Dusk and Construction, Lloyd Brown
charcoal, acrylic, collage, plaster and canvas
33 x 47 1/4 inches
1985
It's amazing how clear it still seems: standing in a vacant lot between the Dallas Museum of Art and Woodall Rogers Freeway, camera aimed towards a jagged horizon of cranes and telephone poles against a hot-white, red sky.
My photo was alright. The painting my brother Lloyd created from it was the sounds of The Fixx frozen live on canvas: intense, coarse, urban, rock'n, unwinding--a cassette tape unraveled while still playing; images and sound pushed to the limit. Soot, concrete, neon.
It's impossible to state the impact Lloyd has had on me. He opened the world of art to me--not just the visual arts, but also music, and through music, literature.
Words. Texture. Motion.
Grainy, granular film. An image glimpsed and then gone.
Something almost seen.
While other high school students were looking forward to vomiting at the next kegger while so and so's parents were out of town, thanks to Lloyd, I and my friends were out taking in the horizon or standing stunned before a Kandinsky down at the DMA wondering How in the hell does someone get that much color out of pigment? Don't get me wrong, I would have loved to have been at the kegger; I was simply never invited. But, because of my brother, the energy of that isolation was channeled into something meaningful, and so I was never drawn to the druggies--freaks, as they were called in my school. Nor did I become that strange kid drawing tanks and blown up stick-figure men, the loaner dreaming of the day he could take out revenge on society.
Instead, I got high on life. The Fixx was a big part of the non-narcotic psychedelic trip. Many of my early poems are not-so-subtle rip-offs of Cy Curnin's lyrics. It's not that I intentionally plagiarized his work; it's that I felt so connected to what he expressed both through the music and lyrics, that it was natural for me to borrow. That is probably alright. Imitation is the first step towards originality. Here's one example, inspired by the song "Camphor":
Enchanting
Well, it's after midnight
I'm awake like many nights
with my eyes watching the time
My pen playing word games with my mind
Late at night.
Well, I'm neither joyful nor depressed
And though my eyes are tired, my mind won't rest
Because things are so enchanting
High on life.
Well, I really can see the clover,
Turn the rusted leaves over and over.
In my mind, through my eyes
I can see beyond those deep blue skies.
And it's so enchanting
Late at night
And it's so enchanting
High on life.
I'd come home from work late from Braum's Ice Cream. Sometimes Lloyd would be up painting. Sometimes he wouldn't. I'd be wound up, and so I'd go to my drafting table that sat in the corner of the living room. Sometimes I'd work on an architectural drawing. I still believed that's what I wanted to be. Sometimes I'd work on a painting or collage--not a very good one (they never were), and often involving nudes ripped from a Playboy magazine. Most often though, I wrote. Poetry chose me before I chose it. Although I had absolutely no training and had only opened one poetry book (Boris Pasternak, thanks to my ninth grade English teacher, Mrs. Becker), those early poems of mine still had some sort of magic. That spark came from the lyrics and music of bands like the Fixx. The Fixx, like all of the great art I was exposed to early on, came into my life because of Lloyd. I couldn't have had any greater exposure to creativity had my brother been Pablo Picasso or Paul McCartney. The world may not know it yet, but I do. I am the brother of one of the greatest creative geniuses the world has ever seen, or will ever see again. Like Theo van Gogh, I get the privilege of being that interesting footnote. And it is indeed a privilege. Creativity is infectious. It spreads. Being around one who fully takes in the world around him and then goes about the mundane but rewarding task of shaping that into a intense spark reflected back to the universe. Well, there simply is no greater joy.
Thanks Lloyd.
For the Fixx.
For the paintings.
For the drives.
For red skies
at night.
Phil. What to say? He liked Neil Young--a lot. He liked The Kinks--a lot. He drove a 1972 gold Dodge Dart with a black vinyl roof. The speedometer was broken. The needle raced back and fourth between 0 and 100. As he sped up over 60, the speedometer sped up also--overshooting its finish lines, making a loud clanking sound as it crossed over the 100 MPH mark and slammed into the wall of the speedometer casing. The same would happen as the needle crossed over the 0 MPH mark on the way back. For such a tiny object, it could make quite the racket. Phil would simply crank up Neil Young's "Cinnamon Girl" or "Cowgirl in the Sand" to an even higher volume and proceed on down the road, slightly hunched over the steering wheel, fingers occasionally tapping to the beat, but not very consistently. It wasn't necessarily a lack of rhythm--just a lack of follow-through. Being a rock'n'roller simply consumed too much energy. Phil wasn't lazy; he just lacked the restless, I'm-bored-out-of-my-mind, someone-please-save-me-from-myself energy that animates most teenagers. He was steady, sure, slightly cynical. He was, in short, Judd Hirsch's character Alex Rieger on Taxi. There is an episode where everyone driving taxi is "really" either an actor or a movie star waiting for his or her big break. When someone asks Alex about his ambitions in life, Alex says, "I'm the only taxi driver in New York City." That was Phil. Honest. Real. Not caught up in dreams--just grounded in living, although somewhat reluctantly.
I don't think the entire time I knew him he ever called me up to do something. But, when I called, bored-out-of-my-mind because I was always bored-out-of-my-mind, he'd say, "Yeah, sure, I guess so." And off we'd go.
Well, not always. We did a little bit of going. More so once I had my car. I liked to go downtown Dallas or to White Rock Lake. I liked the Dallas Museum of Art and Swiss Avenue. Phil liked seeing Conan the Barbarian or Mad Max at the dollar theater a couple blocks from his house. I was restless; I wanted to create; I wanted to be somebody. Phil just wanted to be in his room listening to Neil Young on his stereo.
Phil and our friend Andrea at the spillway at White Rock Lake in Dallas,
probably 1986, perhaps 1987. We each had our music icons: Phil, Neil Young;
Marsh, U2; Jim, Bruce Springsteen; Andrea, Peter Gabriel; and I, the Fixx.
Occasionally I got him to take a road trip. There were several: a couple to the Guadalupe Mountains, one to Big Bend National Park, one to New Mexico, and one to Utah. However, perhaps our first trip was the most meaningful because it was so damn cold and dreary. Hard vacations are memorable. I wrote about it six years later, about halfway through my ten-year undergraduate plan. In fact, I missed the assignment deadline because I went on a walk-about through Juarez, Mexico, a few miles from my apartment in El Paso, instead of facing the daunting task of writing. I came home frantic, got to work, and then rushed it over to my professor's office after-hours on the last day of the term. Luckily, she was still there. Later, she called me into her office and proceeded to yell at me because she thought I deserved a C in the class based on my participation, but "based on this essay, your writing deserves an A". "What should I do?" she wanted to know. I said a C would be fine. She insisted, "No, the work--not you!--deserves an A." She probably overvalued me. Good teachers do that. They value potential. I had plenty of that because whatever I had, it was all in reserve.
But, here's the thing: I honestly don't know if the essay I wrote that day could have existed if I were a better student. Although I eventually found discipline, eventually found peace, and even--for better or worse--eventually found happiness, the essay she admired so much was the product of a different incarnation of me, one who was restless, bored and driven to experience life to its fullest, headphones on, the Fixx cranked up. I was manic, desperately seeking to experience something vital. That incarnation wasn't necessarily always enjoyable to be around, especially for Phil, who at the time was completely satisfied with staying in his room and listening to music.
2. Outside
(Written in 1991)
I grew up camping. From my fifth to sixteenth year, I spent every summer with my dad in Reno, Nevada. Each weekend the family left the city behind and drove northwest into the vast ponderosa forests cradled between the Sierras and the Cascades. My mind's eye sees the sun pouring down through the needles overhead, striping the roads with fantastic patterns. My mind's ear hears the slow lapping of cool water against the shores of Eagle Lake. And though I cherish these images and know they must someday be given space to bubble up full-bodied and ripe, they are not what I choose to write about today. Rather, I recall them because I find it hard to separate scenes in my life. I can't take you on a trip to Oklahoma without first taking you to California. For what I have experienced at one time determines what I will do at another.
My dad sitting on a lawn chair outside his trailer, camping.
I am back in the eleventh grade, living in Dallas with my older brother, Lloyd. Spring Break is approaching and warm winds have been stirring me. For days I have had to make myself do algebra with the sun pouring down through a mental forest canopy. I have had to diagram sentences through the smoky, blue haze that rises from the blue, humpback hills surrounding glorious, white Mount Lassen. My mind has been an eagle chained down. Waves of light have battered my soul, and I have wanted to go outside. I have seen long highways and have imagined the diagrammed world thrown out the rear-view mirror. No grids, no numbered streets, no schools, no numbered thoughts--just free-roaming thoughts that you don't have to justify with thesis statements.
And now Spring Break is here. Phil (my best friend) and I head up I-30 in his old '72 Dodge Dart. His speedometer is broken and the little red needle races back and forth between zero and a hundred, bashing itself against the walls of the gauge case, making a terrible racket. But we have music to drown out the noise. Phil has brought along Buffalo Springfield, CSNY and Neil Young for my conversion. I have brought along the Fixx for his. We'll just see who converts who!
The towns of northeast Texas zip by as we head up towards the Ozarks that spill over into Oklahoma from Arkansas. It isn't northern California, but it's about as close as I can come to that feeling within a day's drive from Dallas. I have been in the Ozarks before, and I know there are some places where the smoky, blue ridges can fool you into thinking you're in northern California. The only difference is that the high, icy dome of Mount Lassen never peaks its head above them.
We head up I-30 towards Texarkana, passing Cumby as Neil Young asks us, "Are You Ready for the Country?" and we yell back, "Hell yeah!" We pass Mount Vernon and Mount Pleasant. The trees along the boggy creeks are Sprite green with purple blossoms mixed in. We get caught up in the repeated pounding of the piano in "Southern Man" and break into singing, "I saw cotton and I saw black / [something] white mansions and little shacks / Southern Man when will you pay them back?" (Young) We sing with all the hatred and zeal our hippie hearts can muster. We get so caught up in mental revolutions and scenes of spitting into Bull Connor's face that we almost miss our exit.
"Shit, that's it!" I yell as I see the U.S. 259 exit sign.
Phil spins the steering wheel, and we slide onto the access road just after missing the signpost. The car rocks, looking for balance and the road.
"Jesus, Phil!" I say. And we break into laughter, more as a means to release terror than joy.
Clouds have been racing over the horizon and breaking up the blue dome. The cold surge continues and whole plates of blue shatter into white. Soon the blue is gone and the white thickens to black.
We cross the Red River under a cloud burst. The river is swollen, the color of chocolate milk. The windows steam up and then feel cold to touch.
Few know this, but green is brighter on cloudy days. The lowlands below Idabel are covered in lime-sherbet grass and wildflowers. And the dark weather doesn't dull the scene.
However, as we move north past Idabel, the trees appear to die. It is still winter here. The world looks haunting and cold, which I love, but Phil gripes, "The trees look dead". I try to make him see that bare trees are beautiful and that the cold that seeps into the bone and settles like larvae is something to be cherished. Mood is mood, and it is to be permitted, even savored.
Now we are deep in wood--thick, wet, rotting wood. Steaming black pine choked with undergrowth. The hills rise up out of the wetlands and lose their heads in clouds of mist. We pass Octavia and Oklahoma 63. Winding Stair and Rich Mountain are before us. We go between them and turn up Talimena Skyline Drive. The road winds and rises and then follows the ridge top. Even Phil is a little impressed.
We rise and drop, rise and drop, in and out of the clouds that are breaking up. It is sunset and the fire ball below the cloud line washes the miles of wet, dark green expanse with gold, making the world a color I can't describe.
The road is pink, even hot orange in places, quartz chips in the pavement on fire. My heart is on fire.
This is life! Diagramming sentences has nothing to do with living. Diagramming sentences doesn't even have anything to do with language. Words are, or at least should be, lines written across the sky. Education should evoke freedom and make one want to soar. But school, for me, is sitting in a corner by the window, peeking out the blinds when the teacher isn't looking. I want to tell Phil this. But he won't understand. He'll think I'm trying to justify my lack of interest. He prefers the more direct, "School's a crock, work's a crock, life's a crock" approach. But, I can't see things that way. For at times like this, I feel throbbing, wrenching beauty. It's not life, but the diagrammed world that is a crock. It is the paradigms we lay across what is natural to extrapolate artificial meaning. We diagram the forest looking for places to lay down pipes and cables, missing the beauty of the trees. We chop up literature looking for structure and miss the beauty of the words. We cage and control legend, myth and fear with strict religious doctrine. Man can't see anything without a grid, a paradigm, a frame, a box.
The rest of the trip was cold and dreary. We spent whole days feeding single flames of fire. The wood was wet and steamed up ashes that filled our cold creamed corn with gray mud. It rained and the fire steamed some more. We lived huddled around a small volcano, our bodies reeking from the steam and gasses. But I loved that trip, even the cold sogginess of it. There is beauty in mud and slime. Let the cold creep in on my bones and settle like larvae. I might bitch and complain, but I will stir inside. Only in a walled room does my mind die. I need to get outside to get inside. I haven't been inside lately because I've been cooped up doing homework.
The homework has improved since the eleventh grade. I finished up college algebra and calculus a couple years ago and will never have to justify my math with theorems again. I still have to chop up literature and explicate symbols that are meant to be read with the natural, unconscious mind, but at least college teachers can comprehend an interpretation not already written two decades ago. And I have my writing classes, where occasionally I'm allowed to write lines across the sky.
Yet, inside is not outside. I just need to travel, even if it's only by memory. It's not the same as it is live. It's a little less cold, but also a little less intense. Still, it's a form of going outside. All I want to do is go outside. So long, bye-bye!
3. Postscript
It is late Sunday afternoon. A lot has changed since 1992. With the world. With Phil. With me. I went to church this morning, for one thing, as I do almost every Sunday morning--something I definitely would not have done in 1992. Phil also has taken up religion and is a lot less cynical than he used to be. I became an English teacher, and I love teaching sentence diagramming. However, although definitely essential to my life now, none of these things seem pertinent here.
No, the only thing that seems to matter at this moment is that outside my window a hard summer light glistens off slightly stirring leaves on an oak tree. Behind the tree is a sandstone gravel ridge with dark globs of green juniper splotched all over it. Each tree-blob glistens on one side and casts a great shadow on the other. The entire ridge glows warmly polka-dotted against a blatant blue sky.
I need to water the garden. More importantly, I simply need to be outside. It is the only practical thing to do on so many levels. As much as things have changed, I am still much the same, and the lyrics of Cy Curnin and the music of the Fixx move me as much as they ever did, maybe more so, for they are now layered over with my own stories of outside.
Outside, I stretch the mind that hides within
New pride, I lose four walls that keep me tied
Outside, I breathe new air that reaches me
Fresh tide, does all the cleansing life can give
Tongue-tied, no words will match this point of view. (Fixx)
References
Fixx, The. "Outside." Reach the Beach.
By Cy Curnin. Prod. Rupert Hine. MCA, 1983. vinyl.
Young, Neil. "Southern Man." After the
Gold Rush. By Neil Young. Prod. David Briggs. Reprise, 1970. vinyl.
Upwardly mobile parents--for three years, that's what I had. Not that it did me much good. I was personally poor as a son of a divorced mother on church welfare. I was personally poor as the son of a school teacher and a stay-at-home mom. And I was personally poor as the son of suddenly rich parents who earned $180,000 in a single month--and that was back in the 80's!
Now I'm grateful my parents didn't spoil me with their new found wealth, and that they lived pretty modestly themselves. It was good for them too, because they soon lost all that new prosperity in a bad investment. If they'd let money change them drastically, the adjustment back to lower middle class would have been excruciatingly difficult. And perhaps, because of how I was raised, I'm just not that much into things, which is good, as I'm a school teacher like my stepfather. I hate being poor, which I've been a couple times in my adult life, but as long as the bills are paid, and I have enough change to stop and buy a soda, I'm happy.
Back then, though, I wanted wealth to stand for something--mainly my missing self-esteem. Because of all the teasing I received at school, I would have really liked some symbol that I mattered. I had one specific symbol in mind--a black, Mercedes 380 SL convertible. I was sure that if I asked my dad to buy me one of those, and he did, my life would be completely different. Instead of having tobacco spit in my my face by a bully, I'd be cruising around town with his girlfriend. The only problem is that I didn't know how to ask my father to buy me one, and so I'd just dream. Odd thing is I never dreamed of the girls at my school anyway. I only dreamed of one girl, and she was back in Sandstone. I'd fallen in love with Kelly in the fifth grade, and in five years, with 1200 miles between us, nothing had changed. The only problem was that just like I couldn't tell my dad I needed a black Mercedes 380 SL convertible, I couldn't tell Kelly that I needed her gorgeous blue eyes, little upturned nose, soft freckled face, and oh so cool southern California attitude in my life. So, I just dreamed--of the girl, of the car, and of the Ventura Highway in the sun.
* * * * *
My parents first big check from the multi-marketing diet program they sold was $15,000. Until then, they'd been living on prayers after moving to Dallas. My stepdad, after all, was a school teacher. There was no big rainy-day fund if things didn't work out. The only furniture we brought with us from Utah was mom's organ and the mattresses that we slept on, and mine was placed directly on the floor. We bought a cheap couch and love seat for the living room, and that's all the furniture we had. I remember I used one of the boxes I'd packed my clothes in as a nightstand in my room.
Then the check came. With that money my parents hired a secretary, bought her a desk, and the rest of us went shopping for antiques at Joe Small's Auction House.
If you knew where to go, antiques in Texas were cheap in the 80's. They'd bring shiploads of them into Houston from England. Apparently, in Europe everything was considered old junk unless it was at least a couple hundred years old. Why that would be so, who knows, because furniture from the 1800's and early 1900's is still very solid furniture with elaborate woodwork compared to the particle-board crap made today. And oh the smell of hundred-year-old wood! There's nothing like it.
Anyway, we had an apartment with no furniture, my parents came into some money, and my dad learned about Joe Small's Auction House. The first time that we went it was to buy necessities--dressers, bedstead's, night stands, etc., but it quickly just became a fun night out together as a family. It was every Thursday, and it often went until midnight. One night my dad gave me $40 to buy whatever I wanted, and that began my short but joyful career as an antique's dealer.
Oh I loved the auction. We'd show up early and walk around, letting the old dark woods and oxidized mirrors on buffets, sideboards, and wardrobes speak to us. We'd feel the curls on intricately carved leafs and scrolls that decorated the tops and edges of massive edifices of wood. I especially liked high furniture, like highboys and wardrobes. They reminded me of early skyscrapers, like the work of Louis Sullivan.
After the look-around, came the action: the auctioneer rattling off numbers hypnotically; the colored cards going up--some discretely, some with great finesse and power; there'd be the bidding wars, which were usually friendly, but occasionally not. There'd be the gasps of wonder when somebody got a steal, and the laughter when someone overpaid. Most in the crowd were dealers and came every Thursday night. They were competitors but also colleagues. They knew and appreciated each other's business. It was like being around a great big dinner table and fighting over the bowl of mashed potatoes.
My parents had a family friend, Jim, who lived in the same apartment complex as us, and he had a booth at Vikon Village Flea Market in Garland, Texas. There he sold great oak dining tables that he bought factory-direct in Alabama and transported to Dallas. I don't remember what piece of furniture I first bought from the auction with my $40, but I do remember Jim allowed me to sell it at his booth. I remember that I sold it for $80, doubling my investment.
I wasn't in business long, and I didn't always do well, but I had fun. However, this is not where I tell you that from this youthful adventure I learned the hard knocks of capitalism and went on to become a successful entrepreneur. No, instead, this where I first encountered books. They were not particularly good books, and as reader, I had absolutely no idea what I was looking for, but I was drawn to them just the same.
Now, we lived next to a library, and my parents had church books back in Sandstone, so it's not like I'd never seen a book before. But the church books just sat on the shelf, unread. And at the library, I only checked out art and architectural books. I'd read parts of them for the information, but mainly I was interested in the pictures. It never occurred to me that words were something worth encountering in any other form than song lyrics. Up until recently, I'd never been captured by a story.
But I had an exceptionally good ninth grade English teacher, Mrs. Becker, and she had us read Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. I loved that book. I equated Estella with Kelly back in Sandstone. Why I did that I'm not sure. Kelly was beautiful, and she was a sophisticated girl, from southern California, which from the vantage point of small town Utah, seemed pretty worldly. However, she was never haughty nor mean to me. Still, as my shyness kicked in around seventh grade, her mere presence became an intimidation because in my mind she was just so much more of a creation than I was. She was perfection and I wasn't. The way Dickens described Pip feeling around Estella was how I felt:
Though she called me "boy" so often, and with a carelessness that was far from complimentary, she was bout my own age. She seemed so much older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed, and she was as scornful of me at if she had been one-and-twenty, and a queen. (Dickens)
It wasn't that Kelly was haughty; it was that to me her mere presence was scornful because of her perfection. It was like placing Manet's painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergere next to a black velvet Elvis painting sold in a market stall in Tijuana.
I was all too aware at an early age of just how beautiful women really are, and for some reason, I never saw any beauty in myself. As far as I was concerned God simply goofed on half the population, and as a male, I was bound to grovel before their majesties. Ridiculous, I know, and it set me up for a great deal of pain, for if a woman is unapproachable simply because of her mere existence, how is she ever going to become a best friend, or even something more? Knightly love is such a damn foolish thing, but I had a bad, bad case of it.
But, longing for Kelly connected me to Dickens' Pip and Estella, which connected me to books. One day, wandering around Vikon Village Flea Market, I found a bookstore tucked back in the back corner. I say store because it was more than a stall. It actually had walls and windows, though if I remember right, no roof other than the massive metal one set on steel beams that spanned the entire city of peg-board stalls. This seller was permanent enough to erect walls and bring in tall bookcases that were crammed full of dusty, aged books. I have no idea if any of them had any value because I had no knowledge of books or literature what-so-ever. Something immediately pulled me towards the books. I thought I might find another one by Charles Dickens. I wanted again to enter a world like Pip's, to feel the cold fog settled out on the marshes by the sea, to sit by the fire with Joe, and most of all, to feel again the awe of seeing a beautiful girl again for the first time. I never knew words could do that. I'd been deeply moved when I read Joseph Smith's account of the first vision, but I had never experienced the tactile nature of words until I read Dickens.
It was new, and I wanted more. I entered. The books looked so amazing, row after row in shelves, stacked on tables and chairs in jumbled piles. And the aroma! Old, dusty books are amazing. New ones can't compare. I'm not sure how I found Dickens. I had no knowledge of how to navigate a bookstore. But I did. It was a hardbound book with a worn, dark blue, linen cover with his portrait embossed in it. If I remember right, it contained three novels. I still have it somewhere, but I can't locate it just now. But, I think they are A Christmas Carol, A Cricket on the Hearth, and A Tale of Two Cities. I read a Christmas Carol and worked my way very slowly through A Tale of Two Cities. Though I never completed the latter I was astounded by the language, dazzled by the description of the wine running down the cobblestone street: A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. The accident had happened in getting it out of the a cart; the cask had tumbled out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just outside the door of the wine shop, shattered like a walnut shell. All the people with in reach had suspended their business, or their idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them, had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down, made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help women, who bent over their shoulders, dipped in the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infant' mouths; others made small mud embankments, to stem the wine as it ran; others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted fragments with eager relish... (Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)
Wow! The imagery, the sound--together how they did implant an experience in my head. Years later, the scene would bubble up again mixed with marshes from Great Expectations and Picasso's Blue Guitarist to create a poem:
Blue in a Baroque World Through some worm hole there is a cobblestone lane lined with oil lamps and pocked with rain. Galaxies of light unfold in ripples spreading out in gathered darkness puddled at the bottom of a high hill. The ragged man with the blue glow hears a violin in his soul cut a coarse chord that says I'm so damn tired of this. It isn't his loneliness though he knows as well as high halls and crystal chandeliers. He'd like to pound a harpsichord until it squeals like a pig. For some reason he can't explain he knows traces of God puddle in the mire at the bottom of the high hill where a long tide pushes in to fill the mud flats obsidian pocked by cold hard rain.
Dickens gave me God in low places, Christ as he historically was, among the people who needed him most. Wine; stone; torn, tired feet in need of washing, of healing, of transcendence.
Moonlight on water that slowly fills the bay with absolutely everything. I wanted--no, I needed God that way.
References
Dickens, Charles. Tale of Two Cities. Dickens, Charles. Charles Dickens: Five Novels. New York: Barnes &
Nobel, 2006. 954-955. Compilation.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Dickens, Charles. Charles Dickens: Five Novels. New York: Barnes &
Nobel, 2006. 1214. Compilation.
Greg set me free from the school bus. The reason I'd lived in the same apartment complex as he did for six months and didn't know him was because he usually walked. He not only walked, but he walked creatively, avoiding the busy main streets, cutting through alleyways and finding as much of the natural world as one could find in suburbia.
As much as I liked this new freedom from the bus, as much as I liked walking with Greg, I liked walking best on the days he wasn't going to school or was running late, because just like back in Sandstone, I preferred walking alone.
I did, however, use the routes he showed me. One of these routes took me along houses set back along a long pond. The developers had dammed a small creek, created a small lake and set houses around it. From the street, one had no idea the pond was there. It was the backyards that faced the pond. They do this a lot in Dallas. And although it may create temporary high land values, it doesn't work. People want public spaces. They want culture. The neighborhoods that ultimately gain the most value are the ones designed around public parks. Turtle Creek and White Rock Lake are perfect examples of this. Here the exorbitantly wealthy live around parks open to the whole city, and it works quite well. I'm not saying there isn't racism or prejudice towards the poor. Turtle Creek is definitely over-policed. Later, when my brother moved into the area, he was often picked up for having long hair and walking through neighborhoods where law enforcement felt he didn't belong. But at least in the Turtle Creek and White Rock Lake neighborhoods there are no physical barriers keeping the general public out. And the wealthy, to their credit, must enjoy some diversity, because it is the open park neighborhoods, not the gated communities, that are the most sought after real-estate areas in Dallas. What good is a pond that nobody else can see?
Yet, the first thing the newly financially-arrived want to do is establish their own private paradise, and so, in the suburbs, there are creeks, and ponds, and small lakes that nobody but the homeowners see--unless, of course, you're a crafty teenager, like me, seeking out nature wherever it can be found.
There happened to be one particular place on a cross street where "my" pond could be viewed. I'd stop for five or ten minutes and just watch the ducks sliding along through green water, leaving ripples behind. Lush, neatly-trimmed lawns slanted down from brick houses to wooden docks, where long, untrimmed grass met the deep green waters.
Google Earth image of "My Pond" that I stopped at each day walking to school
And so I learned to walk the backstreets and the alleyways, looking for unseen worlds, a little oasis around a pond; an untrimmed wild of grasses behind a tall wooden fence, just off the driveway where they put out the garbage cans; a sudden view of ragged, wet woods around a creek that opens up for a moment next to a bridge.
This walk, however, always led me to Tim's house, where I would join his friends, Carl and Phil, and all together we would walk in safety to school, I no longer faced with the brutal reality of riding the bus.
I enjoyed their safety, but part of me died each morning when I arrived at Tim's. Just as his house came into view, I'd stop (if only mentally) to step out of the real me and slip into a costume. The Steve that arrived at his house was loud, obnoxious, sarcastic, and bragged a lot, especially as my parents' income increased quickly. We still lived in an apartment when I started referring to my friends as "poor peons". I'm not sure why they didn't ditch me, but they didn't. The funny thing is, if I remember right, Carl's father was nominated as a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in physics. He mentioned it once, but he didn't make a big deal out of it.
Later, Phil would come to know the better me. However, Carl and Tim would not. Tim had plenty of his own character flaws anyway. He was rather pompous for a little picked-on squirt like me; he loved Hitler and hated Jews. But looking back, it is clear Carl had class.
Who knows, maybe Tim, like myself, had another version of himself he simply didn't let the world see. I don't assume the Hitler-loving, Jew-hating Tim was the real Tim. It could have been, but not necessarily. Junior high is a time of masks. Almost nobody is who they say they are. Most don't even know. I knew I wasn't the bragging, pompous son of the nouveau riche, but for some odd reason I thought that version of me was more likable than the kid who would like to spend his days feeding ducks. How I could think that, I'm not sure, but I did.
"A conspiracy of silence speaks louder than words." --Dr. Winston O'Boogie
Time alone. I'd always spent a lot of time alone. When I was seven, we lived on a ranch in northern Utah and had no neighbors. I had a couple of friends at school, but at home I was my own best friend. That ranch was a great place to be your own best friend. We had two rivers, a creek, and a small lake on the property, along with who knows how many irrigation ditches. We lived in an apartment in a great cinder-block barn. Lloyd and I actually slept in a bunkhouse on the first floor, and the apartment was on the second floor. I had the entire hay loft as my play area, which included two more bunk rooms. In the spring, the great wooden door where they used to bring the hay to the loft would be open, and I'd look out on a deep green field and the horse my sister often rode.
Alone is what I knew best and liked. When we moved to what I'll call Sandstone, I had a couple of really good friends, and I'd often walk home from school with one of them, but I enjoyed walking home alone more. I loved strolling along the irrigation ditches; watching a cloud hang reflected back in the slow-moving water; being dazzled by the long, green grasses growing along the bank turned upside down in the rippled reflection.
So, when we moved to Dallas, and when, at first, I didn't have any friends, it was no big deal. I could have cared less. The teasing I received during school was deeply damaging, but the time alone just gave me time to explore my corner of this great big, new metropolitan area in a deeper way. There was the library almost next door. There was an LDS (Mormon) bookstore a block to the north. I bought my first journal there, and for the first time in my life, I began to write down my thoughts in little three to four-line poems. There was a Half-Price used book store about two blocks to the south and a record store about a block beyond that.
For Christmas, I received a Sony Walkman from my real dad. I loved it. I constantly had a tape going. I walked down to that small record store and bought The Beatles: 1967-1970. I still remember that record store well. Sandstone didn't have record stores. Pioneer Market sold a few albums, as did Steven's Department Store. Bradshaw Auto Parts sold 8-Track tapes, but there was no proper music store. So, I loved being in that small suburban store. The odd thing is that I don't ever remember music playing. It was as quiet as a library. Perhaps that is what I liked about it. As I flipped through the albums in the silence, I could hear the music in my head. Then, I'd go over to the tape section, and get what I wanted. The tapes were in big, plastic, locked files, and so I'd have to find the owner to unlock them. She was an elderly lady who spoke very little. It seemed I was always the only customer, which explains why the store closed a couple of years later.
The other tape I bought there was Shaved Fish by John Lennon. I'd heard "Imagine" the previous summer in a Grand Central (like a K-Mart) in Sparks, Nevada. I'd heard the song a few times before that, but I'd never paid attention to the lyrics. That time I did. I just stopped. Until then I didn't know lyrics could capture such pure and innocent desires, an unselfish yearning for humanity to be more. I didn't necessarily like, "Imagine there's no religion," (Lennon) but I knew that the religion I believed in, if lived fully, definitely would lead to everything else imagined in that song; I was hooked. I went down to the record store looking for that specific song. I found it on an album called Shaved Fish (Lennon, Shaved Fish).
Even though my brother brought me up on the Beatles, Shaved Fish blew my mind. There was a rawness to Lennon's solo work that just pulled me in. That "Day 4," a drum beat, and then "Instant Karma's gonna get you / gonna knock you right on the head." (Lennon, Instant Karma)
Wow! There was a deep rough steel grit to it. Even on "Dream 9". It had all the psychedelic otherworldly quality of "Lucy in Sky," "I Am the Walrus" or "Glass Onion," but it was stripped down to just the glass river and the blank blue sky. It was a round, glass table set out in the woods left to gather dew. The symphony stayed home, and only the string section showed up, but oh how they could play! And the lyrics:
Took a walk down the street Through the heat whispered trees. (Lennon, #9 Dream)
I was stunned.
And so I wandered around my little section of suburbia, headphones on, listening to Shaved Fish. I wanted to see the movie Reds. I wanted to dream of a world less brutal than the one I experienced at school. I wanted to be able to name pain as precisely as Lennon did in "Cold Turkey." I wanted to touch the realness that one only touches through art. I wanted to explore this new city, and I wanted to explore my own mind, which was just as new to me.
People made me feel alone and unwanted. Time alone made me feel valued by some unknown presence as I connected with myself and the world around me.
References
Lennon, John. Shaved Fish. By John Lennon.
1975.
Lennon, John. "#9 Dream." Walls and
Bridges. By John Lennon. New York, 1974.
Lennon, John. "Imagine." Imagine.
By John Lennon. New York, 1971.
Lennon, John. "Instant Karma." By John
Lennon. London, 1970.
One hot, muggy day early in the spring, which in Texas could have been as early as February, I met Greg, who probably saved my life. I don't know if I could have withstood the bullying I received in junior high without a real friend. He also connected me to Phil, who along with Marsh, are like brothers to me. I would not have met anyone in what we call the gang--Phil, Lucy, Marsh, Andrea and Jim--without Greg. I probably would have moved back to Utah with my parents after two years, and Dallas would just be a short, agonizing memory.
I did meet Greg. Like I said, it was a hot, muggy day. The clouds were low, black and boiling. I got on the bus. There was the usual pushing, shoving, and over-the-top laughing. Some guy grabbed one of the twins and put her on his lap. She giggled and squealed, and said, "Stop it!"
in something that was between a playful giggle and a panicked scream. As a teenager, I assumed that was all for show, and thought that she liked it. Looking back as an adult, I'm not so sure. Everything during those years is so tumultuous. It's hard to know what's real. Now, I doubt she knew what was going on inside herself. Her brain was probably telling her attention--good; being grabbed, loosing control--not good. And in the chaos--the screaming, the pushing, the shoving, the laughing uncontrollably because it hurts to much to cry, who has a chance to analyze how they actually feel inside? I don't know how anyone makes it through puberty alive. But most of us do.
I was shoved. There was an empty seat next to a gangling guy looking out the window. It was a choice between either getting up and being shoved again or asking if I could sit down. He said yes, pointed to the clouds outside, and said, "It looks like a tornado might form."
He said that so nonchalantly. My heightened senses--all that pushing and shoving and yelling--just skyrocketed. Tornadoes were definitely not part of my childhood. This was new.
"Really?"
"Yeah, see how that cloud is swirled a bit, and drops down low in the middle, like it has a protruding belly button."
I don't exactly remember if Greg described the cloud that way, or if he used the word "protruding," but he could have. He was a smart kid, and he wasn't normal. There is no way to be normal in junior high and act intelligently. Intelligent people care about others, feel empathy, act carefully--in the best interest of not only themselves, but also those around them. Intelligent people see the big picture and move with measured, reflective responses. No, junior high is the time the normal person just shuts down all rational thought and acts on selfish, hormone-driven, ego-centered instinct. Anyone decent is going to stick out like a protruding belly button during those years.
Greg protruded. He was tall, he was lean, but had a curved back. He dressed like a hick--snap-up plaid western shirts and blue jeans--but he didn't seem to like anything country. He liked opera and theater. He wasn't normal, and unlike me, he didn't even try to be. He liked Neil Diamond. He liked fast cars, but unlike those other kids who drew them all over their binders along with the Ozzy and Van Halen logos, he'd actually done his research and knew what he was talking about. He especially liked small, European sports cars. He dreamed of becoming rich, and he had very concrete plans. I don't think most people's lives unfold anything close to their expectations, but my guess would be that his did. He was smart; he knew what he wanted; and most importantly, he seemed totally untouched by the world around him. He was teased like I was teased. The difference was he just didn't give a damn. In his mind, he was already running a big corporation, driving race cars, jetting around the world. To him this whole junior high experience was just a picnic in the woods with mosquitoes. Sure, the mosquito kids were annoying, but it wasn't the end of the world, and it wasn't like he'd stick around and get sucked dry. He'd hop in a little Italian sports car and speed off with some jock's girlfriend to his real life in a mansion just over that hill. Sure, he was failing all of his classes, but what did that matter? Unlike the rest of us, he knew junior high is not real life. He'd listen to music and dream his way through it, and when the moment was right, he'd step into the light and claim his prize.
I quickly lost contact with him during high school. If I remember right, he moved. Maybe back to St. Louis, his hometown. However, I did once hear from a mutual friend that somewhere around 11th or 12th grade Greg became an A student and went on to college and received some award. It surprised my friend. In ninth grade we all knew he constantly received C's and F's (there were no D's in our district). But, it didn't surprise me. It was part of his plan. Dream through the ridiculousness and act once the game was real. I knew nothing about Buddhism then. I doubt he did either, but Greg was the first Buddhist I ever met, and perhaps the only truly proficient one I know. Most Buddhists, like all truth-seekers, including myself, seem to be caught forever in that striving phase that must occur before arriving. The Greg I knew in junior high had already arrived. He was just sitting things out, killing time.
One evening he came over to the apartment and knocked on the door, holding a kitchen chair. My mother let him in. "Grab a chair. Let's go sit in the field. That fog is amazing." So, we did. The fog was so thick that in the center of that five-acre field, the city lights all but disappeared. Greg didn't say a word. He just sat there in silence as cool mist slowly dampened our clothes. I enjoyed it, but I started to get cold. He could have sat there until he grew moss. However, noticing that I was cold, he said, "That was amazing; let's go."
I wish a little of Greg rubbed off on me, but I can't say that it did. Still, although he was only a friend for a brief while, he was a good friend, and more importantly, he connected me to Phil.
After visiting the library, we drove by my old junior high school. I snapped a photo, but I made no connection to the place whatsoever. I wanted to. I knew I wouldn't like it, but I wanted to because I love my life, and I don't want there to be any holes in it. Perhaps Barbara Streisand was right, or almost right, when she sang, "What's too painful to remember / We simply choose to forget." Perhaps it's not always a choice though. Perhaps forgetting is sometimes forced upon us by the mind seeking escape. Perhaps will is not always involved, at least not conscious will, when it comes to memory.
Here's the thing. I can remember every kid in my second grade class, but I just can't get my mind to enter the hall of that suburban junior high school. And I want it to. I want to be there and feel again as I felt then, because that is part of what writing is, an act of recovery. A recovery of the past. A recovery of the self. A recovery of truth. A journalist writes not because it is easy, but because it is necessary for democracy. A historian writes not because the past is pleasant, but because it is vital that the past doesn't get buried. A novelist writes not because it is easy, but because it is necessary to capture our deepest desires, our deepest fears, the parts of us we can't slip easily into idle conversation. Writers write to keep into human dialogue what the rest of humanity chooses to leave out because it's too painful to remember. Good writing isn't escape; it's engagement with life at the highest level, which is why it was frustrating to look at my old junior high and get nothing when I absolutely know that place caused me great pain.
I teach at a residential treatment center, and one day one of my students asked me, "Mr. Steve, How do you get past something really terrible in your past?" Without much thought, I gave him my honest answer. "I don't really know. I know lots of people have incredibly horrific pasts, but I don't. I had great parents, and nothing really bad ever happened to me. You'll have to talk to your therapist about that."
We're trained to say "You'll have to talk to your therapist about that." Our youth will avoid the hard work of therapy by going through unofficial channels to receive "help". But, I was being honest too. I haven't had to deal with any of the big issues so much of humanity has to deal with: no violence, no rape, no sexual abuse. I've been lucky. Divorced parents is as bad as it got for me, and that happened when I was two, and so I have no memory of it.
School was my only hell. Yet, it was hell, and I want to get back there because there are some things one can only learn by reentering what hurt the most. There is a writing exercise by Natalie Goldberg called, "I don't remember." To do it, you just write down, "I don't remember" and write whatever comes to mind. Supposedly, the act of admitting that you don't remember eases up the pressure and allows thoughts hiding out in the deep caverns to venture towards the day light. We'll see:
I don't remember my first day of school at that suburban junior high. I don't remember pulling up in the bus. I don't remember the blue hall and long line of lockers. I don't remember the fear I had of forgetting which hall contained my locker as all the halls seemed to look alike. I don't remember the frequent dreams I had of not being able to find my locker, of wandering around the school endlessly, looking for it. I don't remember that kid Scott who reminded me of a friend I had way back in kindergarten--how he looked so cool with shaggy, long blond hair that curled around his ears. I don't remember being shocked by his Texas accent, or the fact that he was actually a dumb, cruel shithead who had a dumb, cruel shithead friend, named Steve. I don't remember shop class, or Miss Moore, who was young and slender with red hair and freckles and a heavy Texas accent. I don't remember how she flirted with Scott and Steve and ignored their cruelty to me. I don't remember listening to the Eagles "Hotel California" on the radio in shop, hearing the lyrics, really understanding them, and feeling I was really there--locked in the Hotel California, egos consuming each other with steely knives to avoid being eaten alive themselves.
I don't remember sitting alone at lunch, or Mr. Gray--the gray haired black vice-principal that came in and yelled "Quiet" at the lunchroom every day, walking past me in his gray suit and protruding belly, never seeming to notice that everyday I sat alone, not knowing how I felt so claustrophobic with the loneliness closing in tight around me like a thick darkness. I don't remember opening up my Tupperware sandwich container and hating that my mother packed my lunch in it because I was teased terribly for having it.
However, I do remember refusing to tell my mother that I got teased for the container because I knew exactly how low and stupid it was to isolate someone just because their lunch came to school with them in a Tupperware container, and I knew my mother was proud of the lunch she made me, and I knew that I'd rather live with sitting alone with my Tupperware container than to adopt a paper sack because the wolves wanted it that way. I remember knowing if I ditched the Tupperware container, it would just be something else anyway. I remember opening that Tupperware container as if I were claiming my seat on a bus in some horrible place like Montgomery, Alabama, and thinking to myself, "Okay, shitheads of the world, take this."
I remember not always being so honorable. I remember rolling a penny down the hall with another long haired kid who always wore Pink Floyd shirts. I remember him saying, "This is how I identify Jews; they'll pick it up every time." I remember how sick I felt inside as I laughed--how I was terrified he'd find out I was Mormon. I remember thinking how he was cool, and that I hated that I was selling out my soul to be with a cool kid, but that I did it anyway.
I remember how in class a beautiful girl with long, glossy brown hair, and deep, chocolate eyes sat in front of us. I don't remember his name at all, but I remember her name was Brandy. I remember how he'd play with her hair, and she would let him. I remember being amazed at that. I remember how she would turn around and talk to us, laugh and smile, and how it felt so amazing to not be isolated. I don't remember thinking, "It might not be right to roll a penny down the hall and yell 'Jew!' at the person that stopped to pick it up, but boy this moment makes it all worth it." But part of me must have had that exact thought, or I wouldn't have done it.
I remember one day a big, overweight kid with acne troubles targeted me as a friend at lunch. For a couple days, I accepted. He drew pictures. I drew pictures. The difference was, I drew landscapes--lakes and trees, old barns, and tilting outhouses. He drew tanks, and bombs, and guns--lots and lots of guns. People blowing apart. He knew their names. Not of the people blowing apart--at least, I hope not. But of the guns. He knew them intimately. I don't remember thinking, "We're in danger here at school," but I should have.
I do remember feeling sorry for him, but knowing there was no way I could ever provide him the friendship he needed, I avoided him. As lonely as I was, our worlds were just too far apart. I could roll a penny down a hall and yell "Jew" to fit in, especially if it was to sit next to someone who was deemed cool enough for a girl like Brandy to turn around and smile in our direction, but I could never spend my days drawing tanks, and bombs, and guns. I had too much fun drawing aerodynamic people. I saw other kids designing aerodynamic sports cars, and I thought to myself, to heck with that. Why not design aerodynamic people? Short; squat; big, aerodynamic noses on jelly-bean shaped heads; spoilers on their butts. You could stand them up in a hurricane, and they would not move.
I was in a hurricane. I wanted to be able to stand and not move. I hated myself when I'd roll that penny down the hall. However, I was proud that I never asked my mom to pack my lunch in a paper bag. I was also proud that I never drew a tank or gun. I was proud that although sometimes I would fantasize about taking the head of one of my tormentors and smashing it against the locker, most of the time I realized each of us was just doing his best to survive.
I wrote my first poem that ninth grade year. I don't remember all of it. Part of it went like this:
Whose beast are these, who kill to cry Who drink the blood of their brother's sigh? These, these--are His to keep, which he loves, forgives, and hopes to keep.
I was proud of that poem. I still am. However, I also know I rolled a penny down the hall and yelled "Jew" at the small kid who stooped down to pick it up. I hope in his mind he told me to go to hell and now proudly displays that penny as a trophy for having overcome, if only for that moment, the stupidity of the world. I wish I had my Tupperware sandwich container. I'd mount it on the wall in a gold frame to remind me of my better self--how at least a part of me was willing to fling a righteous middle finger at the world--to proudly hold up a cross, a poem, an act of forgiveness, instead of just conforming to cruelty.
That test never ends. It's what fuels the anti-immigrant movement, and it's what got Christ nailed to the cross. It's ultimately what we are here for: How will we stand when the winds of humanity are blowing in the wrong direction? We are here to learn to fling that metaphorical finger rather than roll the penny and yell "Jew" in order to fit in. Our soul and our God demand to know ultimately where on that question we stand.
I hope I prove to be as aerodynamic as those squat, little figures I drew because we definitely live in a time when the winds of humanity are blowing in the wrong direction.
