Pick any cardinal direction and move from State College, and you’ll be in the country quickly. All two-lane country roads and huge overhang tunnels as the roads cut through the forest.

              One day we wound up in the mid-day sun in a field of golden weeds near a stream with large shade trees looming over us lazily and only half-concerned. I remember Leslie lying next to me with Paul sitting up and gazing into the beautiful weeds all around us and crushed beneath us. This was maybe my first perfect moment. Before this, I might have said the first time I had sex was perfect. Surely only perfect for me, I’m not getting ahead of myself. Or maybe it was striking the side out as I pitched my chunky little heart out on field 9 right behind Kunkels Auto Parts. But I remember my left arm and leg pressing against Leslie with the sun dappling through the trees and thinking, this is love. This is hippie love! Maybe we had music with us, and maybe not, but I heard what I wanted to hear. The only thing I could hear.

The Stones and that Donavon-sounding song they have. I hummed and giggled and kissed Leslie. I remember that because she’d usually be too shy to kiss around people, but I can see, I can feel her just slowly and languidly roll her face to her right to meet mine. I love you, Leslie Weimer. Let’s stay here forever, I thought. To voice it would have ruined it. But I prayed for it. Let’s just please stay here in this squiggly moment forever, and God, I want to taste you. I want to fuck you so bad in these cracked and enveloping golden hairs growing up all around us like kind little zip ties. This is what I remember. I pray to God that at least ten percent of it is true. It’s true to me. Memories fit together with wishes so beautifully. We keep getting entire new lives and histories if we play with memory enough. And no one can ever check us short of some ham-fisted video, and even then, what we feel is always hidden and thus ours to tailor to specific wishes and desires. I love you, Leslie Weimer.

We drift away, slide, and vibrate back to our little apartment on St. College Avenue, slinky intact and muttering. God, I love LSD. Nothing grabs God’s ear like LSD. So odd that I wound up drowning in that which puts earplugs in God. God can’t hear us when we’re on dope. He tries to read our lips, but it’s so hard as our faces almost always look at our feet, and God is always above us.

It may have been the same weekend. Maybe it was a two-day trip. Maybe it was weeks later. It was still warm and edging into spring. The little crew finds itself again filled with LSD and careening slowly, very slowly, around the tiny country roads surrounding Penn State like arteries and veins not two miles out.

Someone points out the truth. Someone offers that “nature is scary.” Godamn right it is. Creatures and behemoths and shadows and squawks and low murmured growls are everywhere. The Chevette moves at a glacial pace as I ping pong from one shape of a tree to another shimmering slip of a fence. They could be anywhere. And yet, we’re so wildly comfortable and ebullient in this fear of nature. We laugh at that which terrifies us. Where’s my fucking Slinky!? Ah, thank you. All good. We drift down country roads, seemingly back in time. Someone simply says, “Let’s find the buffalo.” Huh? What buffalo? They used to be here. Let’s find one. Ok.

I distinctly remember all of us getting excited that we now had a project, a goal. Find the buffalo. We closed our eyes and stretched our necks, and clenched our fists as you do on LSD. That delightful tingling that zaps through you…and no, it is not rat poison, it is NOT strychnine. Don’t be an idiot. Remember those troglodytes who preached that nonsense clearly devoid of any sense of volume and dosage requirements on a little square of paper? Those dummies always show up.

We drove about, chattering about buffalo and the terrifying nature of a cow behind a fence looking and chewing away from us. We manifested beaming and exciting fear and collapsed down whole mountains of the stuff with laughter. Laughter so hard we had to pull over from time to time and wipe our eyes. I’d pay anything to be back in that car in those moments. Or at least try to recreate them. I will not die until I do. God lives between the giggles of friends. God is happiest when we let our guard down and just give into joy and silliness. God begs us to be little children running after butterflies on a June day, only vaguely waiting to be called in for lunch. These are the spaces God inhabits. I want to forever be as close as possible to God. I believe in God. I do.

We keep driving and looking for buffalo. We don’t see any. We keep laughing and keeping God close. “Him!” someone in the back says “Him,” and we all collectively look to our right and see what can only be described as a Dark Age Serf in the midst of fieldwork. If anyone knows where the buffalo are, it’s this guy. As God is my witness, and He was absolutely in the Chevette with us, this person is clad in what seemed like a burlap coverall sort of dress with a belt around the middle. Hair all wild and dirty and reaching for the stars. He’s using a pitchfork. A fucking pitchfork! To move piles of what seemed to be middle earth hay and oats. He’s in the front of a little house. A hut by truer description. Jesus! Where had we gotten ourselves to? I pulled over to take the joke to the next checkpoint. Paul pushes his pulsing face through the window and simply asks, “Where are the Buffalo?”

Now I know that memory is malleable and likely not enhanced by LSD, but as I said, God is witnessing all of this, and so I sit here now as I have for all these years and see him silently hold up his filthy burlap-wrapped right arm and just point across the fields lying on our left. We’re stunned. All giggles trapped inside. Paul mutters thanks. I edge the car away. Fuck! Oh shit. What was that? We just keep driving, trying to figure out if he was a plant, someone involved in some crazy-complex prank or maybe a guy who knew where buffalo were.

All serious now, as serious as a car of LSD-filled kids can be, we drive. We drive for a while until we encounter a possible left turn. I slow down and kinda look around at my friends and God thumbing through Atlas Shrugged in the way back. I turn and drive down an identical road in the waning sunlight. We all look and slide our eyes across the fields and eventually, maybe a mile or so, come to a T in the road. I feel like I got the guy’s directions, so I turn left. We roll up a little rise and crest, and then we’re pointed forward and down upon huge pastures on either side of the road.

They stand together without any of the cares that plague us. They don’t question the existence of God. They haven’t the arrogance. They chew grass and walk forward a few steps to the next tuft. We sit in dumb shock. We sit there looking at hundreds of buffalo. They fill the space while pressing together, moving like a single fluid organism. We’d found the buffalo.

We’re all almost frightened to see them. As magical and ordained as this feels, it’s too much. We shouldn’t be making stuff happen. It feels like we did. But, here they are. Perhaps they’re Beefalo, a cow hybrid type raised for low-fat meat. But they are fucking buffalo as far as we’re concerned. We get out and move to the fence and just gaze upon them. I remember almost tearing up at the site. Again, maybe I’m manufacturing this detail but please, God, let it have happened.

We watch in dumb silence as they slowly move up and over the crest of the hill. We found them; they’ve shown themselves and must move on. This really happened.

Later, when we’re home and drinking beer, we start to doubt ourselves. Really? Did we really see them? God walks in and says, “You saw them. I could read your lips as you looked up to see them slowly eat and glide through the pasture. I saw ‘I believe’ on all of your mouths. Look, don’t take my word for it, but what do you have to gain by not seeing them?”

In time these moments became fewer and fewer; we trusted God less. And shortly, I started staring at my shoes more than I ever should have. God’s been trying to pull my chin up for years.

Fearless

I was anything but fearless. I was a thirteen or fourteen-year-old kid in a small town where being beautiful and athletic was everything. I was very far away from both. I could make people laugh. That was my saving grace. A fat kid who seemed to fit into the periphery of all different social groups. I had friends in all of them. I floated amongst the cliques with a laugh here and there and made out ok. When I think back on these years, they get jumbled up because they took place in two wildly different arenas. Two very different worlds. I started out at John Carroll High School, the private Catholic High school. I ended up at Bel Air High School, having been expelled with a month to go in my junior year.

 “Leave, we’ve decided you aren’t good enough for us anymore.”  I was ok with it. I became a hero. My parents were pissed. Especially my mom. Maybe I’ll write about it but suffice it to say that I got fucked on the deal. They’d just had it with me. And they made my parents go to bat for me in this little room near the library. They made them plead for me, and my parents told them to fuck off. They told them to just be done with us if this is what they wanted. I stood outside and had no idea that two people were fighting for me to such lengths. The door opened. My mom just touched my shoulder and simply said, “We’re done. We’re going home. What should we have for dinner!?” To this day, my mom roils at the mention of John Carroll High School. “Fuck them!’ she’ll say, and she’s not one to use that word much.

But before all of that and after the whole baseball team letdown, I fell into the groove that so many smart, weird, unlovable and unattractive kids do. I fell into drugs and music. I’ve told you about the Quaalude/Amphetamine caps we had as “samples” in the upstairs guestroom closest. My Mom the pharmacist bringing home free unit-dosage cardboard sheets of drug-rep samples. I had The High Time Encyclopedia of Recreational Drugs inside every denim clad three ring binder I carried to school. I studied the effects and prices of hash and barbiturates and hypnotics across the globe. I was way into drugs. I was so into the very idea that you could put something into your mouth (at first) and within a measurable portion of time feel wildly different and in a way, absolutely predictable. I was obsessed with drugs. Drugs, and even the daydreams of drugs allowed me to pretend I wasn’t me. I wasn’t sure who I wanted to be, but I sure knew who I didn’t want to be.

And there was that very first yellow 5mg Valium I took from the amber plastic pill bottle in our family kitchen bathroom. Just five milligrams. I took one and swallowed it. It was a school night. I remember because I wondered if I should take another for the next day for Tim. (I did) I swallowed this little pale-yellow tablet and went to bed. Goodnight, Mom, Goodnight Dad. Goodnight Dusty and Bear. Debronich Eespatch, Novstrovya Woof! Woof! The evening ritual complete with three Polish tidings of love which I still don’t understand. One of the words means goodnight.

I lied in bed with the lights off and probably the little radio next to my head playing WKTK. I remember some feeling rolling through me. Everything was fine. Like there was simply nothing to worry about. Every conscious aspect of my life was just sort of funny. I giggled. True giggles. Those little, short, bursts of pointless laughter. I looked to me left out of the window and just kept giggling. This was alright. Valium was definitely alright. I slowly fell asleep with some new smile on my face. I’ve been chasing that smile forever.

I keep going back. At first this was all supposed to be a forward-looking trip starting from a single Violent Femmes song and my summer of trying to fall in love with Leslie. Little memories start to creep in, and it feels phony to ignore them. Holden Caulfield would hate me.  And so, I give them some space and they just open up wider chasms of a life. I’ve always thought of my life as a series of distinct single lives of a closely related person. I feel like I’ve been a distinctly different human living a distinctly unique 24-hour lifespan one day after another for years, decades, an entire life. The kid who giggled himself to sleep that night was no more me than you are. But I do know him. He’s a part of me. He’s another soldier in the Army of Me Against The World. And it’s not an angry war. It’s not hateful. At times it’s even a loving war but it is a war, nonetheless.

At some point if I go back far enough, I’ll get to The Thing. Who wants to talk about a thing like that? The hardest part of sharing something that happened to you that fucked you up is the absolute certainty that IT WASN’T THAT BAD. Almost everyone has had it worse than you. We spend a lot of energy dismissing and downplaying our “Trauma.” The word alone has been overused to the point of frivolity. We live in a culture where trauma is a currency, and we collect it like our grandparents collected trading stamps. But you know what? These things happen. And they fuck us up. And it doesn’t matter if we were raped, beaten, yelled at, looked at funny, never chosen for the team. It’s all the same and no one is immune to it. Some of us have more resilience, for sure, but again, it’s not a competition I’ve been lucky enough to have fallen into a life where I get to be someone people like this come to for help. I’ve become a “therapist.” I have the master’s degree and the hours and the love of it but I was denied the license and then said fuck the license, I can do it anyway. That’s a whole different story and I’ll get around to it. But the point is that I talk to people every single day who feel broken because of something someone else did to them. Usually, when they were little and couldn’t possibly understand what any of this world tilting behavior meant. Trauma is something that, in a flash, makes your whole world stop making sense. At least, this is what it seems like it means to me and again, even contemplating writing about mine makes me feel like a fraud. Maybe that’s how it get’s you. It hits you and makes you feel like a liar for screaming ‘ouch!’

What happened to me wasn’t anything that didn’t happen to all kinds of kids. To all of us. But it was how I managed it that screwed me up. See? Even here I’m taking responsibility for it. I have a distinct memory of being maybe 10 or 11 years old. Fuck, maybe it was 7 or 8, the whole period is a blur of sunlit backyards, closed-mouthed dinners and hours and hours and hours of TV screens and spinning records. It’s summer and I’m standing in my backyard in Homestead Village. I’m in the lower depression of our backyard where my mom has her clothesline. I see myself facing the house and staring into the window over the kitchen sink. It’s bright. It’s warm. I have little kid’s shorts on, and I say out loud. “No kid should ever feel this way, and this is going to fuck you up for the rest of your life.” I said that. Out loud. I remember it in a way that is so much more clear and bankable than the buffalo memory. The memory stops there. What else could it contain? But it seems such an odd thing for a little kid to proclaim out loud.

Whenever the thing happened it happened a couple times. It happened while sleeping over at a friend’s houses. It happened while “camping out” in backyards in Montgomery Ward tents. It happened from people who might very well read this, and I won’t name them. I truly believe that they did to me the only thing they knew to do given what had been done to them. That’s the problem with so much trauma. It’s just generations and generations and generations of ok people getting fucked and fucked and fucked and sometimes, actually fucked.

And so, nights sprang into being where the little kid me wound up happy and excited to be sleeping over in some other older, cooler kid’s house and bed. Older enough to be a “big kid” and “Wow! He want’s to hang out with me?!”

Nights sprang into being where he did stuff to me that felt exciting and wholly unknown. It felt good. There are things that can be done to you in the darkest moments of fear “that feel good” and you’ll pay for that good feeling forever. Nights sprang into being where he had me do these things to him and I still felt, confused and excited.

 And days followed when it was all over, and I knew I was a monster.

I didn’t know what “gay” or “homosexual” meant at that age, but I knew it was bad. I certainly didn’t know that nothing he did to me linked to being “gay.” He would have done the same thing to an 8-year-old girl. The concept of an adult wanting to fuck a kid was what baffled me. Confused me. Made all my circuits short out. Just like they do now. But all of it reduced to me being gay.

Little kids always take on the blame for everything that happens to them. They need to make their world make sense. If the father or mother beats them, everything falls apart. And so, they need to make their world make sense. They see their horrible parents as “good” and themselves as “Bad” because only a “good” person would hit a “bad” person. Now everything makes sense. It's s so much easier to see ourselves as the villain in our story. This is called “splitting” This is how kids process trauma.

And so, I became “gay” or “broken” or “dirty.”

I’d heard the syllables spoken on TV and in the house just enough to know that it was something that needed hiding. For years I ruminated on those nights as proof that I was something my parents would banish forever if they know. What’s worse I remembered it feeling good in my confused excitement. There’s no looking back. I was awful.

For years I carried this around always on the verge of confession. But confession meant banishment. I never slept in my bedroom again. Not because anything happened there but because I needed the TV noise to blot out my memories and allow me to sleep. My parents just let that happen. Who knows? I still think it’s crazy when someone tells me they can just lie in bed and close their eyes and go to sleep. Jesus. I can’t even imagine.

Eventually it all burst through. It was a school morning and I seem to remember walking down the basement stairs to get something and feeling all of it well up like a tsunami. When I walked into the kitchen I started crying like a kid on fire. My mother was out of her mind at what had so suddenly overtaken her son. Next, we’re sitting on the edge of the family room sofa and I’m confessing. I am confessing my sins. That’s how I’d shaped it over all these years. She held me and loved me and reassured me and had no idea what else to do. She did exactly the right thing. She never told my Dad as that would have meant me living through the whole thing again via his wrath. We kept it to ourselves. It’s somethings we have together. And now you have it with us. Just me, her, and you.

My mom’s expressed sorrow that she didn’t handle it well, that she didn’t act strong enough. Mom. You were and are perfect. And look at us. We’re still here. Together

Go!

I’m sitting here on Sunday morning after posting The Thing. I click on one of the email alerts I get every 15 minutes or so from MLB.com. Baseball stuff. I’ve become so adept at pushing it all away. But this one’s about a no-hitter. And so it bursts through, and I go in. I watch images that used to fill me with wonder and joy. They just terrify me now. How did I lose this? How can I get back in? I’ve lost baseball again.

              Let’s go back. There’s so much more to tell. Jesus! I’d love to hear your stories. I’d love to hear the little explosions in your lives. Hearing these little bombs, these hidden grenades, is what I love so much about being a therapist. Every day I swoon at the idea that I get paid to talk to people, and they tell me things they’ve never told anyone else. I feel honored. Sometimes I feel like a fraud. But I do it. I sit there and listen, and I love them. I just love them. I’m not sure what else to do as a therapist. I just try and love them. They aren’t all lovable, or at least it seems hard to me. But I try.

              Let’s go back. College was winding down. I was in that perfect place of ending something and an adventure rolling up. Leslie came up most weekends, and we took more acid with Paul and the gang and looked for more buffalo in the country. After that first trip, the magic never held; we knew where they were. The sudden surprise wore off. When we found them that one day, it was like we were on some Tolkien journey. We were hobbits walking through the endless world looking for a ring. The magic wears off. We found these animals while vibrating out of our skin and laughing like jackals. You can’t watch those movies for the first time over and over again. But we’d felt it once.

Our house was chaotic. Greg and I are on the first floor with Paul, John and Steve, two floors up. It was a typical college house turned into apartments and rented out to kids on their way to something. We all had plans. I don’t think any of us got there because life is tricky. Life throws curveballs. Life is beautiful like that. One day I marched home from some forgotten 400-plus level EE class in a wrapped-around trenchcoat and walked up the porch stairs to our apartment door. It was about three inches ajar. I knew this trick. I’d invented it. I’d push open the door, and a bag of flour or maybe even a cup of liquid would lose balance and fall upon me. This was my trick. And I could hear nervous snickerings inside. So, I played along. I held out my left hand holding my Minolta 35mm SLR camera and slowly pushed the door open. Wham! A fucking bowling ball falls from its balance point and wrenches the camera out of my fist. It shatters. The black bowling ball rolls off to the side as the camera lies there dead.

I’m stunned. Too stunned to be angry, and I see faces. I see Paul, Greg, and John looking embarrassed and beaten as if they’d tried their best. And I see Steve Yetsko, smart but a troglodyte nonetheless, laughing with such glee and as if he was wringing his hands together at his chest, waiting for some huge hug of approval. “Did I do good, Dad? Did I? Did you like it??” He thought braining me with a 16-pound bowling ball would be funny.  

These are the moments when God gently pulls you aside and whispers, “Son? You can walk away or murder. Either is fine with me.” Murder seems like such a hassle. I walk away, but I keep tabs. I must admit that while I don’t think I have it in me to pull such a stunt, there’s something about its severity, the sheer, fully over-the-top-ness that I can appreciate. I don’t remember him ever fixing the camera any more than I remember really wanting to take pictures with it in the first place. Truth is, it was a great fucking prank. Hat’s off to you, Steve!

But I kept score. Paul and John who likely argued against the prank became targets. The lived with Steve. I injected the juice from fiery hot Thai peppers into their oranges. I rubbed their cutting boards with these same peppers, so every innocent peanut butter sandwich became an artillery shell. I rigged foul-smelling vials of God-knows-what chemicals under Steve’s bedframe feet, breaking open as he lied down like a drunken oaf every night and filling the apartment with unlivable scents. I switched out all of their coffee with decaf and made it fully apparent to destroy even the placebo effect. I ruined their trust, their faith in coffee. I got back. I’m smart, and I’m clever. Sure there was collateral damage, Paul and John lived with Steve, but collateral damage is what gives war all its flavor, its thrill. I think about all of this stuff with love. All of it sprang from love. To put that much effort into hurting someone is a measure of devotion. We just walk away and forget those we don’t love. I loved these guys. I still do.

Eventually, this pure, perfect, beatific time ended. I’d graduated. I’d done it. Five years. I think my Dad was proud. I know he was. I’d done this for him. I’d spent five years talking myself into doing something because it was what my Dad thought would be best for me. And so I did it. My parents saw me walk down the aisle in the auditorium where Iggy Pop had played not one month ago. I remember wearing the gown and the hat. I stood there in a sea of other Me’s surrounded by other parents while Bachelor of Science degrees was conferred to us. I was an Electrical Engineer. What did that mean? It felt good, but it also felt foreign. It felt fraudulent. Imposter Syndrome swept in and enveloped me. Christ! You can see it wrap around me still like the plaid trenchcoat I never took off. I never, ever, think I’m good enough. Even writing this feels phony. Like I’m just doing it for “likes.’ Like I’m lying and making everything up. Maybe we all feel this. This intrinsic self-doubt. Perhaps this is what ultimately grinds us down. Well. The truth is that I know I’m a great singer. That much I have confidence in.

In any case, Leslie and I watched them drive away happy and proud. I don’t regret a thing. Let’s get back to dope.

A month or so before graduation, I stood before this very hot Goth chick, just mumbling shy goofery as guys like me usually do when juxtaposed next to a beautiful girl. God knows Leslie must have had to hear all manner of my stumbling attempts at charm and teenage seduction. Our house was way more a gathering point for townies than it was for students. And here she stood. I remember her as looking just “hot.” I can’t even begin to describe her other than her black hair and clothes. But I remember she was fucking hot, and everyone wanted to fuck her. I didn’t. It was something entirely different about her that pulled me. Well, I suppose I could have risen to the occasion if she threw herself upon my startled being. But what drew me in was hearing her telling us she was moving to NYC. She was leaving soon. And so I asked her, as anyone who was me at that age in those clothes in that house with her standing in front of would have, “Can you buy me some heroin If I give you some money.” Something about drugs must have been mentioned, or maybe it was simply moving to NYC that made me ask her such a bold question.

I really don’t remember, but I can’t imagine it was an entirely blurted-out non-sequitur. She said, “Ok, yeah, I can buy you some and mail it back to you.” I sprang into action, “wait here! I’ll be right back. I ran downstairs, checked for bowling balls and went into my bedroom to find an envelope of some kind. Then I pulled out from my wallet whatever cash I had. Forty dollars. I jammed it into the self-addressed envelope and fairly lept back into the party. “Here ya go. And thanks!” “ok, no problem.” And I never saw her again. She just evaporated into some Bauhaus-infused whiff of vapor and floated away with my money. I had taken a leap of faith. I try to take as many as I can.

Now I know what some, if not many, of you, are thinking. And I was thinking the same thing. Surely buying you heroin, not doing it herself, putting it into the envelope, and buying a stamp were at the top of her list of things to do upon landing in NYC. Good luck with that, buddy.

We got back to this last semester, and I kept waiting. Time moved on, and I waited. I’d check the mailbox like you do when waiting for something important.

Now, I need you all to know that I reached out and spoke with Leslie just yesterday as I’d considered telling this little story. She just said, “It’s been forty years! Just keep writing.” I had to ask tho. I had to. At some point in our “long-distance” relationship, Leslie told me that she was ok if I had sex with another girl. She understood. Now, this was as likely as her telling me that I was allowed to win the state lottery or that she’d understand if I was, for whatever reason, drafted by the Orioles and asked to start Game 7. The chances of me aligning all the stars and keeping every planet in perfect orbit to wind up in some bed with some random chick were small. Very small. I just wasn’t that guy, but I loved her for it nonetheless. And so she granted me this freedom with one little caveat. I could fuck any girl at Penn State and, I suppose, anywhere really as long as it wasn’t Brandy Zimmerman.

              Brandy was one of the gang. She was a stunningly beautiful blonde girl following some unknown path I suspect her parents put her on. Maybe she was on her own path, but some way had led her to our corkscrewed house. And she was a friend. She was an actual student like us. Not some up-and-out-the-door Goth chick on a forty-dollar mission. I remember Brandy having the hots for Paul. Virtually every girl in that little community we’d built had the hots for Paul. And I guess she was a threat to Leslie, or maybe she just didn’t like her. When Leslie gave me this get-out-of-jail-free card, I didn’t think of Brandy at all!

I could fuck anyone but Brandy.

              Well, you know where this is going.

The night came when I slept with Brandy. I want to use more descriptive language. I want to bombard you with erotic filth and detail. I want to be the hero in some sex-filled legend. But I can’t. Somehow we had sex, and it was fine, and I got to do all of my favorite, necessary things, and then it just started feeling redundant. I sorta lost interest in it. I faked an orgasm, then we kissed goodnight and went to sleep. The next morning I felt awful. I just felt guilty. I’d fucked up. Again.

              All I had to do was not do one thing. Just one fucking thing. And I did it.

I remember seeing Brandy a few years later when I lived in Baltimore. I lived in Charles Village. I’d come home and gotten clean for a while. I walked down St.Paul, and she was there. Out of nowhere. We said hi. She looked beautiful. We talked for a few minutes, and maybe I felt some stirrings of a second chance but no. We said goodbye. I’ve never seen her since. Just a wisp of a moment, and how is life like this? Just little moments that should be hurricanes but are just soft, meaningless breezes. I remember walking away and feeling struck by a realization that had never occurred to me before. It’s something I’ve carried around ever since. I realized that I tended to whirl into peoples’ lives like a cyclone; I was gone before they knew what hit them. I had another friend in Baltimore, and I remember telling her that while I loved her and our friendship, I was bound to just up and disappear some day. Not by design and certainly not by choice, but it would happen. I’ve struggled so much with keeping friends and people who’ve loved me in my life in any sort of consistent way. I think it may be that I split before they find out. Surely they’ll all find out, and then they’ll just want me banished. Clearly, my drug use played a huge part in these patterns of intense intimacy, wild abandon and poof! Where’d you go, Mike? What happened?

And it felt all happening again to so many of my friends here at Penn State. I just knew in my bones they’d be distant, heartbreaking memories in so much time. I really do hate this about myself. I try to do better, but there’s never been much evidence of it.

              We were doing those last couple of weeks things you do in college. We were studying for exams in subjects which thoroughly baffled me. But, somehow, I did ok. We drank a lot. We made plans to stay in touch. I’m sure there was some LSD involved at some point. I sold my little Brown Chevette to Drew for 100 dollars. It broke my heart. I felt like I was selling a dog. What kind of monster sells a dog?

              And then wonders of wonders. I brought in the weeks of overflowing mail whether it needed it or not, and ----- hmmmm? I just got caught up in and stymied by an envelope falling out of the pile. My handwriting was on it. No. There’s just no way. It had been months. Maybe she was simply sending back some sorry-man, I-tried-but-got-high-instead note driven by months of guilt with visions of me sleeping under the mailbox all night, uninvested in everything around me except for the daily click-turn of the mailman’s key.

              I held the letter. It had the slightest heft to it. But there was still no way. These things just don’t happen like this, even in the coolest outer rings of the drug addiction inferno. I opened it to find four little glassine bags wrapped in a single sheet of lined notebook paper.

I’d been such a weird kid. I latched onto heroin addiction as a goal so early on. It was aspirational. All my heroes were junkies. And here it was. I looked at these four bags in my hand. They had stamps on them. They had brand names. I can’t remember what they were called, but it seemed so official. Official heroin. I’d never seen such a thing.

I held onto it for a few days, hidden in the back of the shelf in my closet. I’d take them down and treat them like talismans.

One night,  I opened one. I poured some of the white powder out onto a mirror. I rolled up a dollar and bent down. I crossed over. Later, I remember looking into the mirror and saying out loud that I’d never not do this if it was at all available. I’d never stop. It was everything I’d always imagined, and that times a million. I was fucked, and I was found. I’ve always been so dramatic with my out loud proclamations of my own demise.

That weekend Leslie and I did some more. Sex on LSD had been something to consider, but this single night was wholly above it. This sex was like nothing I’d ever experienced. Slow and dreamy and primal and Day-Glo and without end. Always without end. I just remember the red light coming from somewhere in my little room on what amounted to a futon. But Jesus! The love was just so amplified. Heroin gets you, or at least it got me because it makes me want to love everything so fiercely. Every person. Every little utterance from anyone outside. And to feel it to that degree, that first couple of times degree with the person I actually did love the most, was ephemeral. It was epiphanic, and ultimately, it was anodyne. The song kept playing and playing, helped by my slow reach over to hit rewind. It was just a song. Nothing special. I think I’d played it during one of my last college DJ stints from Midnight to 3 on a Friday or Saturday. I don’t know, but it was the perfect song. We listened, kissed, touched and fucked in that red light for hours and never knew what was coming. We just went.

Mother of Earth

I just finished a couple’s session. I gathered my thoughts while giving the bread a second rise and chopping shrimp, spring onions and some BBQ pork I had around for some fried rice I’ll make later. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I’ll just write until it feels like it’s all out and then play some Minecraft. Maybe I’ll just fuck around in my opulently tooled garage pretending I actually make chefs’ knives just a fleck more than I daydream about making them. I imagine a lot. I can see huge vast worlds of creation and love. Worlds where I’m some other guy with someone who waits all day for me to come home and make stuff for her. I want a girl who loves that I can make anything. That I can do anything. That I can do Every Thing for and to her. I think she lives in New Mexico now. I can’t remember. I know she’s not here anymore.

              I think the wife of the couple I just saw feels this way. She feels like he’s gone or at least moving to some arid, flat place. Always a flat place. The husband wasn’t actually in tonight’s session. He’s in Alaska where he’ll likely drink himself to sleep and wake up on a boat looking for salmon. He’s in HIS place. She’s home and talking to me. She thinks he cheated on her for a year while they were in “The Apartment” and before they moved to “My House.” What do you think Mike? I mean really, do you think he slept with that woman?

              Man, they don’t teach you about these moments. I mean, actually, they do. They teach you to deflect and “hold space.” Let her just wriggle there in despair and smile the smile of “I know it’s hard.” And just wait. Wait until she looks down and says, “I know you can’t answer that.” That is what it seems therapists are taught to do. Don’t put your neck on the line. Don’t get involved. Cover your ass. Proceed with detachment and authority. Little, slivers of authority but authority nonetheless. But I guess I fucked up. I guess I went in an entirely different direction.

              And so I told her a story.

              “Here’s the thing about alcoholism and addiction that people who’ve never known it has such a hard time understanding. And I’m not making any sort of excuses here; all of us are absolutely responsible and will be held accountable for everything we do, but here’s the deal. It’s entirely possible to be in a perfect moment for sex and be so enthralled with getting loaded that sex is the last thing on you your mind. Years ago, a long time ago..”  She watches with attention and a shred of new, cautious hope on the other end of the Zoom connection…” I was all strung out, and I had this friend Rodney, and he had this crazy hot girlfriend. She was just 114 pounds of pure sex.” I can at least read a room, and she got this, she liked it, she understood, she nodded. “He was out of town somewhere and I was over there with her getting high and looking for more drugs. We drove around downtown and got some crack. We’re literally parked and lying behind some bushes near downtown LA at about 3 AM. I remember that she was just wearing a t-shirt and panties and the t-shirt was ripped and tattered around her waist. I mean, Jesus. But sex literally never entered my mind. It does now, Jesus! It does now, for sure, but in that moment, we were intent on one thing and one thing only. It’s so hard to imagine for a lot of people.” She actually exhales a short breath of relief. And I’m telling her God’s honest truth. I’m not making this up for her benefit.” I’ve been in so many situations that seem to call for sex but I’m just so happy to be able to get high with someone who gets it and isn’t going to browbeat me about it.” She nods again, ‘Thank you for that. That really helps.” “Look, I don’t know if they had sex or not, and ultimately you’ll never know either. But truly, There come moments where getting drunk or high far surpasses the natural urge to fuck.” Thank you! I can believe that. I feel the urge to temper her enthusiasm as I’m not fully going to bat for her husband. But I do want her to know the possibilities. And I told her the truth. Twenty years later, looking back on that night, I think, Jesus, what a schmuck. But, what are ya gonna do? My loss is her gain if only for a moment.

              We talked for a bit longer and I started with my whole, “We’re going to have to end at 7:30 tonight.” 7:30 is 40 minutes more than the usual 50-minute therapist session. I can’t even imagine just cuttin’ someone off on the dime like that. Maybe if I had more clients, it would be easier. “So what do you think? Do you think we’ll stay together?” Another time-honored question from a client to dodge. “I think it must be apparent by now, or at least I’d hope it is, that I love you guys…as individuals and as a couple. And I know that one of my deep failings as a therapist is that I’m overly trusting. Maybe even naively so. So know that this is the framework from which I’m answering. I certainly hope you stay together but only in a way that both of you are at peace and in love. That’s what I hope for. And if I can feel hope for something, then I can imagine it and then I can see a possible path to it. So yes, I think you absolutely can stay together but it’s going to involve a lot of discomfort for both of you. But, you can both do that. And if any of it is built on lies and the fear that all lies are built on then no, I don’t see how it can happen. I realize I dodged your question but I can certainly imagine you guys together forever. Plenty of people I know I can’t. I can’t see a path.”

              We talked for a little while more. My thoughts had started to wander to how’d I’d cook the eggs for the fried rice. Add the egg mix to rice and violently work it in or cook the eggs first, put them aside and add them at the end? So many decisions. She’s having a very hard time letting me go. I’ve been there. I just wanted someone to tell me, someone with authority, and how the fuck did I become an authority figure for a rich Santa Barbara housewife?! But I feel that this description denigrates her. Feels like I’ve cast some weight upon her for her means and where she lives. She’s no worse or better than you or I. We all just land. We land and look around and wonder who in this crowd makes up our family, our childhoods, our lives, our trauma, our love. We look around and wonder. I don’t want to lessen anyone. Not anyone. Not any God or ghost or man or woman or racist or rioter or Republican or Democrat or Judge or janitor. If you truly think you’re better than a single cell of anyone else, I smile and pat your 4-year-old head. You little idiot.

              The worst times during those 18 or so months in Hollywood before The Christmas Where Everything Collapsed were always the moments involving sex. As I devolved deeper and deeper into heroin addiction most natural human impulses dwindled as well. Certainly, sex drive diminished. I used to think, and sometimes still do, that the magic of dope was that it erased sex drive. I was free. I was free of this split second by split second focus on sex. Every waking moment was a kaleidoscope of imagined images, sounds, smells, memories, fantasies, what-ifs, if-only, and Christ! Look at her! flittering sparkles and paper stars. A person never crosses my path without me imagining.

Without dope life is sex. It’s a big deal. Maybe I had it worse than some but, come on.

              When you’re in love with someone, and you’re kids, and you live in some faraway sunny place with money and with all your wildest dreams a week away, sex is guaranteed. Fucking each other is a daily sacrament. It’s beautiful. It might be sunlit, it might be in neon-lit midnights, it might be on roofs or on hand-painted sofas. It’s everything. It holds everything together. It’s the ritual of saying, “I still want you.” And along comes dope. Heroin’s only ritual is shooting up. Maybe you can tack on cooking it up and perhaps, sometimes, copping but the real ritual is the injection and it’s so wholly solo it might as well be telling the world to fuck off! I want nothing to do with you.

              When two people in love get strung out, they can pull this off for maybe a week or two longer. But even then, it all winds up in the ritual of telling the world, I’m done with you or, more to the point, I got nothing for you. Two junkies in love who met while not junkies is a fresh hell that I wish upon no one. It’s like a forest of sadness trees. An ocean of crying fish, tears lost forever in the saline. That’s a different night. A different song. Different strings of typed letters.

              I continue to think of Leslie when writing this. So much of what is so intimately remembered is a part of her. I’ve asked her for permission at times. She can only say, “Keep writing!” but fuck, I don’t want to hurt her or even make her feel the slightest tremor of hesitation, of weird squiggling ‘head looking down.’ I care what she thinks. Leslie was my first true love. It took me a summer to win her over, and even then, there was a period where I knew she held thoughts of, ‘um, what have I gotten myself into?” I was still just a chubby, goofy teenager. Leslie was in Art School! Four years older. Surrounded by armies of cooler, sexier, more Quaalude holding upstarts than me. I fumbled. I excitedly scrambled and tried to keep up. I guess I caught on eventually. I was the one to hurt her.

              The days would come when I was completely strung out. Which means that I could only exist in one of two distinct states. I was either very high or very sick. Being strung out is binary. Fuck all that trendy non-binary nonsense. If you want to discuss binary versus non-binary, it doesn’t lie in gender politics it lies in addiction. I’d keep count of how often we were having sex. I know precisely how many days of missed sex for Leslie to feel ‘unwanted,’ ' fat’ or ‘boring.’ I knew. And I never wanted her to feel any of that and so the complex equation involving time, amounts of dope and percentage chance of orgasm came into play.

              Let’s say it was Thursday and we last had sex on last Friday. Seems a while for kids. Stretch it out a little with a junky in the house. I knew today was the day. So I’d steel away and cop. I had to have the dope first. If I was sick I just couldn’t have sex anymore than I could sit up straight. But, if I got too high I just couldn’t come and the whole thing would “soften” out into just so much shame. I had to hit the perfect balance  AND she couldn’t know about it! It was imperative that she didn’t know. She could not help me in this. She could not be an accomplice.

              I bet none of this is news to Leslie now. I feel your little pat on my head like so many silly little stupid children. You had a lot of patience.

              And so I’d slip into the sunlit bathroom and get out the works and the lighter and the cigarette filter and the belt and the …..ahhhhhhhhhhh. Time to fuck. Wish me luck!

              And know this. As God is my witness and God means a lot to me. I don’t take God lightly. He’s here. He’s sitting on this pile of Taschen books and wondering what I’ll do next. I care. I cared that Leslie got off. I didn’t count on it given my state but I tried. I had about 12 minutes before the dope kicked in washed everything way into imagined dreams of Leslie’s saying, what’s wrong with me? And my half heard feelings of ‘ just kill yourself. And sometimes I’d hit it and I’d make it and it was good and we’d kiss and forget that this whole nightmare was washing down around us like thick rain. Rain thick with tears. Rain, bubbling and laughing and patting the little kids on the head. God love you.

              These are things that ‘normal’ people rarely worry about when they marry and plan a family. They rarely worry about this sort of stuff because they aren’t fuckin’ junkies! I sit here typing as if I’m some sort of toy skeleton- 12 feet tall. Christ. To just be home and normal. Just normal things and normal loves.

Let’s fry some rice.

I don’t know if he cheated on you on not, but God, I hope he didn’t.

Pigs on the Wing (Part One)

At that point in my life, Tim Fusco was easily the coolest person I’d ever met. I landed at the California University of Pennsylvania in the fall of 1982. The first year of an eventual five-year dual degree adventure. I’ve told you guys about all of that a little. I was in my first college dorm room. I knew right away that my random roommate was trouble. He just seemed like a poor man’s Vanilla Ice without any of what I’d later find out actually made Vanilla Ice kinda cool. Ice became a contractor and built ridiculously garish homes in Florida. He had a reality show. These monstrosities were abominations utterly devoid of taste. But here was this once-was guy just excited to be making something. Even supposedly ugly stuff needs to get made. Only things that don’t ever get made are truly ugly. But yeah, this dude had none of that. He was just some Pittsburgh shitbird without an ounce of interest. But Tim, Tim was so very improbable in this dorm, this college, this state that I was mesmerized.

You put all your stuff away, hook up your stereo you brought from home, and then walk out into the halls to see what’s happening. This is your very first moment of not living at home. You’d been away from home before, but you still lived there. Now I lived here. You live here. We, the past me and the present me scrolling through memories live here together with this lummox and a building full of other kids sniffing around and looking for possible tribal markers.

Let me be clear. To be a tie-dyed 17-year-old Deadhead in a Western PA coal town in 1982 was to be an outlier. My tribe was certainly going to be a small one. But the markers were very easy to spot. I saw a couple of possible contenders. I saw Led Zeppelin stickers on unpacked record crates nestled into a dorm room with open doors. I saw guys with Rush or Scorpions t-shirts. Not really my thing, but I was getting closer. And then I see Tim.

At the end of the hallway comes this tall, lanky, um, person? Half sauntering, half strutting with his eyes down and his hands clasped together just above his waist. It becomes clear this person is a guy. He’s wearing what I’d later realize was the only get-up I’d ever see him in. Faded black Levis. But not denim. Remember those levis that were just cotton of some sort, and they’d immediately fade to grey. Best pants I ever had. Absolute punk uniform requirement. At some point in time, they disappeared; I’ve tried finding these damn things for decades. This was the first time I ever saw them. I distinctly remember him wearing combat boots, as well as I remember him only wearing Converse All-Stars. Whatever one is actually, the truth is all he ever wore. He might have worn all kinds of other shoes too. Who can say? His shirt was a white or black t-shirt with the neck, sleeve, and waist cuff, cut off, so the material rolled up on itself. Usually, they were blank, but sometimes they said Bauhaus or Dead Kennedys or just “Too Drunk To Fuck.” His hair was perfect Syd Vicious spikes, and he had a tight leather choker with a little padlock holding it together. He was preposterous. He looked like he was wearing a very well-researched and sourced Halloween Costume. I hadn’t been sat down and made to listen to The Sex Pistols and the DK’s “In God We Trust, Inc” yet. I didn’t know this world yet. This world I’d tumble down into for years. So he just looked so alien to me. When he flaunted past, I sorta said, “Hey,” in that way young men do when they’re sizing each other up. He just kept going with his own non-committal “Hey.”

I met a couple other guys who seemed to have the same, “wow, I’m so very far from home,” frequency buzzing from their ears. It’s always the ears. Almost the entirety of my human connection and community revolved around a perfect center core of music. We didn’t necessarily love all the same music, but we LOVED music. It was actually beyond love. Music for us ventured into dependence. Music was our weapon and our armor, and our spoils. There was hardly a part of me on that first college day that wasn’t formed or steered by music. My clothes echoed the Grateful Dead. My drive to be an outlier stemmed from the imagined lives of people like Lou Reed and David Bowie, and its edges were softened by Pink Floyd. A decidedly Gilmour-centric version. The only parts of me sitting on this dorm bed in the room of a new-found possible friend that wasn’t forged in music were the parts of me that were here because of my Dad. This five-year dual engineering degree was his plan. I went along with it because I really didn’t have any other ideas, and I knew it would make him happy. Make him proud. No matter how much I fucked up, he and my mom had my back. Not joyfully. Not easily. But they were there.

I’m sitting there and in comes Tim. I was fascinated by him. He was incredibly inward-facing. He spoke very little and always seemed on the verge of an anxious collapse while also telegraphing that he was fucking bulletproof. He existed in some strange cognitive dissonance. He’d met and connected with one of the other guys who’d somehow found each other and were in the first moments of forming a tribe. We were in Mike’s room. Mike Labarbera from Long Island. He dug the Dead too, which is why I suppose I was here, but he was playing The Mothers of Invention. Mike, all smiles, laughter, and divine sight hidden under a permaglaze of THC. Even without the THC. He called pretty girls “tomatoes.” God, I love that.

I just watched, and Tim stood there in his ever-present lean against a door fiddling with something in his hands, always at belt buckle level. He’s forever in that posture in my mind, even in the memories of him lying on a bed, sitting in the grass, or sitting in my car. Always leaning. Always fiddling. I think I was forming a crush.

That’s what I remember most clearly. I remember feeling like I was attracted to him, and that felt weird. That connected to The Thing at 8 or 9. Not necessarily a trigger but familiarity. And yet I knew it wasn’t the same sort of attraction that I’d feel if a tomato walked in the door. The California University of Pennsylvania in 1982 was fucking light on tomatoes.

Guys get crushes on each other. We rarely admit it, but we do. Maybe it’s something else, and we just use the same term, but sometimes two straight guys meet, and one gets pulled into the other’s orbit. That’s the horrible thing about crushes; they never happen for both people. Only one gets to carry it around. It might turn into something else for both of them. It might turn into love, but the initial crush is always one-way.

I don’t remember much more about that first meeting with any of those guys. I just know we all stuck together and became friends. This bond served us well and perhaps primarily existed because we were all such targets of derision by most of the people there. We were weirdos and fags and queers. We were all the familiar names that kids like us got called. But we closed ranks, and we loved it. We flaunted it.

We all hung out together whenever we weren’t in class. Tim got lucky and had Fred as a roommate. Later known as Fred Hate when we started the band. They got lucky. The rest of us got stuck with some version of my poor man’s Vanilla Ice. Whoever Mike’s roommate was is forgotten; I guess we just pushed him out. Some other guy’s writing about the creeps he got stuck with in a college dorm. We gravitated to Mike’s room. Second floor and right before the stairwell. We’d get cases of Old German beer in waxed cardboard boxes with bottles you had to return, all with worn rings around their center from the endless bottling plant apparatus. It occurs to me that this box couldn’t have held 24 bottles. Isn’t a case of beer 24? It had to have been 12. And yet that’s memory, a case. Myriad versions of a single moment can be written in memory.

We’d smoke pot and listen to Zappa and whatever else anyone could get Mike to put on. I’ll tell you this much, those three years in California, PA and not just Mike but other friends as well made Frank Zappa repellent to me. It’s just too much, guys. C’mon! Switch it up a bit. It’s fine. Other guys and some girls drifted in and out of the scene and I can see snatches of them but it’s all the backs of jackets or just the eyes or I can hear just the Western PA accent from some mouth through the smoke. The core remained intact and attracted other components over time, but at first, it was just a handful of us.

The crush with Tim morphed into an odd friendship as we got to know each other. What was strange about it was that I was close to him without ever really knowing anything about him. He was so entirely guarded, yet he’d toy with people by dangling little parts of him into the light only to snatch them away at the last second.

Tim was basically a sociopath. I’m not entirely confident he felt empathy or compassion. But somehow, he escaped the label by being, just, some other thing. Hard to say. I loved the guy, but I always felt like he could pull the rug out at any minute. It’s not easy to admit this. As I write this, it feels like maybe Tim and my friendship with him was a measure of what I felt about myself and what I felt I was worth. Back then, we were just the two weirdest and smartest guys in a band of a handful of “fags.” Tim and I found a lot of things together as those years progressed. We found Eno together. More for sure, but Eno’s enough. At one point, we had an apartment together, and we’d play “Ambient 1: Music for Airports.” all night, just looping and loud and perfect. Try it. Believe me. Christ, I love this record with the power of a thousand suns.

And on one of those nights, I got into a thing with Robin. Robin, the girlfriend I lost my virginity to. We argued. I sulked. She sat there stunned and alone. I walked away. Proud. Confused. Tim came out of his bedroom. She saw him. I was gone out of frame. She went with him into his bedroom. I hear it from my room. I’m pulsating with confused hate. I’m paralyzed. She fucked Tim. We never spoke about it. These things happen. You use one hand instead of two. You fuck up. You don’t use two hands. You drop the third out.

And so we stuck together, and maybe he was or wasn’t a sociopath, but we needed each other for unknown or at least unclear reasons. No one who could see the full movie of my life at this moment would call me “straight.” The sex addiction formed by The Thing and the chasing of shame it excited would surely cancel that out. I don’t know about whatever Tim had left of his life. I can’t imagine him still alive. The point is that nothing about our friendship was sexual or loving, or ambiguous. One look at Tim, and you knew this kid had been through the wringer. Someone else’s wringer. But here we were. In a dilapidated Western Pennsylvania coal town college. We were two supremely fucked up lambs who found each other at the abattoir.

To Be Continued

Post Script:

As I sit here and read this back, I keep thinking that there’s no story here. I know that the real payoff of our friendship happens in the end, but still, I feel like this isn’t enough. What’s the point? What’s the point of writing about loving a sociopath. But I think that I’m starting to realize why I’m doing this. Surely I want you to like it. Surely there’s that. But I think I also want to tell you everything. I want to expose the very most hidden parts of myself to an imagined witness. I want “to lead with that which I most want to hide.” I preach that all the time. I guess this is me slowly doing just this. Because if I can imagine just one other person knowing ALL of me, well, then I’m bulletproof.

Pigs on the Wing (Part Two)

Reading all of this back, I realize that I may have put Robin in the shadows. Anything that happened that night, and God knows if my memories are correct, was my doing. I have to take it all on. Robin was from New Jersey, and there’s nothing about her at all that I don’t remember as beautiful. She allowed me into worlds in which I still journey and fumble and wonder about within. My memory of that night is just me pushing her away and into Tim’s room. That part becomes murky. But within days, maybe hours, we’d all fallen back into our normal roles. Tim with his chubby Goth chick girlfriend from Monongahela, PA, and Robin and I together again, and ever-spinning albums of Eno and Dead Kennedys and ‘Live from the Deaf Club’ and On The Beach. We just all sank back into the present. We bounce back quicker when we’re young. We’re stupid, but we’re elastic.

California was situated at the base of a mountain. The college and some train tracks and the Monongahela river formed the bottom. Cheap spindly houses marched up to the top and disappeared over the ridge into desperation. There was simply nowhere else to live. Just permafrost and terrorblast. It was always early winter in California. Always trenchcoats wrapped around drunk giggling bodies and marches towards parties or the chance of drugs. In between, there were hours of math and chemistry and sociology and physics classes. They were easy compared to becoming an adult in such a place. At such a time. In such a person.

Life continued. Our little band switched partners and living arrangements. Robin and I moved apart as I zeroed in on Leslie. There was no overlap. I really don’t think there was. When I met Leslie during the summer of that first year, I fell all the way in. It took Leslie a summer to realize I lived within her, that I had somehow crawled in with laughs and charming her parents, who I truly loved, but it seemed like it had happened by fall. The Violent Femmes’ first record had done the trick.

I write this in a fog. The thoughts and the themes get all swirled around. I sit at this beautiful, blue plywood table which I know you imagine wrong, and I look for secrets. I look for things to tell you that even my dogs will tilt their heads at. Imagine your dogs looking at you like, “you sure? Really?? Alright, Dad, um….” I want to tell you everything, but it’s not so simple. It never occurred to me that confessing my sins would be the easy part. The hard part would be remembering them.

Maybe it was the second year, maybe the third. I could easily take a moment and figure it out, but I want to go with the fog. I know it was 1984. Hardcore Bob came into the picture. Bob Mullins was a 6-foot-four (at least) 125-pound guy who charged up to me one day in a fluorescent hallway. I’d already had my Sex Pistols/Dead Kennedys confirmation, and I was wearing a homemade tie-dyed Dead Kennedys shirt. I was still on the fence. I could feel myself tipping, but I still held on. This spectre of a human appeared before me in ash-covered dime store jeans and an army jacket. His head was shaved to almost scratches, and his sunken-chin-smile was more like a leer than the shy, brave act I realized it was later. “You like the Kennedys?” Remember the Chris Farley character on SNL where he’d interview people like Paul McCartney, ask obvious inane questions, and then beat himself on the side of the head, yelling, “Stupid! You’re so Stupid!!!.” That’s what the question kinda sounded like, looking back. “Yeah.” I just said, “yeah.” Man, everything changed

1984

We were so primed for this year, and here it landed on us, and nothing changed besides little quips and smirking grins. It was 1984. I know that much. I was with Leslie. She’d come up for the weekend if I didn’t go to her, and we’d have sex in the sunlight from the curtained window that spilled upon my little rented bed. I see that. I see her body and her face and her mouth and the light, and I feel my love for her. I feel the incredible luck I’d had to wind up on a mattress in such a moment, exactly like this. It still feels lucky. Fuck, everything good feels lucky.

I think she and Tim got along pretty well. Minus the Anti-Social Personality Disorder, Leslie was probably more like Tim than she was like me. I can’t really explain how. Maybe they were just more inward-focussed than I was and more into the details. They both seemed to love the details of life, the little loose ends and things others missed. I was struck by those things as well, but I was always putting so much energy into keeping everyone happy that all sorts of cool, weird little squiggles slipped past me.

And throughout all of this Hardcore Bob artfully and expertly led us down a path and to cliffs and fights and weirdness and hours in his bedroom watching him smoke his weird skinny cigarettes and listening to Finnish Hardcore or some other “non-poseur, non-pussy” hardcore punk. Man! I get exhausted just remembering stepping into his bedroom. All the curtains drawn tight. Both his parents were weird, unseen professors lurking somewhere else in the house. He drank coffee from a never-empty green plastic tumbler and rubbed all those skinny cigarette ashes into his cheap jeans. And he was fucking serious about hardcore. This music was his entire lifeline to some sort of manageable, if only barely unincarcerated life. Fuck. I could write forever about Bob and his impact on all of us. Most of the time, he was just preposterous and a figure of fun. Sometimes he got so deep under your fingernails that you just wanted to bash the side of his face in with a shovel. And ultimately, after we left, he lost his grip on the kite string of sanity, and he simply blew away into Pittsburgh hospitals and, I guess, a Pittsburgh cemetery. I remember standing in the kitchen of my first apartment at Penn State after the three years at California were up. I’m on the phone. It’s the kitchen wall phone. How odd to think we could only talk in certain rooms then and usually standing up. Someone told me he’d died. They said he’d seen sparks fly from his mouth before they took him in. And now he was dead. I don’t know who told me or any details or hell, even if he’s actually dead! But I suspect he is, and I just remember feeling a kick to my stomach and knowing that I should have been much kinder to him. But the truth is, I was easily the one who was the most kind to him. It wasn’t enough.

We had formed a band. Bob demanded it. Fred Hate and I played bass and guitar. We alternated. My name was Choreboy. It was taken from the name of copper scrubby pads sold in cheap grocery stores. Years later, I’d buy Choreboy pads every few days to cut up and jam in glass pipes to smoke crack through. Ah, the prescience of youth. Bob was Lex Luther, and Tom was Larvis K Gravis. Tom’s still around and still making amazing music in SF, but then he just laughed and played the fucked up drumset I hauled up there one weekend. We were called “99cents.” We’d found a long roll of 99c stickers somewhere and figured, hey, we already have stickers! 99cents it was.

God, I want to write so much more about the four of us floundering and exploding into finding our way towards playing LOUD in front of shocked eyes in a dark Pittsburgh dive called the Electric Banana. We all have wildly different memories of it, I’m sure. But Jesus, those times did a number on me. I never would have had the balls to go where I eventually did with music without them or Hardcore Bob. Bob, I love you. I should have loved you more. I should have made sure you knew I love you. I fear that you never knew that from anyone.

1984. That year came and went. Tim and I shared a room in a house with two other guys. I still talk with Blair on Facebook from time to time, and I can’t remember the full name of our fourth roommate, but I know he was Paul. Paul and I bonded over The Dead. He drove me home to Leslie’s apartment one weekend. We listened to Dead bootlegs and drank a big jug of wine. A comically big jug of wine. I was hammered by the time I got to Leslie’s. I feel like she had some friends there to boot. I’m sure I made a great impression. We lived these kinds of moments together. We’d drink wine all night, go to class, and dodge the silly attacks of the lummoxes who called us fags. No big deal. We just rolled through it. We pushed their nose’s in it.

One day, I went to make some dinner. We were all living on generic “fish sticks” we bought from that market halfway up the mountain. Total “Deer Hunter” sorta place. Always early winter. I put four frozen fish sticks into the toaster oven, turned it on, and left. I had 4 or 5 minutes. Maybe I went and laid down to listen to music, and maybe Tim left the room. When I returned after hearing the Ding! of the mechanical bell in the toaster, I looked and stopped. Flummoxed. My little fish sticks had transmuted into ash. Ash occupies the exact space and volume of the generic fishsticks. They’d just vaporized. I felt wonder. I looked around like you do. Nothing. I opened the door and poked one. It fell away like houses of ashes do. I pulled back. A miracle has occurred. Bob was right! There are forces much bigger at play, and also, nothing matters, and nothing is at play.

I remembered a comic I’d seen floating about the house in a book. Just some little book. Fuck, what was it called? Let me Google………

The Far Side! Gary Larson! Remember? We had a little square paperback book of comics floating around the house. I think it was the cover, but maybe not, but one comic killed me. There was an illustration of a big Kafka-esque cockroach drinking from a bag slumped against an alleyway wall. Surrounded by bemused but uncaring bugs. “One day, I was a Fortune 500 executive, and then the next day, they realized I was just a cockroach.”

I don’t want to oversell the obvious parallels, but I distinctly remember that. I remember thinking, “Yeah, of course, they’ll find out.” And my fish sticks had been found out. They pretended to be the thing everyone who loved them wanted them to be, and they blew it. They’ll find me out too one day. I’ll be a cockroach-shaped bit of ash.

All of this happens in a nanosecond. Boom, Boom, boom. And I stare at my uncloaked fish sticks, found to be just ash. And I hear laughter. I hear Tim. He slithers into the kitchen with that bemused sociopath smile that I loved. I saw it all at once. He’d rolled up light cardboard in the shape of my fish sticks, swapped them, and just let them burn.

Perfect. Like the kids’ arms in Apocalypse Now! And it’s not the arms that Brando marvels at; it’s how sacred the memory is. If I remember nothing else about that world, that time, that kitchen, Tim’s face, please let me remember this.

Brando:

“….Horror. Horror has a face…And you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. “

We willingly became the ‘fags’ of the school. We forced them to look at us, fought them on rooftops, and lost all the fights with laughter. Fuck em!

“I remember when I was with Special Forces…Seems a thousand centuries ago…We went into a camp to innoculate the children. We left the camp after we had innoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every innoculated arm. There they were in a pile…A pile of little arms. And I remember…I…I…I cried…I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget.”

We had three, really two years together, and despite the pathology, the addiction, the youth, and the awkward disease of becoming a man, we did what was before us. We formed a band. We turned fish sticks into ash, and we beat them at their own game.

“And then I realized…like I was shot…Like I was shot with a diamond…a diamond bullet right through my forehead…And I thought: My God…the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters…These were men…trained cadres…these men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love…but they had the strength…the strength…to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral…and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling…without passion…without judgment…without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.”

There’s so much I never want to forget. Every little sneer of Bob as he told me I listened to the wrong music. Every dismissal of Tim when I shared something excitedly. Every friend floating away from me to form new clusters circling around my head, hurling down rocks. Fuck! How do I stop forgetting? How do I remember?? Where has so much of my life gone, unrecorded, unnoticed? How much of my life do I even remember? Ten percent? Five percent? Is it even two? Think of all the hours we’ve been alive, and how many of those hours are, in any way documented, or recorded or remembered? Jesus, most of my life might as well not have happened. There’s no reason to suspect it did. Life becomes a matter of faith. I am nothing if not a man of faith. Truly. I have faith that these hours did exist with me experiencing something, and yet… they’re gone.. they’ve long ago floated away into an almost-always winter of forgetfulness. Most of my life never happened.

And we bring it down. We lower it down to now, and me thinking of then. We contain emotions, and we straighten up, and we think of things clearly. We pretend we have any fucking control over our memory and the things that loved or hated us.

I don’t think I was hated a lot. At least I can say that. I’ve been hurt, but it wasn’t from malice. It’s always from fear. Fear of something is what drives the entirety of what seems to attack us. Well, except for the sociopaths. Maybe they just want to hurt. I choose to push it away.

In any case, the fish stick prank was fucking brilliant. Just four sticks of ashes perfectly sized to replace my fish sticks. And in such a quick time. I never want to forget that feeling.

We spent the year there, and we slithered through 1984. So few memories. I only remember the fish stick ashes, Leslie’s naked mouth, and the wrath of Bob. But we move on.

The next year, the wholly inconsequential 1985, we moved upstairs. 1985 is the most vapid of all years. There was some confusion about us all living in some other shack outside of town. We even moved in. I remember a huge dark living room with our bedrooms off to the side. But the landlord appeared. He just appeared. I just remember him becoming flesh in the light, and poof! Something had happened, and we couldn’t live here anymore. We went back to the yellow house, back where we were except one floor up.

This was so much better.

I roomed with Andy from New Jersey from the New York trip story. Tim and Fred Hate lived in the other room. One night Andy went to sleep while the rest of us, Tim, Fred and I, stayed up on acid. We decided to wake him up every thirty minutes and make him eat a popsicle. Offer him a popsicle. We’d walk in there with a blue or red or orange frozen, um, thing and proclaim, “Andy! Time for your popsicle!” I remember him lifting his head and eating it over the next ten minutes. Fucking magic. Had to be at least 5 hours worth.

One time Andy told me, “Ed McMahon met my Father.” Listen. Not “my Father met Ed Mcmahon,” but “Ed McMahon met my Father.” That means everything to me. It’s the most beautiful, accidental expression of love I’ve ever heard.

God, there’s so much to tell, and I’m sinking into Highland Park Police helicopters and sleep wrapping around all of my worlds. I’m off. We’ll see where this goes. I have an ending. I always have an end that never appears.

But I remember one last afternoon. Tim came back from a weekend at home. He’d been to Eide’s. The Pittsburgh place to buy real records. He had a few albums, which he showed us. One was from New Order. Maybe the first one after they ditched Joy Division after it stopped at the end of a rope. I always hated them for that. A few others and then one with a big rat on a hotrod spraying Tommy gun fire after fleeing rats. Big Daddy Roth sorta deal. He put it on. I hated it. He took it off and walked into his room with his piles of records. Fuck, I really hated that record. He walks around the corner with this thing in his arms that would change everything for me. I’m only writing this now because of that.

It. Changed. Every. Thing.

Big-Jesus-Trash-Can

But God gave me sex appeal!!!!!!

That last year in the Yellow House. The spring, actually.

Fall had gone into some soup of little people bounding about in double time, bouncing and squirming; Slam! (Get Up!) (UP UP UP!!!!) whoah..slide down and BANG!!! Pinballing with pings and pops, and Wham! Flying off into some 1940’s arcade walls and slowly rolling..to…a.…Christmas stop. All the time, kids just trying to figure it out in a skeleton of a town in Western Pennsylvania. And we were lucky. We got Lucky! We found each other, and we laughed and fucked and moaned and sighed and gulped and …..well, we looked each other in the eye. At least we did that. I wouldn’t trade a second of it. Not like it didn’t hurt, but…

We came back to The Yellow House. Upstairs now. Me and Tim. Fred and Andy. Not the last year but the best year. It was always Tim and his lackey and me and mine. Wholly unwitting. Fuck the both of you, Fred and Andy muttered.

Tim had bought those records. When he brought records home, then….wait!

Is Tim still alive? Can anyone answer this?..anyone reading this, linked to this, emailing this, or fallen upon this? Can anyone answer? Is Tim still alive?

I feel like he isn’t. I’ve had this feeling for decades. I’ve always felt like he split and left me holding the bag. Like he’s half-interestedly looking at me typing, and he’s smirking. Looking down and dead in the eyes.

And when I imagine this, I drift off to….Love and loathing spiral around each other into cornfields of confusion. Leaves flitter, and I stroke blades of newborn grass and just speak love. “Love me,” I breathe. “Just love,” I exhale on to little tendrils of flowers. Just..love. Just wrap yourself in the childhood blankets of reassurance and safety, none of which appear in college or even in earlier days. When we leave, we leave it all. We shoot past safety into …little thin whisps of wonder, thin ropes of sex, and tiny mouseholes of magic.

And so, in my world, Tim is dead.

But in that fall of 1985, he was surely alive. It’s like we’d walk down the mountain daily to punch in and slay our dragons, punch out and climb up each night and say, “Hi, let’s have some soup and watch the ‘A Team.’” The four of us did our thing, and did any of us even know what each other was doing? We knew what we liked and what we disagreed about. I think we only guessed who each other really was underneath. Down where they get you. Down past the safe and anodyne parts of us. In the brightly lit belly of all the beasts that swam and played and yelped and snuggled within us. No one knows those parts of us, those feral and sad parts. The puppy parts.

And then Tim brought that record home. That thing he had in his room. Back then, to buy a record and to pore over its cover was to also quickly record it on TDK SA tapes, “the best you could buy!” Bob said. You could keep it MOVING! Keep it mobile, keep it around you wherever you went and use it like armor no matter what the Troglodytes threw at you. Fuck Them! Music as swords.

That’s what we did with our records. We recorded them onto cassettes right away. Plastic rings onto plastic tapes. We imbued these little plastic things with magic. Music was magic. If you don’t think music is magic and you can’t hear that…that little sigh…well…then I’m not sure….what…to…do.

Tim bought that record with the rat shooting the cats or the mouse or whatever the fuck was going on in that cover. I don’t know; I just HATED it. I’d never felt such a visceral loathing. Bob snickered and told me it was the ‘Birthday Party.’ I can not tell you how much I hated it. I hated Tim for buying it. I hated everyone in the room for NOT hating it. Jesus! It drove me crazy with hate!

They fucked with me. They’d play it to rile me up. Jesus, it was just awful. Just noise and pretentious bullshit and wholly nonsensical. I’ve never hated anything like I hated this music.

Time went on. They grew tired of fucking with me. Probably because I started selling LSD, and they all wanted in. I’d buy sheets of 100 from my friend Tim Z in West Virginia, and I’d own the place.

Let’s spend a moment with Tim Z. Tim was from Bel Air. He lived in Marywood up near C-Mart. He went to C. Milton Wright. I just knew of him. He was a big deal if you were into drugs and The Dead in Bel Air at the end of the 70s. I think I had the same sort of fascination (crush) with him that I had with Tim at college. My childhood best friend was Tim Amos, and I was still close to him. When I went to John Carroll, Tim Hardwicke became my go-to. Hmmm. I’ve never considered this before. Tim Z was the flip side of a sociopath. He was a people person. He was wildly cool and drifted through crowds as if they had just parted for him. At least, I imagined this as I’d hear all about him from mutual friends who wound up at JC. Richie Gramil, for one. Richie was the first of us to die from this stuff. This stuff we all wound up doing. I don’t think Richie made it to 19. Richie talked a lot about Tim. Eventually, all roads lead to Dead shows for our diaspora. We met there and kept at it. I still talk to Tim every now and again. I love you, Tim

So yeah, I bought acid from Tim Z while he was at WVU. I’d get the little perforated square of cardboard in the mail in a letter. I think I paid 200? Maybe 150? It was about 2 or 3 inches square with 100 lesser squares easily detached via the perforations. But use scissors! Don’t get your paws all over it, man. We’d settled into eating LSD like it was beer nuts. Eating it like it was Utz Crab chips. People, unknown, would climb the stairs from our front door and ask, “Do you guys have acid?” I’d say, “yeah, go in that room, cut off what you want and leave the money.” That’s how it worked. LSD users have a slightly higher level of character than the rest. They’d cut what they wanted and leave 5 dollars a hit in one of those tin Sucrets boxes. I don’t think anyone ever really screwed me over. I certainly never noticed it.

We drifted through these days with lots of laughter and wine and trips into Pittsburgh to buy more records, tapes, and awkward visits to family houses. All but mine. Bob smoked and rubbed ash into his jeans for months, all perched nervously and anxiously on the edge of the red chair.

The day came when I was fully away from these psychedelic imaginings. I’d sold the last of the LSD. We were all just normal kids walking through our college years. It still mattered to me that I made my Dad proud. Just another day. And yet, everything was wrong. I’d slammed up against the ceiling of my aptitude. The math that had come to me so naturally and with such confidence started drifting away to some other, higher realm. I couldn’t reach out to it as readily. I was just not as smart as they told me I was. I swear I tried. But I bounced and skittered across the glass pane of “this is as far as you go.”

I think it was a Wednesday night. Maybe it was Tuesday. It was definitely in the very middle of a week. I was fairly failing Statistical Analysis. It was too hard; I had no idea. I’d never felt such a feeling of …just…dumb.

I just felt dumb.

Like all those kids, years before, that I kinda looked down upon, not quite sneering but with a look of wonder and fear. How can you not understand this?

Look, I was stupid. I didn’t get any of it. I was without understanding. I’d become one of the dumb kids.

Everyone was gone. I was alone in this tall, proud, and crumbling apartment. I had a bunch of mushrooms. You know the kind. It wasn’t something I’d planned on. I remember the feeling of doing something spontaneously and how good and unfamiliar that was. I remembered I had them in a baggie in my dresser and just decided to eat them.

I boiled a little water in the kitchen and dropped some tea bags and a baggie of dried mushrooms into the pot. A bunch. A whole bunch. Certainly enough.

(the best cook you ever had)

I’m sure I had thoughts of, “Oh jeez. I just ate a lot of mushrooms.” I suppose I walked into my room to try again and do math homework that beat me at every turn. I kept trying. And then I had the thought. I think I thought to sneak into Tim and Fred’s room and find the Thing I hated. The record. The tape.

(grind.grind)

I figured I’d grab the cassette of the album, which I hated but was so drawn to. I wanted to just dive into hate and fear. And fascination. Hate has such a powerful pull. I fear we’re so more fully pulled to hate than we are to love. I was that night. I found it. A TDK SA cassette. “Junkyard” and ‘the birthday party’ scribbled in Tim’s hands.

This thing had tormented me for months. I really can’t put into words how much this album bothered me.

I snuck out with the cassette. No one else is home. I’m just sneaking around this empty house for sneaking’s sake. I feel the mushrooms coming on. A baggy full. Who knows how many after all this time. A couple grams? Maybe 5? Maybe 1? Just a jar full of mushrooms and hot water and a tea bag. A slosh of the stuff. I’d swallowed it like lemonade. I feel the heat first. It shoots up the back of my neck. The little muscles in my shoulders flex and vibrate.

I sit on my bed and prepare. I’m perpendicular to the pillow, but the pillow is pressed against my right thigh. My back is against the wall, my combat boot-clad feet hanging over the edge. I have my statistical analysis book on my lap. I still marvel at the simple thought that I was going to try and do homework given the mushrooms I’d just taken. I didn’t think they’d give me any sort of breakthrough, any leg up. I just always did my homework, whether I could or not. I always had something to turn in. So I nestled into this space where I did almost all of my work and opened the book. I have my walkman on and its tendrils in my ears, and it just happens. Slowly.

Little things appear in the dark corners of the room. Little smiles and laughs. I shake it off. I know what’s happening. And still, the little smiles poke out from the shadows behind Andy’s headboard directly across from me against the opposite wall. Whoa. It’s getting hot. Um…

I remember hearing the first sounds of the record. Sounds I was very familiar with as I was teased by them for months. But now. Now, something else is beginning. This is at least a defining moment of my life. Laugh if you want to. Fly around me and snicker, but I sat there clad in iron and had a moment.

I Had A Moment

A moment alone.

A moment where I just felt weird

(and like a bug)

I saw all the little numbers and letters on the page of my math book start dancing and darting around and popping up to give me little kisses and jumping sideways to laugh and hug, and then they’d rest again to try the next big rubber bounce up to ME. I could see their little black serifs scrape across the textured white paper of the book. Huge swatches of white paper where the type had just gone AWOL. They were so happy! My God, they were happy. I laughed with them. All of these lovely little digits trying to get into me.

(i let them)

And I just let them, and all the while The Birthday Party is POUNDING in my ears. I’d heard it a thousand times before and hated every second of it. But now, well, now is a whole different matter. The sound in those little earphones is just scraping and sliding and pulsing and wrapping around my head. Tightening down like a tourniquet with all the letters and numbers and formulas pulling the ends of the rubber. Happy. Smiling. Hearing the sound. And the music grows in my mind. Just POUNDING from AUSTRALIA and SCREAMING and TEARING TEXAS Apart like GOLD!!

FUCK!

FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!!!!!! This is it! . Oh my God, I feel it now. THIS IS IT. THEY ARE COMING! This is it! Nothing else matters.

(fuck you mike, you pushed robin away)

For hours this happens and more. For hours I sit and look wide-eyed, unmoving and wonder where they are and if they’ll come to help me.

(and all we get is 40 hack reporters)

HOURS pulse IN and OUT

BOOM boom, BOOM. An edge drifts down.

(sharp, 23 degrees, japanese sharp)

NO! Wait!.....This is it! Fuck, what is this? What is happening? Where’d they go? The letters and the numbers and the homework. I kept trying to do my homework, which seemed a little better. Throughout all of this, I kept trying to do the math because I wanted to make my Dad proud. I never took a step without wondering what my Dad would think of it. Not until he died in my arms and not since. This is all that matters. I love you, Dad. I never stopped. Nothing else is this. I’m confusing my father with this music. It becomes some huge thing. The bed and the heat and the letters, and then I realize. It hits me. Nothing else is like The Birthday Party.

(you’re a child..step back…you’re a simpleton)

Little numbers dance. They pop and squirm and smile. Little airborn smiles. The guitar scrapes and scratches across the reverb! The bass slides and fucks underneath. The bass fucks you.

(come steal my heart away)

Bang! Bang! Bang!!

(scream)

Look at the numbers. FOCUS on the numbers! Try and forget this nonsense and just focus on the numbers. Nothing in this little Yellow House room has felt this way. Just me. Just mushrooms. Just little faeries. Little flitters of love. Screams and reverb from Australia. Robin. Leslie and straight through to Nery! 35 years. LOVE!

Beep, beep, beep. She loves me.

(you can’t tell)

Come! Come into Me

(i doubt it)

I don’t think leslie will want me anymore. I shrivel and look up between the digits as they drag their serifs like minstrels. I’m nailed to this bed with little kids’ feet hanging over the edge, and I want more than anything to hold Leslie and tell her I love her. I see it all slide into my mouth, and it happens, and it’s over. The song ends, and it’s silence. This first song has lasted a month.

I’m thinking about love and math and flickering smiles, and there’s some weird band in my head. Who are they? Where is Leslie?

(i taste you as i lick you)

The singer is just another leaping letter from a book of numbers trying to escape the pages of a Statistical Analysis textbook.

Whoever they are, I will love them forever. I see them all slide into me and wish me Merry Christmas. All the little bouncy numbers.

(i run away from you)

All of the little you and me. All of our little feet hanging over the edge. Little kids. Little smiles. Before The Thing. Before things needed Australian sound. Australian push-back!

Oh My God…I just sigh into my lap and my book and the walkman, all piled together like a wet knot. This was all before I was so sure of things. Before I proclaimed that magic didn’t exist. I took such pride in dashing everyones’ hope. This was long before that. This was when I still believed in stuff like love and magic and letters and numbers and rivers of reverb roiling in like mountains from the Outback.

The numbers started jumping less. The smiles grow tired but no less happy. Just tired. I remember thinking it might be time to stand and, well, just stand. I put my book and notebook aside, dropped my pencil, and pulled the headphones off. Wow.

Fuck. What a night.

( i taste you on my face in the morning)

I got A’s ever since. I mastered Statistical Analysis. Something just clicked in that swirl of drugs and music, and wanting to make my Dad proud. Something made sense. Nothing I’ve done since hasn’t in some way been connected to that night and The Birthday Party and Nick Cave. All one big thing for me. All the heroin and the heartbreak and the romance and the joy and sadness. All of it I trace back to that night in some way or another. Look, it did a number on me.

Laugh. I know you want to, and I want you to! Laugh! Laugh at me, laugh with me.

To this day,

(BOOM!)

I see everything in terms of statistics and Nick Cave.

Everything is math and Nick Cave.

Like it or not.

Thank God for that night 😊

(Tim and I snicker down upon you all with love)

He's Gone

Robin reached out to me earlier today. She told me she has no memory of sleeping with Tim that night. She told me she couldn’t even imagine it. And I believe her. Implicitly. Explicitly. Little poisonous ideas worm into my psyche, and they sit there on the same perches, the same branches that truth does. I confuse them. And don’t we always favor the thoughts that cause us the most pain? Don’t we reach for the reeds to flay ourselves with? I certainly do. But Robin reached out, my first love, and I trust her.

              For a while there, when college was new, and everything was wrapped in the glow of “just not being home,” things and thoughts and tastes and reflections were magical. We drank things and swallowed things, and put other things on our tongues. We were FREE. We were free to sink or swim. And maybe I should take more.

It’s hard to write. It’s hard to categorize all of this into a narrative. My hands and fingers fairly pulse and throb above each black key with cobalt blue letters perfectly spaced in the middle. This button makes an E. This one makes an O. So many choices with the dogs wandering around and wanting treats. Swirling into a storm of love and smiles but confused smiles all the same.

And so summer came when school let out, and I was back home. New friends and relationships were now spread across the world. And me, safe in my house with people who loved me. God, I was so loved. My parents never considered if, even for a moment, not loving me. I took it for granted so often, and they never wavered. They just loved me no matter how high I piled the debris onto the bonfire of my life.

I can’t even remember how we knew that the Dead were touring, but somehow we did. How did we know? I’ve wondered about this for years. It’s as if it just popped into our consciousness. And we’d get tickets, or we’d at least make plans to drive to someplace without tickets. We’d just go and see what happened. Nothing has ever felt that wide open with possibilities since. And here they were at Merriwether Post Pavillion. Just a little way down the line.

Andy and Robin, and I made plans to go. They drove from New Jersey to pick me up. I assume they spent the night after the show, but I can’t be sure. Anything could have happened. I remember sitting on the little stoop in front of my house in the bright sunlight waiting for them to roll up. I just sat there. The sun felt good, and I was excited to go to another Dead show. God, they meant everything to me back then. My Dad was home, and my Mom was working. She was a pharmacist and worked at the local hospital. She’d get off at 9 each night but had to be on call once she got home. Someone might need some morphine or an antibiotic, and she’d get the call, and in she’d go. My Dad usually drove her. I think so, at least. It didn’t happen a lot, but it was something that lurked in the shadows.

And so I sat and waited, and then something happened which I’ve carried around like a noose ever since. People talk about regret. We do things we wish we hadn’t, or maybe we regret not trying something. I’ve always felt it’s better to regret something you did rather than something you didn’t. But, I did something while waiting for Andy and Robin that I would give anything to take back.

At some point, I stood up and walked inside. They’d get there soon enough. I just walked into the little space between the front door and the stairs leading up to our bedrooms. My Dad was home. He was likely lying in bed reading. He was always reading. He called down and asked me if they’d arrived yet. He was happy for me. He knew what a big deal a Dead show was. I don’t think he fully understood what sorts of things could happen there, but he knew his son was a bit on the wild side. I think he was secretly proud of it. He certainly was years later when I got a record contract. When he passed away, I found a box of everything ever printed about us. Every interview and every test pressing. He’d kept it all. I never knew.

And then he asked me, in a very halting and almost shy voice, if he could go with us to the show. I was just shocked. I could hear how much he truly wanted me to say yes. Fathers don’t ask their kids those questions without putting an awful lot on the line. He just said, “Can I go with you guys?” I told him we didn’t have an extra ticket. I lied to him. We wound up giving a ticket away to some Deadhead dodging the rain from underneath a Day-Glo bus. But in that moment, I just lied, and he said, “That’s ok, maybe next time.” Fuck. I could hear the disappointment in his voice, and all he cared about was not making me feel bad. I just lied to him out of fear and embarrassment, and God knows what other horrible reasons, and he just tried to make me feel like it was fine. I stood there looking at the floor. I felt paralyzed. I never want to forget that moment and the proof of how horrible I could be. It’s not like he had ever asked such a thing before or since. He asked one time. He took a chance, and I blew it.

I think I’ve only told one person about this. I stuffed it so down deep inside me where all the rotten things lay. One night it just came up, and I told Nery. I think she was shocked at how overwhelmed I was in just trying to get it out. I know she held me and said whatever people say to people they love when these people are self-destructing on the couch right next to them, and the dogs are worried, and everything turns grey and joyless.

Eventually, Andy and Robin got there, and we left shortly after. They met my Dad, and we never spoke of it again. I just floated through the rest of the night. I remember giving the ticket away and how awful I felt about it. What was I so afraid of? Why did I react with such reflexive lying? I know he would have had a blast, and I’d have that memory instead of this awful thing. But I fucked up. For all my talk of wanting to be the outlier and the weird kid given the chance, I just shriveled up.

When my Dad got sick and lay in the hospital for those last two months, or however long it was, I thought so much about this. I just wanted to make it up somehow. He waxed and waned. Some days it seemed like he’d be able to come home, and then other days, he was just out of it. And even then, when he could talk, he was just happy. He kept looking out for us, my Mom and the many friends who would visit. He had so many friends. He was such a truly good guy.

You think of all sorts of things when your Dad is dying in front of you. You can’t wrap your head around it. This just can’t really be happening. I thought of the Dead show and a thousand other times when I wished I’d been kinder to him. Surely someone made a mistake. And then the doctors ask you and your Mom to step into a little room. They sit you down, and you know what’s coming, but nothing can prepare you for it. The doctor was very kind and tried to soften the blow as best he could. But what can one really do? He told us that my Dad just wasn’t going to get any better and that he’d be on life support indefinitely. We had to choose. We had to choose to let him go. Fuck. I’ve never felt anything like that. I remember the room so distinctly, the beige walls and the white Formica tabletop covered in tears and my Mom’s look of panic, and I held her.

We let him go. We allowed them to stop life support and sat next to him for two days until he finally took his last breath. And he was gone, just like that. I just shut down and went into taking care of my mom mode. I couldn’t handle it. It took a long time for me to even begin to face it. And I didn’t dwell on the Dead show memory, but I carried it. I still do. My Dad asked me to be a part of my life for one night, and I said no. I fucking blew it. I’d give anything to have that chance again. I love you, Dad.

Chuck E's In Love

After the Christmas Where Everything Collapsed, I wound up back in Baltimore. It was 1989. The Orioles had a season of historical tragedy. I went to rehab for the first time and made my way into a little tribe of people trying to stay away from their demons and desires. Most of us did. Certainly, every now and again, someone would fall off and die. I know that sounds flippant and callous, but this is what life is like in the world of sobriety. People you love just up and die, and you feel shocked, weep, and you move on. Better them than me. It sounds horrible, I know, but it's real. Just staying alive one more day is a big deal.

I fell in love again. I met Trish, and on we went. I remember telling Leslie about her. We were in my car on some backwoods Harford County road just talking. She was home for Christmas. I told her about Trish and reflexively started crying. I'll never forget her reaction. She said something to the effect of, "Stop your fucking phony tears. I'm not buying it anymore." Wham! She just lit into me, and I knew she was absolutely right. I'd used tears to try and gain sympathy, but what sympathy could I expect? Jesus, the things we do to people we love. That Leslie is even in my life is a testament to her soul, certainly not mine. And, well, Trish didn't last so long anyway.

              I spent that year living a new clean life. I stopped getting high. I had a lot of sex and made a lot of pipe bombs with Paul. Paul was another newly sober friend and was a plumber by trade. We'd get PVC pipe and acetylene from his work and make cannons that shot 16oz glass soda bottles hundreds of yards into the night. We could punch a hole in a billboard from across the street. We'd laugh the laughs of adrenaline. Eventually, we moved up to black powder pipe bombs. We never wanted to destroy anything; we just wanted to feel the exhilaration of the BOOM! God, what a feeling. One night we got arrested. 8 felony counts. But they let us go. God knows why. We made one more bomb and set it out in the sticks. A long fuse that gave us a hundred yards or so of distance. I heard a massive BANG followed by an immediate ZINNNNNNGGG right next to my ear. It moved my hair. Shrapnel. One-half inch to the left, and I'd be dead. This marked the end of our bomb days. I got scared.

              I kept going. I kept going to meetings. I kept fucking Trish and feeding her dog, Jake. What a beautiful dog. Her Dad was in the CIA. The real deal. That's all I know. Very hush-hush. And we kept going. And as all things do in a junkies life, eventually, I got high. I remember driving through neighborhoods near North Avenue and listening to The Cowboy Junkies. That first record is so sublime. All recorded with just one microphone. So ethereal and so silky. You drive around and look for likely characters. Hopefully, some older Black guy. The young ones would always burn you.

I pulled over and asked him if he had dope. Sure enough. I bought a couple bags and an outfit and set out for a sea change in my world. I was doing this. No turning back. I got home to Trish's apartment, where I basically lived all the time and went into the bathroom after getting a spoon. I did the thing. The ritual. I poured the powder into the spoon and squirted some water from the outfit. Old hat by now. One minute later, and I'm back home. Wherever home is. Whatever my idea of home and happiness and love was. I was back. Once it starts, it doesn't end until everything collapses.

I could tell you all about the next couple of months and my slow but steady move back to LA. Eventually, Paul and Arron came out to drive back with me. They had no idea I was strung out. Paul found an outfit in my jacket pocket the very first night. We all just looked down in shame. But here we were, and we were going back. I left Trish with some idea of her coming later. To start some new life. She found some new guy to fuck, and who could blame her. I saw her once again as she was on her way to San Fransisco. She stopped in LA to check-in. I was decidedly checked out. I'm sorry, Trish. I'm just always saying I'm sorry. I should grow a pair and just stop being a fucking monster.

It's so hard to write about such long periods of time and distill the essence of each and every day. Surely things happened in that year in Baltimore that are worth talking about. All the people I met and all the little inroads to my heart they made. But I think I have to look at this life in fits and starts. Maybe everything will become apparent and clear in time, but now, now as I sit here and drink wine and wonder what's important, I have to be ruthless. I have to chop everything up and just put the pretty things, the ugly things, the things that stab and hug me on the platter.

And so, I settled back into life in LA. I lived with Paul in Frogtown. I don't know why it was called that, but it's an area near the river and next to Atwater Village. Working-class houses and Mexicans and kids in bands and junkies. I just kept getting loaded. It's not like you just stop. It's your job. I fell back into doing PA work and Art Department gigs. When I was low on money, I'd ask my parents for some. I'd come up with some half-baked catastrophe that required a few hundred bucks, and they'd send it. Jesus, the cost of that psychically is immense. The drugs help, but the drugs wear off, and there you are. Just some piece of shit who lied again to your parents to get dope money.

Jobs came and went. A good job was one in which there was enough petty cash to stay high throughout most of the days. Some jobs were awful, with me kicking and begging to go home, but you can't really let anyone know. I mean, they all know it's not a huge mystery why one guy is sweating and vomiting the whole day, but they never let on. And so, time passed.

I got a call to do a job in the desert. Earlier I wrote a story in which I confused "desert" with "dessert." It kills me. But I was going to the desert, the dry place in this story. The video was for Ricky Lee Jones. Surely I knew of her, but she wasn't some hero of mine. In fact, it felt like it had been some time since I'd even heard of her. Maybe this was her comeback. We were going to Death Valley to film God knows what. Lots of people spinning about in the heat and sand with her likely singing up front. I just knew it was a job, and that meant money, and that meant dope.

When these kinds of jobs happen, you have to prepare. You're going to someplace where there is simply no dope. You have to prepare. The night before we left, I bought whatever dope I could and had such a good plan about how to ration it and get back relatively unscathed. Junkies always pull this shit. We do junkie math. "I’ll do a ballon when we start and wait until lunchtime to do the next, and if I keep this 6-hour process going, I’ll be fine.”

We all met at Propaganda on Orange, or was it Citrus? It was in the new bigger building. I was driving the production cube truck. 7Am. We’re all there. We all have walkie talkies. It’s all very official and standard. I have a pocket full of dope, and I’ve already done my wakeup. I’m ready. Things are looking ok. We head out.

The convoy starts, and we head out towards wherever Death Valley is. North I guess. Somewhere out THERE. Some other world. At some point, we stop to get some drinks. The walkie-talkies buzz, and we pull over at that Bun Boy place. Some hamburger joint that you can’t miss if you find yourself out there. Now it’s hours before my next planned shot, but I figure, well, maybe if I do a little, this whole thing will be a little more pleasant. Maybe I can be nicer to people. Maybe I can be a better PA. And so I dip into the bathroom and Vroom! I do a big shot. Ahhhh. Such is the feeling. I’m in love with everyone. But, my supply is severely diminished. It’s ok, I’ll just wait a little longer until the next one.

I’ll spare you the details, but we arrive in Death Valley hours later, and it’s hot. It’s FUCKING HOT. It’s easily 120 degrees. It’s like the sun has landed on you and wrapped its tendrils around your heart to fry your soul. Fuck, it’s just fucking hot. And you know what? I got nothing left. I’ve shot all my dope, and I’m fucked.

And so it begins. We unload the trucks, set up the cameras, and get extras in swirling bright wisps of fabric ready to dance in the heat. Everyone is jumping in and out of the motorhomes to get just a taste of air conditioning, and we just get to it. And I’m getting sick. I’m getting very sick. Dopesick is bad enough without 120-degree sweltering heat enveloping you. And I am not asking for compassion. I brought this on myself. All the years of romanticizing Lou Reed and Nick Cave and William Burroughs got me to this point, and I am well and truly fucked. And I deserve it.

The rest of the day is a blur. It’s miserable. I keep wondering if maybe someone else there has dope, but that’s just a non-starter. I just go through it. Maybe one of the worst days I’ve ever endured and one I know I created and deserved. I know at some point, I started pretending I was sick, like flu sick. I tried to get some sort of compassion. The day continued, and the next thing I remember is lying on the motel room floor with all the other PAs in bed. All of them were partying and drinking, and I’m shriveled up and trying not to vomit.

But sometimes miracles happen. The next day when we all woke up and got ready to go back to set, Nina, the production manager, asked me if I still felt sick. To this day, I think she must have known what was really going on with me, but she didn’t let on. Ricky Lee was done with her parts and needed to be driven back to her home in Ojai. Since I was sick, Nina asked me to drive her. God knows what kind of logic was at play here, but I just said Yes! And I was out of there. I was no less sick, but at least there was some sort of light at the end of the tunnel. I’d take Ricky home in one of the production vans, drop her off and head back to LA and we’d all wrap the job in a couple of days.

I remember sitting behind the wheel of the white Galpin van with Ricky Lee Jones in the passenger seat. Of course, I wanted to talk with her, but all that was on my mind was how dope sick I was. I remember thinking, she must have some experience with this, but I dared not ask her. We just drove. We drove through hours of flat, dry desert headed, I guess, to her house in Ojai. I thought of her as a rock star. I knew really nothing about her, but I knew she was a big deal. Somehow.

At one point, we pulled off to some little café/gas station to get something to drink or at least break up the trip. When we walked in, we saw two kids playing Pong on a quarter arcade game. Pong! They were so into it. This is all they had, and they were mesmerized by it. I remember asking her if she ever felt this excited by Pong. She said no, but she got it. She said she loved these kids for making do with what they had. I fell in love with her there for a minute. We got drinks or whatever, and we left. And those kids never looked up. They had no idea that some rockstar and shitbird junkie had just fallen in love with them. They just kept spinning their knobs up and down to bounce one more square white ball towards each other’s hopeful demise. Just miss! Just miss my shot! We left.

We drove on. At one point, I put on the first NWA record. Maybe I was testing her. Maybe I just liked it. I truly did love it. All I know is that we got into a big fight. She hated it, and I just told her she had no idea what the hell she was talking about. Back and forth, we fought. There’s something so intimate about fighting with someone you see as a rockstar or at least someone better than you. We fought and argued and eventually just became friends. I think we even laughed at how preposterous the whole day was. I grew to like her. A lot. She was one of the good ones. And one we drove, getting closer to Ojai.

We pulled into her driveway at some point. It seemed like we’d been driving for hours and hours. We likely were. God knows where Death Valley is, but when we got to her house, it was so much nicer. Shade. Trees, Plants. No Suns landing on our backs.

We walked in. She had a beautiful house. All rustic and beautiful art and nice little things here and there. And a beautiful girl who turned out to be her babysitter. Or Housesitter. Or something. I didn’t see any kids, but I was told I had to drive this girl home to LA. She was gorgeous. But, dope sick precludes a lot of that, and I was surely not one to seduce anyone. She was just a nice girl I had to drive home. We drank some water, and I asked to use the bathroom.

Well, you know what junkies do in bathrooms. It was upstairs at the top of the stairs. I walked in and reflexively did what I did in every bathroom I'd ever been in. I saw myself in the medicine cabinet mirror and reached and pulled it open.

A choir of angels sings. Pure light from Heaven reigns down upon my seeking eyes. There, in the middle of the center shelf, rests a prescription of Percodan. 5mg Percodan. I don’t hesitate for a second. I just reach out, twist the top and empty all of them into my mouth. I bend over to scoop up water to wash them down. How many did I take? Who cares. Hopefully enough. Seemed like a lot. I’ve never felt such an injection of pure relief as I did then. Consequences be damned. I just swallowed every Goddamn Percodan that Ricky Lee Jones had. Later, maybe I felt guilty. But it was much later.

I walked downstairs, told Ricky it was very nice getting to know her and gathered up this hot Mexican chick and headed out. We drove for a while, and just before we hit the 101, I felt them coming on. I was going to be alright. I was going to make it. The beautiful girl and I talked all the way home, and I just felt the oxycodone swell up inside of me. And I’d made it one more day.

That’s what being a junkie is. Just making it one more day. I never heard anything about it. I never really cared. I bought more dope when I got home, and I settled into my futon in Paul’s house, waiting for the next opportunity to cut a little more out of my soul. Junkies destroy themselves by using extreme pleasure to carve away parts of themselves. None of it is good. None of it is romantic. None of it doesn’t break everyone’s hearts.

I think of you a lot Ricky. I wish you could read this someday.

Some Weird Sin

Eventually, it all had to end.  There are stories from before the final Christmas, and I suppose I’ll get to them, but it seems like at this point, you all need me to experience some pain, some suffering from all the selfishness I’ve been sharing with you.

              Every Christmas, Propaganda had a huge party for anyone even remotely involved in what we did there.  From the lowliest PA to the top directors like David Fincher and the robot hack, Michael Bay.  I shouldn’t say that.  Who am I to judge someone like Michael Bay?  What the hell have I done which puts me in any position to judge him?  And yet, those movies he made were, well, they weren’t Apocalypse Now, Magnolia, or A Serious Man, but people sure did seem to like them.  I judge music the same way; I never take into account that the stuff I consider as unlistenable brings millions of people a lot of happiness.  It’s not a sound metric.

               This final party.  My final party was downtown in one of those beautiful old theatres.  I can’t remember the name, but it was cavernous and had opulence cascading from the painted ceilings to the lush, if not garish, carpeting covering every conceivable step.  It was like playing hopscotch where you simply couldn’t land on some thread of blue and red and woven brown and green carpeting.  Acres of the stuff.  Leslie and I went, and I think Marion and maybe Arron went as well.  Limousines regularly pulled up outside, disgorging STARS and DIRECTORS and MODELS and LAWYERS.

              I was dressed up.  I can’t remember what that meant, but it surely wasn’t the suits I wear now.  I waited a lifetime to lose enough weight to wear a suit.  It’s one of the few things I dreamed about.  Get skinny enough to wear real men’s clothes.  Wear suits.  It’s happened now as if by magic, but even dope didn’t make me thin enough to have a beautiful suit back then.  But I was respectable.  We all entered and dispersed into the crowd.  In the theatre, I think they were showing ‘Koyaanisqatsi.’ Phillip Glass music wafted over the crowds and seeped into the foyer where people stood with drinks and plans on getting laid.  And where was I?

              I found the downstairs men’s room which is still the most massive and impressive bathroom I’ve ever been in.  It was titanic!  Tuxedo-clad servants offer everything from cigarettes to cologne and with the hope of a tip.  I dig these guys.  Takes a lot of balls to do that.  Make yourself answer for the hope of a couple bucks.  I needed nothing from them, but I always tipped.  It felt awful not to.  But the real magic was how much space there was to hide and do my thing.  I was surely high on dope.  Like I’ve said, I had to be.  But I also knew that within twenty or so steps from the front entrance was a cadre of old Black dudes selling crack.  Never trust the young Black guys.  But the old ones, well fuck, you can set your clock to them.  They survived long enough to know it was just easier and safer to just sell what people wanted.  The young ones thought they’d get over, and ultimately they caught one in the dome or a slice along the neck.  So yeah, trust the ones that survive.

              The night is just a vague memory of snapshots of moments here and there.  I don’t remember seeing Leslie or Marion or really anyone.  I just remember constantly going outside, finding crack, coming back dressed to the nines and heading down to the Grand Canyon of men’s rooms.  Always a stall open.  No one gave a shit.  Everyone else there was on their own sad, lonely trip to regret.  We gave each other space.  We respected each other’s self-destruction.  “I didn’t see a thing, my man.  Carry on.  And can I borrow your lighter?”

At one point, I went back out to cop some more rock.  I guess I had endless money.  I have no memory of feeling in any way constrained.  I just smoked and went back for more.  I don’t even remember trying to dodge anyone I knew.  I was an automaton.  I went out, and this old black guy said, “Hey!  You’re that Michael J Fox guy, huh?” He was excited!  I felt some odd thrill that at least I passed for a real person.  Minutes later, someone else thought I was Ozzy Osbourne.  Jesus!  How bad could I be?  I must be doing fine.  Let’s buy it all!  Let’s just go crazy with this stuff because clearly, the world didn’t see me like I saw me.  I had some breathing room.  But, you know, it always ends there.  They left, and I bought more drugs and shuffled back inside to hide in my men’s room stall.

I’d break off a little piece and place it carefully on the upturned glass pipe right on the copper Choreboy mesh.  I’d light the lighter and watch it melt, and then I’d tilt it down after I was sure it wouldn’t drip out, and I inhaled.  I’d inhale as long as I could.  And I’d wait.  Nothing happens with crack until you exhale.  Eventually, I couldn’t hold my breath anymore, and I let a lungful of smoke gush out of my mouth and then I was God, if only for a minute.  The euphoria can not be described.  There’s a reason people trade their entire lives for this feeling.  It’s as indescribable as it is all-encompassing.  When cocaine hits you, whether it’s smoked or injected (snorting is for pussies.  I’m sorry, I  know that sounds awful and judgemental, but, well, it’s just true), every single aspect of your entire life makes sense.  Everything you’ve ever done was exactly the right thing to do.  The birth of a child pales in comparison (not that I’d know).  You are simply wrapped in a blanket of pure perfection.  No one should ever feel this good.  It’s unnatural.  It’s an abomination to feel such pleasure, and yet, once it happens, you chase it forever.  You feel your soul catch fire and warm the entire universe, and you hear the screams of gratitude from a million planets.  A billion stars.

But it fades.  You keep smoking more and more and trying to recapture that original high.  And sometimes you do.  People like to say you can never recapture that first high, but that’s bullshit.  You just get more and more, and you’ll get there.  But crack only lasts for a few minutes.  And then it’s replaced by such a soul-crushing depression that you either do whatever it takes to get more or do some dope.  Crack is why God made heroin.  Together or in the form of a speedball, you can keep this going for days.  You can keep this going until you die.  And most of us do.  I didn’t die.  I came close plenty of times.  I felt my heart slam its way out of my chest and onto the bed, and I saw darkness overtake everything as too much dope pulled me under.  But here I am.  I’m lucky.  I have so many, so, very many friends who didn’t make it.  They chased this feeling of believing they were good until it killed them.  And that’s all they wanted; they just wanted to believe that they mattered and that they hadn’t been so horribly abused that they’d become rotten.  And they went too far.  I’ve lost track of all of them.  But I remember so many, and I know they died trying to believe they were good.  Just that.  They just wanted to feel like they were worth a life.  So very few of us die out of some narcissistic and arrogant view of ourselves.  Junkies die believing that maybe, just maybe, they’re worth a damn.  I hope that’s the last thought they had.  I hope they at least felt that at the end.  Johnny, and Carl and Tim and Nate and Fred and Richie, and so many more; God, I hope your last thought was, “I guess I’m not so bad after all.” No one dies from drugs in an effort to cause heartbreak to the people that love them.  And I’m not giving anyone a pass; we cause so much pain, but know this, junkies die with one thought in their mind.  “I think maybe I’m good enough.  Maybe I’m just not so hateable.  Maybe I’m not the monster after all.” And that’s it.  The lights flicker out.  The heart stops beating.

I can’t get to Christmas yet.  This is all I have for tonight.

Skates

And here I am. Am I 57 or 58? I honestly lose track. I’ve had such an incredible, improbable life, and despite all the magic, I still feel empty. So many loves I’ve had, and I found new ways to push them away. Drugs surely played a part. Other times it was just letting distance grow and not being able to swim back to her and try and pull her to shore. A few years ago, maybe 5? Maybe 6? I wound up again in rehab after doing what I’ve always done. Giving in. I eventually just give in. But there were people at this place who put me on a path that led to this very moment. These beautiful people who I still love dearly today. I’m sitting here typing, and I feel nervous. I feel somewhat afraid.

Tomorrow morning I’ll drive to Culver city and see two clients at a sober living house. Both are from Montreal. One is a 23-year-old kid who has trouble even believing he’s human. He’s done things that he can’t even wrap his head around. Violent things. Rage-filled things. Drug-filled things. But he never asked for this life. And he’s trying his best to change The other is an Ex NHL player who shot it all away with gambling, coke and lies. The kind of guy you’d want as a best friend. Just a good guy with a fucked up, wholly hidden second life. And I’ll try to help them. I’ll try to make some sort of inroads into the heinous things that were done to them when they were just little kids. Imagine being raped by some motherfucker and having to hear him tell you he loves you. Imagine that. Imagine what it does to a kid. I’d just as soon put a bullet in his abuser’s face as I would help this client. And I just found a gun in my house. It’s in a metal box in my bedroom. It just showed up. Someone else’s stuff I’ve been holding for them after they left for parts unknown. It’s just sitting there in this little metal box. I’d use it happily. But that’s not available to me, so I can only do what I can. I’ll try my best. I’ll use EMDR, a therapy I fully respect but have almost no confidence in my ability to do it.

I truly love being a therapist. That’s what I call myself. I’m allowed to call myself that. I turned away from getting a license when the state of California told me I wasn’t a “good fit,” as I have a DUI in my past. I fought it for a year. Eventually, they offered me a three-year probation offer. I said yes. Weeks later, when the documents arrived in the mail and I read what I was meant to agree to, I said fuck ‘em. I don’t need a license. I’m better than that.

So I sit here and listen to a song I haven’t heard for years. When I was touring with my band Lifter in the mid-nineties, some guy named Hayden put a record out. Our manager, Scott, loved it. It wasn’t my kind of stuff. But there was one song. One song that just yanked at all of my cells and chilled all of my blood. It was called “Skates.” The singer is a kid working in a department store who sees a sad middle-aged man come in. He’s distraught. He wants ice skates. It’s summer. He doesn’t care about the price. He wants the best. The singer does what he can to find the best skates for this guy. And why does he need skates so bad? Well, Jesus, to tell you that is to dissipate all the magic. He needs them for reasons I hope none of you ever have to experience. He needs them for the same reasons the guys I’ll try and help tomorrow need me. He needs them, and they need me because life can really fuck you up. It can rip you apart and leave you clinging on out of fear and anger alone. Just grasping onto to hate and worry like some vine, some branch.

Tomorrow at about 10Am, I’ll pull up in front of this sober living house in Culver City. I’ll be wearing my teal suit and carrying my Haliburton case with all my notebooks and EMDR devices in it. I’ll walk in, and the dogs will run up to me excitedly. They love me. Ona, in particular. A beautiful pitbull says hi with her mouth as she bites down on your hand. It’s all she has, and I love her for it. I’ll bend over and hug and kiss her. Other dogs will orbit around, but Ona stays latched onto me. The guys will offer me coffee, and I take some and ask what room we’re gonna be in. Hopefully, it’s the office. I need a good outlet for the EMDR deal.

We’ll walk up, and we’ll talk a bit. I’ll sense the nervousness and also the hope that they’ll feel. They’ve carried this destruction for years. They’ve been looking for new skates for so long. They need to save someone. Maybe them. Maybe their parents. Maybe, everyone they’ve loved and lied to. We relate on this level. I tell them everything about me. They trust me. At least, I believe they do.

We’ll start. We’ll try. We’ll see if the skates fit. And we’ll skate until there’s just no river left. We’ll skate unto we reach the beautiful shining desert. And I’ll pull them aside and say, “I love you, man. I’m not going anywhere.”