born against 1973

The LIfe Sentence.

2010-12-31T22:29:00.002-06:00

I walked in the room and it was grey, the walls and the floor, and there was no window, but there was cherry-white paint splattered on the light bulb attached to the grey ceiling over the metal table. I shut the door behind me and nodded to the three people behind the table. They did not nod back. I just stood there, a little too close to the door, and afraid to go any further until I was told doing so was acceptable.

With a curt drop of his head the man in the middle, too short with blistered skin and sun-bleached hair, motioned toward the single wooden chair in front of me. I sat down, my hands pushed together in my lap as if they carried heavy metal cuffs. I was not entirely sure if they did or not.

On his left was an overweight black woman, with thick thick glasses and a permanently disgusted look on her face.
On his right was a razor thin person (I could not discern a sex) wearing all black over paper-weak skin. The face was a skeleton.

“Tell me where it all went wrong. Tell me about ( he checked his notes) Peter” the man said, his two associates picking up their pens in unison, as if every word I would say mattered.

Peter was my terrible friend. Me= too impressionable in my teenage days, him= older and a dropout with a pocketful of money, since his dad made him work and he still lived at home and drove his dad’s car. He lied to women in the worst ways, dangerous, anti-social untruths to get what he wanted. Drugs and alcohol for barely-teen teenage girls, exaggerated borderline cartoon tales of his life and all the things he’s never really done and…

“Stop. Tell me about you. Tell me things you’ve seen.”
This year? Or Ever? Or today?

A rotten, rat-chewed mattress in a house of garbage hoarders, a 30- year-old man rolling over just often enough to not become entwined with the springs cutting his back and shoulders. And he doesn’t get off that mattress, ever, for any reason. You want to hear things like that?

“What? No, Lord no. I want to know… when did you become this way?”

Maybe 3am in the desert, 1995? And the desert was a sand-awful place to break down. But the Van picked it for us, a busted transmission and not enough oil. We were literally camped out on the border of Utah and Nevada, two throwaway states, at least for Southern punk rawk trash, nothing more than means to an end land on the way to the waves of California, the guitars of Seattle. We’d spent a hard 10 hours in Las Vegas ogling the strippers smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk between shifts, and stepping over the pornography crowding up the gutters. Bet it all on black. Bet it all on the dark side.

“That’s too long ago… more recent?”

Wasserman and I stumbled through a freezing cold New York City, the inside of our bottom lips freshly tattooed. We walked Greenwich Village looking for nothing to do, our mouths all bloody and swollen. Being straightedge never felt so good…

“Even more recent?”

I did a week on my head in a closed down hospital. My hand was all sorts of burned in a house fire and it was no big deal and it got infected and they said the poison had poured into my bloodstream and it became a very big deal. But me? I’m fine, I’ll be fine. On Night One at Hotel Carraway I snuck past the nurses/doctors/ valets and ran through downtown, onwards to Speakeasy. I was drugged up so bad from… the drugs that I don’t even remember being there, or running back. I do remember that I was going through a real phase of surfer-acid reverb tunes and The Raveonettes were my soundtrack of escape.

A friend snuck me in contraband, that being a red bandanna, and I stood in the doorway of my room with it tied backwards on my head, scaring visitors of the terminally ill that adorned every other room on the floor. My incarceration that week pumped my blood so hard; I could feel the veins contracting. Or maybe it was just the dark side taking over, who knows, and more importantly, who really cares?

“Excuse me, but did you just say ‘who cares’? As in you go over to the dark side? And what does that even mean?”

Sitting there I realized I had come up with two great book ideas, a cool poster, and a new game to teach Janey. I looked around at the grey, I felt the veins, my veins, contract. This hearing needed to end.

I blurted out, without meaning to be so rude, “Are we almost done?”

The three faces of judgment looked stunned, looked at each other, looked back at me. “Do you want to add anything else before we make our decision?”

And I have so much more to add.

“Yes,” I said, “you know what else?”
They didn’t answer. They just waited.

Writing these one and two thousand word pieces is masturbation. They fill this untitled, dark-abyss, void I have to do something bigger with my days. They are hit and run, small-time skirmishes, militant-enforced guerilla tactics.

I’m going to fight my war.

I’m going to fight my war on my terms. I’m going to put down 90,000 words this year on notebooks, my computer and on the back of receipts and napkins. And…

I’m never going to dress like anybody else, or look like anybody else, or think like anybody else ever again. Or write or react or speak like anybody else either. I am now my own celebrity.

Passion, inspiration… those words are for posters, laminated pictures of cats and mountaintops. Books with how-to titles, cheap poetry and late night commercials on the off-channels.

So let’s get homeless, lets get abused, lets get sick, and lets get dying. If that’s what it takes to war the good war.

Call it what it is. Say it. Say the word out loud.
Say it!
The word is possessed.
Say it and swallow the red pill boy.

Their faces mirrored equal parts shock, disdain and disgust. The silence in the room seemed eternal, but was probably closer to 30 seconds. “Uhhh” the man in the middle of the table uttered, “that was more than enough of what we wanted to hear. Mr. Cowgill we have decided that you are to be given…”

“Wait” I yelled, a last ditch effort on my part, “just wait! I can be good. I can learn to smile and laugh politely. Wear suits, drive in rush hour traffic and drink wine socially. I can. I can belong.”

They smiled back at me, their smiles were sad. “No, no you can’t sir. I’m afraid what you are, what you have done to yourself, with yourself, the direction you are going… only warrants one thing.”

I took a deep breath and stood up, no longer feeling the nonexistent shackles on my wrists, my back already turned before… the condemnation.

“Life Sentence, Mr. Cowgill, I’m sorry. But you’re already well aware I’m sure.”

I nodded yes. I turned and thanked the three of them- the man with the blistered skin, the heavyset woman, and the skeleton. All three of them were so so sorry. I opened the door and walked away, far away, from the grey of the room, not at all surprised with the decision.

“We seek only reprieve and welcome the darkness. The myth of a meaning, so lost and forgotten.” – Lamb of God

Essay #2

2010-11-29T17:07:00.002-06:00

(Not only did I change names but the new names all come from Material Issue songs. Material Issue was an opening set rock-n-roll band from the super early 90’s that no one ever listened to, or had even heard of, but me. And when the lead singer killed himself it broke my black emo heart. Essay #2 is not a ‘fuck you’ essay. I’ll save that one for later on.)

Diane’s body was broken and smashed underneath the roof of her car, a brand new ‘96 Honda Civic. The roof was crushed down, violence, from the weight of the tree on top of it. A dog or cat, or raccoon, or ghost, ran out in front of her, in the rain, at night, and she swerved, and she died, and the whole thing took maybe five seconds. Calling it a freak accident would be an understatement. The details of this wreck are akin to a sideshow carnival act, much like the two-headed dog, the Enigma Man, or the Siamese twins that, ironically, both know how to eat glass.

Diane was all sorts of Christian-religious, but that was okay because she backed it up by actually being a good person. She dated a boy who was crazy about Christian hardcore, bands and t-shirts that said things like Strongarm and Wish for Eden. He was straightedge, and she was on her way to save the world. I loved them both. Two years after Diane died I saw her boy out on Highland Avenue, and he was filthy and drunk. I haven’t seen him since.

Last week I stood outside on an East Lake corner, in the rain and thunder, and heard Diane call my name. The corner is an unfortunate view for this side of town’s not-so-subtle slide into spiraling abandon, chewing up its young, burying off its old and swallowing the souls stuck in between. The neighbors on the next corner position beat-up pitbulls chained equal paces to safeguard their drug house, the downed power line, and the infants learning to walk on the dirt yard and gravel.

On this corner the children, all babies, inside the East Lake address were once reduced to sleep nights in a doghouse, escape from a mama and her abusive boyfriends and her black shadow of addiction. I nodded along as Diane spoke, not a bit surprised to hear her after all these years.

She told me to quit sleeping.

“You can sleep when you're… you know…” she trailed off for a moment. “And help someone who needs it. For no reason. Help them because you can.” I pictured her with her arms out, wide and spread, and smiling. Her world, her idea, is much more beautiful than mine.

“Anything else?” I asked.

“Quit wearing so much black. It’s bad for your soul.”

I walked inside the East Lake house, and I said hello to the babies that survived their mama.

And Valerie,

Valerie crashed her car too, a flipped-over, metal re-arranging affair as well. And yeah, that’s what killed her, but me, I blamed the needles. Before crashing she’d just picked up the contents for the needles, a black moist powder in a rubber balloon. Before dying she’d had a kid and gave it away, she’d had a mama and her mama went legally insane, and she’d had a boy at home that liked to fill up the needles too. This particular boy of hers and I used to shake hands in the high school hallways and talk about industrial music. Skinny Puppy and Ministry kind of talk.

Valerie was such a leather wearing rebel punk rock girl. She was short and fiery, and had a different boy, in the days when I really knew her, that she always left me to runaway to. The two of them would share needles stuffed with the same black moist powder, and that went on and on until he went to prison to serve real time. He was inside when she crashed her car and died.

I was on Arkadelphia at midnight, again in the rain and thunder, helping medics piece together a drunk driver. It took a really long time to cut him out of his pretty sports car. In the back of the Rescue Truck I held his scalp on, blood running down his eyes and mouth, that not even being the most severe injury he, or we, needed to worry about.

Valerie’s voice sounded like she smoked two packs a day for a reason. “There is nothing else when you die, ya know”, she said, “this is it.”

“Why are you telling me this now?” I wanted to say, my hands wrapped around the cracked skull and exposed brains of the victim, his blood dripping off his chin and on my arms.

“Go do something dangerous. Soon as you can. Tonight even, who cares? This is it George. Go hitchhike to Portland, or jump a train. Rob a liquor store and give the money to the poor. Fuck, just don’t die boring.”

“Am I boring?” I may have said that out loud and gotten a look from the other firefighters and medics.

“Life is not an option, man. What did you write one time, ‘Life is living fast, dying young and living forever’? You wrote it, so… back it up. Don’t die boring, George. Too many people are lined up doing that already. And don’t ever wear white. It just tells the cops where you're hiding… and it’s bad for your eyes.”

I thought of train tracks, and books I want to write, abandoned wood bridges over water. Small Southern towns with polite waitresses and black coffee. I thought of my grandfather. “Fast, young, forever… got it.”

I get it Valerie.

Then little Christine… she just put a gun next to her head and fired. Her parents found her in her bedroom, an 18-year-old body with tear-stained eyes from a meaningless boyfriend/girlfriend argument. And all that blood. Her funeral was so quiet... (I still think about you Bobby Jean)

And little Christine talks to me all the time.

In graveyards at night, if I'm there just to be dark and morbid, putting lyrics against her tombstone.
Or inside burning houses, romanticizing of being a super hero.
Or driving highways late at night, making sure the world is indeed round.

“Pick the best place to commit suicide,” little Christine said, “and never go back. Burn the map to get there too. Believe me George, it ain’t worth it”.

“But you did it!” I screamed, and I’ve screamed it more than once, many times over the last 13 years.

“So? I was 18 and dumb and impulsive and, and, and…” she sighed too loud, trying to swallow her anger. She caught her breath, lowered her tone. “Listen… you and I, neither one of us are known for thinking things through okay?”

Her words were broken, and bloodied.

“But, please, you have to listen to me. Find something small, something otherwise meaningless, and use that to get you through. Try this. Try staring at that building off Highway 31, the one downtown that says ‘American Life’. Okay sure, it was originally some stupid insurance ad or whatever but still, those words… American Life. Use it, and don’t ever forget what that says.”

“I don’t know what that means, Christine.”

“Then spend the rest of your life figuring it out! Oh, and one more thing… quit being so sad all the time. You’ve got too much to do.”

“Like what Christine”?

I heard her smile, I heard her fade away far too young and far too soon. Her words broken and bloodied with regret.
“Fast,
young,
forever.”
I get it Christine. I promise you darling, I understand.

“Song #1 is not a fuck you song. I’ll save that thought until later on. You want to know if there’s something wrong? It’s nothing.” - Fugazi

The Hardcore singer, The Hardcore song.

2010-11-01T00:23:00.002-05:00

I know what caused this. A stupid song. The song is not really stupid but I’ll call it stupid since I let it get me so worked up. The song is “Piano Man” by Billy Joel. Oh, and “I Knew Prufrock Before he got Famous” by Frank Turner. So two songs. Two stupid stupid songs.

BORN THIS WAY
The microphone is held together with duct tape, the chord connected to it affixed with duct tape as well. The house lights are too dim, busted bulbs and black light, you can see the outlines of cigarette smoke and sweat in the halogen. The singer seems so much older than me, he’s not, and he’s wearing a t-shirt of a band I’ve heard of but never actually heard. They’ve played four songs already, the crowd is piled on top of itself at the front of the stage, ravenous for more.
It’s 1989,
or 1999,
or 2009,
or last night.
“This song…” the singer says “is one I wrote at 2am… after everything went wrong” he says, “and I mean every word of it.”
And I mean every word too.

East Lake Trash. There were too many of us in the car and none of us were old enough to drive, including the driver. I sat in the backseat, pressed tight against the window of the beat-down 4-door Chevy. I had my shirt pulled up and over my mouth and nose to mask away the pot smoke. I was tall and too skinny, and had already started chopping off my hair. Jon drove, the cassette tape music were his choices. Black Sabbath. Black Flag. Hendrix. Sounds that sound like that.

Parking lots were no sanctuaries. Electric weekend nights hummed with seething violence and drugs and teenage sex. I was just the passenger to it all and I would find myself gazing in eyes that were glazed over, or rolled back, or wide-open asleep. Briana’s house, lost in the White Projects behind the airport, was always on our radar. Her mom would snort coke and sleep with Briana’s boyfriends. Her mom was only 32, too young to be a grandmother but it wasn’t up to her, no not anymore. I ran away at 1am and rode my skateboard there, past Bama Motel Hookers and the Woodlawn Wolves, showing up with my shins all bloody… decorated in pieces of gravel and glass.

Secret Handshakes and New Years Eve Promises, all strengths of East Lake Trash. Jon taught me how to drive in a wrecked El Camino and I drove fast, maybe too fast, but fuck, I’m impatient now, I was really impatient at 15. You want to know the REAL reason I don’t do drugs or drink? Morals? Religion? Recovery? No, no, no. The real reason is because I’m fucked up enough as is.

That, and I’m a control freak.
My personality is cocaine. My mood swings are heroin and vodka. And at 15 I had no idea who I was becoming.

News traveled Amphetamine fast when Martin wrecked, and he was drunk, and it was the third car his dad had bought him, and the third car he’d wrecked. Jeremy was in the back seat and his legs crushed and broke in the tumble. Everyone around me was on LSD and didn’t care, so I pretended not to care either. We poured into a car for the Rugby Deli, the all-night store that sold beer and cigarettes and porn to anyone, any age. We hit Thrill Hill so fast in the wrong lane, Campbell driving with his pupils wide from the Acid. I was in the back seat in a hoody, freezing cold in the January electricity.

And no one knew why we were supposed to fight that time, but we were, and it was in the graveyard off Division Avenue (ironically next to Station 19, and maybe 100 feet away from where I’m writing right now). The East Lake Trash buzzed with the voltage, the potential blood. I was scared and stupid and too skinny and I wore a fist full of heavy spiked skull rings, there were two baseball bats on the floorboard. Boys I didn’t know with long hair and ratty jeans from different zip codes lit Molotov cocktails; seeing the fire in their hands was electric.

News traveled LSD fast when the skinheads moved into East Lake. Wisely, they kept to themselves in the angry half-black, half-white neighborhood, UNLESS. Unless they hosted their tourist nazi allies from out of state. Trucks with Georgia, Tennessee and Mississippi tags lined their street on Friday afternoons and that always meant hostility for the weekend. 35 bald angry boys surrounded a handful of us, us being the Outsiders, at the Rugby Deli. Police cruisers kept black eyes and broken ribs to a minimum. A retaliation of severity was planned, one week out and to the day.

East Lake Trash gathered in a church parking lot, maybe a mile away from the skinhead house. Weapons were passed around, sharpened, chipped and displayed. We caravanned to a high school parking lot and quietly circled around the dirt infield of an abandoned baseball field, directly behind their house.

I carried a lead pipe in one hand and a fist full of heavy spiked skull rings in the other.

Two “scouts” shattered the windshields of every car in the driveway, then ran to the field, the trap set…

But Police had been waiting and they knew, and I think the skinheads knew as well, they weren’t as dumb as they seemed. I think back to all of the knives, and brass knuckles and spiked skull rings. The moon was so bright, you could see the gleam of steel and the nervous violence of the East Lake Trash. We were there to maim, to hurt and kill. I ran through pitch black woods, hiding from Police, hiding from skinheads, running with the East Lake Trash pumping through my veins.

Lately, out of concern for my well-being, or out of morbid car wreck curiosity, I’ve been asked about my writing. The details, the stories, the characters… are they real? How do I remember them? Am I lying?

It’s simple.

I don’t want to just write the song, I want the song to be about me. I have the pen, the axe, the fists, and the terrible ideas. And I can write memory, and mental snapshots, and moments… and I can morph them all into portraits of sorrow, or hope or death or life or fuck it all. This song is about me. This song is my account of nothing.

DIE THIS WAY
The singer is so much younger than me and that’s okay. He’s wearing a shirt of a band that I was friends with, once. There is zero ventilation in the room and you can smell the testosterone sweat and smear of teenage hardcore. But no one is smoking so that helps. The microphone looks new, no duct tape. They’ve already played two songs, the second one had no lyrics. The singer is leaning over, pushing on his knees for balance.

“This next song” he says, “is your life. Every word. Now do something with it.”

The bass guitar thumps against the snare and the crowd, ravenous, moves against the sound.
This is right now,
and right now,
and the night was so so electric…

He says, “Bill, I believe this is killing me,” as his smile ran away from his face. “Well I’m sure that I could be a movie star, if I could get out of this place.” – Billy Joel

Imagining the Bay.

2010-09-24T18:06:00.002-05:00

Imagine every division below exists as its own entry. Excerpts from a journal. And by journal I mean handfuls of scrap paper, receipts, the back of my hand, self-sent texts and anything else I can jot down meaninglessness on before I wise up and forget.

Imagine I’m schizophrenic and that I see things… on my own terms. Imagine I’m temperamental, and too emotional, and self-destructive. “Imagine all the people”, haha. Haymakers, people. I’m still throwing haymakers.

I was staring, I couldn’t help it. He wasn’t moving, everyone else was yelling, running up and down apartment stairs, or walking down the Sunrise Hills to get a good look at the witness stuffed in back of the cop car. And that guy ain’t saying a word. So I could stare and not feel awkward, no need to explain, no one to explain anything to. Face down in a parking lot, him not me, I kept staring. A thin creek of blood sloped down the asphalt, un-ironically arrowing toward the cop car and the silent witness, and I just stared.

I spent the night there once, in Sunrise Hills, on a 1988 New Year’s Eve. Elizabeth Somebody’s mom was out on the town, which meant a handful of Outsiders and yours truly were crashing on the floor. All those guys had a thing for Zeppelin and Hendrix, while my tastes ran… a little angrier. Warzone patches and Public Enemy t-shirts accompanied an everybody-is-my-enemy lifestyle. I wanted to rebel against everything, anything, nothing. I was very good at it.

And I still am, sort of. Kerri says I’m born a rebel and to not even try to explain my tattoos to anybody else. And he told me this outside of an $18 a night hotel, in front of a domestic assault call. A “no ID, no credit card needed” kind of place. Then…

Then Harley quit. Harley quit standing over dead bodies, molested children and burning skin. Harley quit sleeping when he grew sad over what mankind does to itself. Two little girls and a wife at home, he paced the floor all night long, in constant fear of the horror business outside their front doors. And Harley was the real thing too. Patching up bullet holes, shocking hearts back to life and delivering babies. Dive in head first every single night.

Family first though, and I get that. Defending the Bay comes second to something serious. Flesh and blood is that kind of serious.

I had to stop writing when a man called 911 and 911 called for Engine 19. He told the operator he’d be waiting for us on the front porch with a knife.

Still staring at Birmingham murder victim #endless, I leaned down and watched the blood and brains slow from the hole in his mouth. I do the math. He was two years old when I was rebelling against the inevitability of 1989, Sunrise Hills.

Hope called me at midnight in hysterics, in the 1990’s, to meet her in the Southside streets so she could kiss me. And it seemed like that was what life was supposed to be like. Hopeless moments, romance nights and loud, too loud, songs on the radio. Not the Bay.

No, no one died, no one was raped. No, I am not okay. That last call got to me baby. Shook me up good… I’ll tell you about it soon enough.

I can’t stop listening to Billy Bragg. I can’t stop wanting to do something stupid. My next essay will be a document of 24 hours of self-destruction, one bad thing after another, with the hopes that I make it out alive. Billy Bragg is punk rock’s answer to Bob Dylan, so what better soundtrack for it all.

Another tonight, and there are too many kids in the house and I don’t want to leave it, what with the violence and all, but there’s a word for it. The word is “protocol” and I hate it but oh well, a lot of people dig ditches or sit on a shelf for a living. (Against Me borrowed line). The house is sick with kids, not enough men and a 14-year-old girl in a red bandana. “He’s beating on her… again”, she says emphatically.

Police showed up in a pack, and the violence spreads like plague from the bedroom to the living room to the streets of Oporto-Madrid. Kerri ushered the children into a back bed room and told them not to look. People in the street went separate ways… jails and hospitals and other homes in the Bay. I went back to the station and threw up.

Leaving is not what superheroes do.

And I missed a 17-year-old hanging himself on my off day, Grandmother finding him in his room, next to a ladder, the blood pooling with gravity, lower and lower inside his body.

The Queen collapsed behind the SOS Lounge off 1st Avenue, open for business just a few feet from where the streets of the Bay bleed into Roebuck. The Queen looked dead, face down in the gravel, one arm awkwardly twisted behind her back. Unconscious drunk in the 1pm sun looks a lot like death. The back door of the SOS Lounge read “No Bums Allowed” and “English speaking customers only”. Kerri told me the locals call her the Oporto Queen. Fat, drunk and sunburned to hell she scraped to her feet, and the cops told her to shake it off, and wait it out at the Krispy Kreme. They’d give her a ride home (somewhere) later.

Taylor Swift’s “Fifteen” is the last song I should think of… but I do anyway. Roaches are everywhere. And trash. And kicked-in or punched-out holes in the wall. And roaches. And yelling. There was a lot of yelling, threats, and obscenities. And children. There were a lot of children. In their underwear, and dirty, and not shaking off the bugs crawling over them.

“And you're dancing around the room when the night ends”…

This is the house that God has abandoned. The father won’t quit screaming and the grandmother’s neck is tattooed, she’s chain smoking. They are overly polite to us, as if they’re talking to prison guards, but they really just want us to leave. Four little boys and two little girls in the living room, I wandered through filth and found another girl asleep on a back room floor in a pile of garbage. One boy, six, is heading to a downtown hospital. The children seem to have a consensual fear, but it’s masked by the filth and the screaming, their sad acceptance that this is life.

This? This is something called life? No, no one died, no one was raped, no one was burned alive, But no baby… I am not okay.

This is the house where I renounce God, Heaven, and Hell, those kinds of things. Because no God exists that would allow these children to wake up this way every morning.

Life? Life is running so fast it burns. Life is superheroes and pretty girls, muscle cars and cut-off sleeves for summer parking lots.
Life is living fast, dying young and living forever.

My sister Carol lives a hundred yards away, a fence-hop and short cut through the neighbor’s backyard. She has a daughter and she worships her ground too. No baby, I just can’t…

I cant let it go.
I was fighting off a steroid rage, tears, and an uncontrollable wave of helplessness when Kerri told me you can’t save them all. He said it twice in the bay of Station 19. “You can’t save them all.”
Save them all? I’m not saving anybody. I just hope I can sleep. Again. Someday. Ever.
I closed my eyes, and thought of the missed hanging. And I saw these kids… the ones growing up wrong in the Bay. And how I no longer believe in prayer.
That is not what superheroes do. They don’t let go.

Back down Oporto-Madrid, it’s 2 am, and a woman furiously digs through the bushes of an empty lot, flashlight in hand, down on her knees. Kerri says she’s looking for baggies that dealers have hidden, or discarded in fear of the police. We pass the Oporto Queen, alive and well just down the strip, one drunken step after the other… down Division Avenue and out of sight.

And I called Harley and he said it was okay to write about him.

“Flesh and blood, flesh and bone, save us. Save us all”, is what I keep hearing.

I took an ink pen and wrote on the back of my hand “You are so fucked up”.

Can’t… save… them… all.

Goddamn you Kerri, I’m going to try.

“There was this one time, back when I could steal the show…” – The Takers

Heartbreakers. (A screenplay)

2010-08-23T17:47:00.002-05:00

(Unintentionally & ironically posted on the first day of 5th grade.)

VOICEOVER:
The first time I saw Janey was in the Atlanta airport, Terminal C. She was tall and thin, her mom dragging her by the arm, late for a flight. She was at least 12-years-old and her hair was straight and brown and all the way down her back. I had too much time to waste before a flight to Gainesville and I was dragging along the terminal with my backpack and cut up clothing. Some people wear suits to catch a plane, I dress like I’m homeless.

When we pass each other my skin burns and I turn around, waiting for her to look back. Just a glance… but she never does, her left arm well in front of her being dragged along to the gate.

I wonder how many times I fake smile writing this.

FADE IN:
Janey is on a beach with friends listening to a California Girl song. She’s drinking underage beer and wearing sunglasses, I walk past her on the way to the salt and water of the Gulf. Her hair is bleached and she has piercings stacked on top of each other in both ears. Her eyes look hollow behind the glass, the skin around them black from stained-cheap eye shadow. The song goes on and on about the sun and short shorts and parties that never end. I swim straight out into the ocean, more worried about sharks than the red flag and riptide. I did, after all, grow up in Spielberg’s Jaws era.

I stop writing my screenplay in mid-sentence, overwhelmed by the fear of death in a hollow room, surrounded by handfuls of photographs and notebooks full of nothing. I stare at the front door, I imagine the snarling growls of wolves, predators, this world if you let it. I take comfort in simple securities- blankets, taxi locks, brass knuckles and seatbelts. I walk thru Southside and I hear the California Girl lyrics again. The parties never end, they never ever do…

SKIP TO:
I wake up in Atlanta, a city rough with all night left-behind diners, rock-n- roll shows and gay discos. My teenage days once wasted away on North Avenue waiting in line for a punk band that wouldn’t bother for fuel in Birmingham, USA. North Avenue, and Little 5 Points, stumbling past the rude indie-store clerks, the homeless asking for change, and the rich spike punks asking for change. Janey is there, in the 5 Points, talking to herself, angry in beat-up jeans and a ratty Subhumans t-shirt. Everyone in Little 5 Points seems tense, everyone is fake snarling. I watch her stop and speak to different locals, their reactions all the same. No money, no needle, fuck off. 5 Points is so strung out, so “on the line” for violence. Like everywhere else, I never really fit in, I wish Janey didn’t either.

CUT TO:
Janey is 21, barely, and begging me to let her see her boyfriend. It’s raining, we are surrounded by garbage, and it’s all happening too fast in an Elyton alley. I watch the police flashlights wave back and fourth up ahead and I hear Tommy yell for me not to worry about bringing the medic equipment. I leave Janey with a cop who lets her smoke in his squad car while I walk against the alley in the rain… go see what her boyfriend would’ve looked like if he was still alive. (He is not)

FADE TO:
Janey is in the back room of an underground women’s shelter. If you didn’t know the shelter existed you would never know that it existed, and that’s the point. Women hide from evil that not only hurt them once, but is looking to hurt them further. Janey has a worn away face, scarred arms and dirty hair, with clean blankets and a rusted cot frame. The lockers have hand-written bible scripture on them and nicknames in quotes. She is behind me biting her nails, leaning against the lockers. I have no idea how old she is but I turn around when I think she says my name. I bite my lip to blood and hurt, trying not to make eye contact. She walks away, around a corner, and off stage.

Then that one scene… the one where I fall off completely.
And I hear Janey screaming in Northside.

CUT TO:
I am the only one on the porch, kneeling under burning rafters and waiting on water to fill the nozzle in my hand. The front door is wide open, nothing but red streaks and smoke inside. I hear Janey scream and I scream back, “Where!?” I go inside alone and fight my way up the stairs, hearing her scream, screaming back at her, hearing her scream again…

My mask sucks in on my face as the air begins running out. The fire is over, more or less, but it’s pitch black in the early afternoon, thick smoke and charred walls have nowhere to go. But Janey isn’t here. I see a window and, for a second, I think about jumping out of it, but that would be crazy. I yank my mask off when the air ends. The pitch black stings my eyes, rips into my nose, my mouth, my lungs, and I don’t like it.
“Stairs”, I scream.
Someone grabs my hand and pushes it against a wall. I feel the dip of the first stair and relax… believe me, I know the way down.
I fall down the next 18 stairs. Me plus the weight of the gear measures in well over 300 pounds. I laugh when I hit the bottom, and I don’t tell anyone about the screams.

FADE TO BLACK:
Janey is walking down the median of Highway 31, defeated, when I finally lose it. Memories of white trash teenage romance, laughing and marginally breaking the law (my late 1980’s) prove too much to confront on a road run over with bullshit strip malls, fast food joints and, now, the nightmares of four college girls burning in a crummy hotel. I think of Janey in college room hotels, I think of her in underground women’s shelters, in gutters and backstreets as well. All the wrong places, all the wrong people, all the way down.

So what if this is heartbroken?
So what if this is doom and gloom 100%? Fake smiles, false hellos and Smiths records on a sinking ship. Are you fake smiling now?
ARE YOU FAKE SMILING WITH ME NOW?
Because I’m snarling.

THE END:
I hold Janey’s hand along New York City streets, a Manhattan Christmas, the two of us in search of Greenwich Village and peanut butter sandwiches. Janey is wearing a faux fur jacket with a hood that I keep pulled over her ears. She says it makes her look like a miniature King Kong, and she’s right. I hold her hand and flag down a taxi, the horns and cold fading away behind us.

I usher her into the cab, pull the door closed and lock it. I buckle her seatbelt, then mine.
Simple security to keep away the wolves.

“When I see a woman on the news, who didn’t ask to be abandoned or abused, it doesn’t matter who she is… I think about you.” – Colin Raye

The Hunter

2010-07-10T22:40:00.002-05:00

(Everything, as always, is true, or at least as true as I remember. Names are changed, it’s getting to be a habit.)

The one time Briana saw her dad was in a folded-over picture cupped in her mom’s hand. It was a 1978 overheated June, she was riding in the backseat of a wrecked and green Chevy Nova down Highway 11 to meet him for the first time in a Circle K parking lot. She was five-years-old then, which meant her mom would soon turn 20.

Briana looked forward to seeing Dad, the handsome boy in the folded-over photo. They waited, and her mom cried, she didn’t understand why, nothing but a young and dumb teenager soaking up cigarettes and Coca-colas somewhere between Trussville and the White Projects of Woodlawn. “Somewhere between Heaven and Hell”, to coin Mister Mike Ness.

Dad never showed, her mom threw the picture away, and Briana never looked for her father again.

I met Briana when I was 14 and I’d just started looking for something.

I started looking in dead American writers. Hemingway hitting his knuckles bloody on a marlin before writing “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, blood dripping on the pages of a book with torn, dusted covers all across high school libraries. And Fitzgerald smiling, drinking poison and furious about every verb and adjective. I stood over his grave in Rockville once, envying the great dead American writer(s). I read their books, I hid in the pages. I stared at every word.

I stole anarchist books from high school libraries, and I bought zines with cut-and-paste pages. DIY philosophies meets ancient political manifestos, I read them both leaning against a Circle K wall, skateboard and Coca-colas.

A decade later I stumbled through Hollywood, still looking, now on the Boulevard of every boy and girl’s vision of the Runaway American Dream.

Dana.

Dana’s friend tried to kiss me and I didn’t kiss her back. It was way past 2:00am and we were in a nameless park on its benches in the heart of it all. Surrounded by trees, blue and red and yellow city lights in the distance, faint highway noise. Dana told us about the skinhead wars, she was a skinhead. Her and her dark skin and Chelsea bangs and Doc Marten boots. Dana’s friend was dark skinned too, but without the tough guy/tough gal air. I still didn’t kiss her back.

Dana told campfire tales of the Hollywood skinheads and where they left each other bleeding and dead, the gangs (primarily) divided over white power rhetoric and anti-white power rhetoric. 5 on 1 fights bruised the celebrity walk of stars. Dana’s beliefs, and skin color, told me which side she was on. Some gang called SHARP. Skin-Heads Against Racial Prejudice. (I love clever acronyms, no sarcasm intended) Shaved heads would quickly turn into shaggy surf bangs and beards, at least until the heat died down, until the rust blood washed off the razors.

Still looking… I listened to Dana’s tales of violence echo away into the California stars. I thought of her years later when I waded through the violence in suicides.

Tarrant’s man still wore his Oakland Raider’s jacket in the 100 degree indoor hot, the gun in his lap in the blood in the end. Tarrant and her man lived behind a garage, in a hidden room, with tacks in rap posters and records in a stack against the wall. There was a Corvette in pieces in the garage and I hate fucking sports cars. I tilted my head to the side to stare at his body, see if an alternate angle would make this seem less real. Tarrant did a lot of screaming, but she didn’t cry. They taught me to laugh so I did, and I kept looking.

(They taught all of the hunters to laugh. Laugh at danger, shrug off blood and guts, fall asleep with an eyeful of took-their-life teenagers, burned bodies and cut-in-half car wreckers. Laugh. Laugh, keep going… or collapse under the weight of brutality. If you want to help humanity, then learn to shelve your own.)

Betty V. was pretty in an ugly neighborhood crying, her eyes running down her face in black smears and pink circles. The headlights of the SUV were still on, she kept pointing at it over and over. I got out of Engine 14. Her boyfriend had celebrated his early release from rehab with some puncture-wound heroin. He was collapsed behind the wheel, eyes empty and jaw flared back and up, mouth agape, pulse grounded. He looked… dead, and his heart wasn’t pumping.

Narcan.

A medic’s IV, another needle, and Narcan, the great overdose reverser, put him back in this world. He sat up in a zombie-embedded confusion, violent and dizzy. Betty V. kept crying. I leaned my head to the side and looked in her eyes. It was raining, she was still crying, and my view of her never changed. Her eyes seemed so sad.

And then that one time I looked in Portland… the city’s majority runaway citizenship, and heroin dilemma, too many strip joints and Chuck Palahniuk. I stayed in an upstairs flat with closet junkies and their blue-black dyed hair, we stopped by the Salvation Army Store to buy sweaters for the beach. The beach was brilliant cold and beautiful and there were huge rocks in the water, white waves smashing violently around them. The stairs from the street to the beach went straight down and I was lost to the left of a USA map, Pacific Northwest. Teenage girls on family vacations rode horses next to backpack transient punks throwing a baseball. It felt more like hiding than hunting.

Until last week and the 4th of July when I went back to the White Projects where Briana grew up, only now named the Mexican Projects. We were once two dumb 15-year-olds driving through alleys with street names to change shirts for a high school football game. The first black family moved into the White Projects in the early 1980s and the neighborhood drove a burning car through their living room that night.

(I once created a fictional neighborhood in a novel and modeled it after these alleys. I named it Nopelika.)

I drove Engine 19 down a now-Mexican alley to find fire. Gangsters with shaved heads and white t-shirts leaned up against cars and clothes lines. An old lady walked past me with no jaw, an oxygen tube in her nose, small tank on her hip. A handful of cops smoked cigarettes, leaning against their cruisers. And the kids! The kids were everywhere, in the street and dirt. They stared at the engine and I waved and smiled. They looked at my tattoos, I looked in the windows of their homes and the black electrical tape holding together the frames, the uneven breaking doors and chipped away walls.

Briana is so long gone, and I doubt I’ll ever find her.

But I kept looking. I needed something- a meaning, a purpose, and at the very least, a valid explanation.

I found a stack of 1980’s movies, Breakfast Clubs and Outsiders and Pretty Pinks. Pony Boy killed two Socs with a switchblade, John Bender got birthday cigarettes, and the poor girls got the rich boys.

I found a handful of 1970’s adult contemporary songs and they said something about the good dying young.

And I found weights. I ran, and sweat, and bled. I fought myself over and over, since nothing is ever, ever, good enough. I found reckless abandon, a neighborhood born of hell and rotten hotel rooms at 3:00am with girls on their way to somewhere else. More hiding than hunting.

I found fire. I taped a piece of paper to my locker, it read “You are never finished.”

Hiding, I found nothing. There was never any secret one-sentence summary that explained it all… no religion, or message in the clouds. The only meaning was there’s not one, keep going.

I am the hunter, passing through this world never content and never comfortable, always looking for… something.
Her eyes in the rain.
The Boulevard.
A photo of a father that doesn’t exist.

And Briana look at me now. My eyes are open and forward, absorbing the suffering of others, the violence and loss, and missed moments. I try to embrace the actions and people that actually matter, ignore everything else, keep going.

Until the end, I am the hunter, coded and cursed with four words…

Something I once read taped to my locker.

“All of her lovers all talk of her notes and the flowers that they never sent. And wasn’t she easy? And isn’t she pretty in pink?” – Psychedelic Furs.

East Lake, For all my Life.

2010-06-01T16:50:00.001-05:00

Haymakers. Love it hate it degrade it ignore it all you can, but when I write I’m throwing haymakers. I want to write like I’m standing in a minefield, like there’s a knife to my throat, and bullets in my spine. Writing this brought out the Jekyll and Hyde good and bad in me. It made me clench fists and look for something to destroy, it made me want to run away to Portland and Seattle, it made me want to burn this world down in ashes. And then there were the bad thoughts…

Haymakers. I’m throwing haymakers here.)

I changed some names.

Ronnie leaned out the window with the shotgun in his hands, I drove slowly down an East Lake alley. It was a weekday night, it was something to do in 1989, it was revenge against a man and a gun that’d been aimed at us a few moments earlier. He drew down on us and I spun out the tires of my Dad’s hand-me-down Malibu, in the trash and mud on the dividing line of East Lake and Woodlawn. We raced down West Boulevard, no time to think things through, no point in trying. Ronnie retrieved the pistol grip shotgun he kept under his bed. His grandparents asked what we were doing, we did not reply.

Terri still sleeps under the overpass near 81st. His American flag is usually up, and he’s always reading. This morning he was sitting in a beach chair underneath the southbound and northbound bridges of I-59. His shirt was off in the early May heat and I couldn’t read the title of the book he had in his hands.

See that lady? She waved to the Engine, I waved back. She killed one and shot the other two, the owner of a walk-in closet boutique next to the church where I went to boy scout meetings once upon a time. I thought of the pocket change in the register the day three boys opened the door, pistols in hand, none of them walking away, one of them never walking again.

East Lake kids cover the streets and sidewalks, the vacant lots and all the wrong spots, all night all day. Black boys walk pitbulls on homemade leashes with silver spike collars. The airport is buying up homes in it’s shadow for runway space but there are houses with families in them right now, airport babies just weeks old, their front door a piece of plywood, even more plywood covering the windows. Arthur stood over the first murdered body I’d ever seen in an East Lake alley and said something under his breath to the corpse. The flies had found him before anyone else, it was 8am in a July. He was younger than me, he was a lot younger than me and I stared at him, the other firefighters staring at me for any crack in emotion. I did not give them one.

The lady cop with the tattoos up and down her arms is still working out East. She and I hugged in the middle of I-59 at a wreck just this morning, Ruffner Mountain still shadowing the pavement.

The abandoned Elks Lodge is right outside Station 19’s bay doors and that’s where the firefighters rallied during the strike of ‘79. They asked permission to bring in black firefighters because it was 1979 and that’s how things were in East Lake in 1979. Dumpster fires and burning abandoned cars terrorized the city during the strike, the National Guard soldiers proving a poor substitute for smoke eaters. A fire officer boarded himself up in Station 23 and got drunk, the National Guard unable to do anything but watch him through the windows. Unrelated to the strike, but on the night of, a firefighter shot and killed a man in a Northside juke joint.

Listen to the radio. Listen for Engine 19...

I was in Dollar’s Barbershop on 1st Avenue the day of the Minor High riots. Old Man Dollar, at least 90, butchered my hair and I listened to the men talk of their time and their lifetimes. I never said a word, why would I? I was only 16. Across the street was an Exxon, and a classmates’ brother was executed one night for using the payphone on a weekday after sunset. I watched her cry away the rest of the semester, I never said a word, what could I say? I was only 17. And that Exxon is a Shell now and Dollar’s Barbershop is long gone, but the payphone is inexplicably still there.

Tara was a lesbian drug dealer and that’s why we were in an alley on the dividing line of Woodlawn and East Lake. I crept through with the headlights dim and circled back around the Corvette dealership, Ronnie still halfway out the window. His hands were scarred from punching out airport trash windows over news he was going to be a father at 16. We circled the dividing line…

Cinema City 8, you will always be a part of me.

As well as the Anchor Motel and the family that lived in the janitor’s closet-turned monthly room rental. There was one mattress on the floor and the couple were both HIV+, and he was a bounty hunter wearing all camouflage. Their 12-year-old son was having problems breathing and I hate it when kids don’t get a chance. The Bama Motel too, it’s bright neon red lights and I was only 15 and snuck out on a Friday to get a $40 room, next door to pretty white hookers who leaned against the door frames and propositioned and/or insulted everyone that walked by.

The women’s shelter defeats me every time. A woman touched my arm in the lobby and said “George, right?” or maybe it was “George, it’s me Cindy…” and I knew who she was and I remember seeing her in a Southside bar a decade ago, and I knew her from having cheap sex with a friend and I knew she had just had a job working a grocery graveyard shift and she told me over skim milk and peanut butter purchases at 2am that her husband had given her the black eye she wore and that he was a Nazi skinhead, and she could never leave him. I remember paying my tab and telling her how much I hate Nazi skinheads.

Cindy touched my arm in an East Lake women’s shelter, and smiled, and it all makes sense now, but not really.

My mom and I sat in the parking lot of Burger King and ate in the car. The row of porn shops were catty-corner to us, and we laughed at the men sneaking in to the Cinema Blue, the way they parked so far down the Avenue. The Cinema Blue used to be the “College Theatre” and the college in question was nearby Howard which packed up and moved to Homewood and changed it’s name to Samford. I was a student of Samford for one day, and hated it so much, and I excused myself from my counselor’s office and found a water fountain and I never went back. In 1981 Burger King gave away Empire Strikes Back glassware, and I had an unhealthy obsession with Star Wars, one that I’ve never gotten rid of.

They closed the Go-kart repair shop this winter.

Johnny T dealt drugs out of his one-room flat in the top level of an old East Lake mansion. A teenage beauty queen client went missing and her father and brothers held Johnny T, and a roomful of Outsiders, hostage with hunting rifles. Anger-raged tears and fueled on Southern-violence, the beauty queen’s family cooked up Johnny T’s cocaine and tied off each other’s veins. She surfaced a week later in one of those surrounding little towns that you only hear about in references to high school football or the weather. Johnny T tried to be a firefighter for a few years, and quit when they started drug testing.

I took LSD on three different occasions in ’86. We ate the paper and skated over scary dark streets and hid in Rugby Avenue corners. On New Years Day 1987 I decided to never smoke, drink or do drugs again. A few months later I discovered a band called Minor Threat and learned the word “straightedge”.

But then Harold met that girl on the Panama City Strip and her name really was Chaos and they split time living in an old house, in the heart of it all, and a Fultondale hotel room. He left her for a pregnant 14-year-old bleach blonde and they are still together to the day, their kids all grown up.

Cinema Blue is still… Cinema Blue, recently making national news in a glory hole sting operation. Rows and rows of abandoned stores face off against 1st Avenue and the porn shop strip mall, their shelves and stock left behind with the cracks in the sidewalk, and the weeds growing in them, and small business doom. This is my hometown Springsteen, this is my hometown.

The next night in the same women’s shelter and another woman called out my name, a fabled tension all its own. She and I spoke for a few seconds but I don’t remember anything said. I couldn’t get over the children in the lobby and in the dorm rooms, eating cheap pizza and their superhero bed sheets. The shelter wasn’t always exclusive to women and children, but the director said having men on site created too many problems. I told her I understood. I didn’t tell her that I saw a man hang himself there once, because I understood the problems she alluded to were a far different matter.

East Lake save my soul.

The next murdered gangster was pressed against a wooden fence, the rain thinning out the blood and guts of his face, soaking his cliché bandanna. It was cold and I’m sure he was freezing on the ground, the seconds he spent there before he died.

The first house fire in my return to East Lake and the first Birmingham cop to show was once in a high school basement when I got “jumped in” to the Black Gangster Disciples. There were five of them and just me and I took my licks like any 16-year-old was supposed to do. Mitch was there too, and in charge, and he’s dead now. The BGD later brawled with a rival gang, friends of mine from the Southtown Projects, boys I knew from East Lake that would get high with the Outsiders and watch us bleed up our knees on skateboards. Nate is blind now from a machine gun drug deal gone awry and Lewis… he’s in a wheelchair from a similar bad situation.

“Ladies and gentleman, please direct your attention to the loser in waiting. The savior of nothing, and protector of the already-lost.” I had the nightmare again. I couldn’t breathe, there was fire and black. I woke up afraid and screaming, sucking air. I woke up, the loser left behind to clean up the junkyard neighborhood that he grew up trying to get away from. “Ladies and gentlemen, listen for the radio, listen to the tones for Engine 19”. The stabbing deaths and collapsing houses, nonsense assaults, cars burning and overdoses. Just listen.

Listen for the goddam radio.

Ronnie sat back down in my Dad’s hand-me-down Malibu, he put the shotgun under the seat and lit a cigarette. There was no revenge on the dividing line that evening. Ronnie’s son… he’s out there at 18 or 19 now. Living proof of nights that couldn’t end and lifetimes without a chance. And Cinema City 8 is so long gone, and Terri is under the bridge with his books and American flag. And Ruffner Mountain even burned down once or twice, or tried to.

And I’m out here too. Scarred proof of nights gone wrong and one lifetime to make things right, or at the very least…

Go down trying.

“After all the loving and the losing, for the heroes and the pioneers, the only thing that’s left to do is get another round in at the bar.”– Frank Turner

I think it was called Revolution.

2010-05-23T18:29:00.000-05:00

(In 2006 this was 400 words and I re-wrote it this year to 1100. It’s been a while since I’ve posted… anything and I just wanted to prove to you, and me, and the demons that push me that I’m still around. My current essay (not a re-write) will follow soon and it’s an emotional rollercoaster of doom & gloom and neighborhood. Imagine that.)

They served vanilla cokes at the Waffle House. I had no idea until Andi told me and said that’s where she wanted to meet. We didn’t have too much history together but we had enough to hang out over caffeine and sugar. Both of us straightedge, both of us failing trying-to-be, gonna-talk-about-it for-a-lifetime writers, and both of us Pensacola re-locates. She’d seen Exhaust live many times in ’97, ’98, and ’99. She always stood up front and sang the words to our songs, which was impressive, since I thought I was the only person that knew them.

I’m Birmingham-bred and raised, and have been my whole life, except for the one miserable year in Pensacola, USA. That miserable year I spent faking work until sundown in a 9-to-5 law office and wasting away at night in large automotive circles of go-nowhere driving, chain book stores and Wilco songs. Andi, unkempt brown hair and dirty shirts, occupied some of those nights at the Waffle House over vanilla cokes. I had not come to the conclusion that I was living a lie, not yet, tucking in my shirt and reporting to a swivel chair and a desk for a paycheck each morning. Andi, stolen shoes and mismatched socks, I think she knew, but was too damn nice to say so. Andi, smiled a lot. And she had a great smile.

Andi was Anarchist, text book definition. She evolved from the lyrics of the wild and metal bands we danced to into a life out of a Salinger novel, or an Aaron Cometbus zine, or her own book altogether. She slept in a flat with a dozen other folks (one being the above-mentioned author Aaron Cometbus), and never worked… but when she absolutely had to, she picked up shifts at Van Gogh’s, a coffee shop run by other like-minded politicals. I wasn’t living as displaced as her, but I had no established residence either, bouncing from my sister’s couch to my parent’s couch to a couch in the guest house of my then-employer. There was an irony in not having a bed in Pensacola, me being the Alabama trash that I am, spoiled rotten on air conditioning and thread count sheets.

So Andi…

Andi jumped trains. She rode the iron rails from coast to coast, collecting the unimaginable stories along her way. Scary, dangerous tales that left me with a big brother-ish worry when she wasn’t around. Sexist as it may sound I worried more over her being an attractive female, but I wrote it off as my traditional Southern upbringing, and common sense, more so than sexism.

Unimaginable danger stories came from Andi riding trains, it wasn’t all makeup and glam on the back of an open train car stocked with recycled bolts or corn husks. I was in the middle of trying to explain my employer’s lawsuit database when she told me of a teenager that had run away with his younger sister to ride rails and lost her along the way. A trucker drove off in an 18-wheeler, baby sister in the front seat, the teenager busy inside a 7-11 buying them all cigarettes. Six months later the teenager was still searching. Baby sister had just turned 14.

Another night of vanilla and ice in a Waffle House and I was rushed, checking my watch every few moments, adding up potential hours of sleep, since 5am is early no matter how pointless your job seems. My mind wandered over tomorrow’s checklist, my white button down sleeves rolled up, collar loosened, tie taken off in the truck. Put a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other and I was a full-blown executive. Put a gun in one hand and open my mouth around the barrel, this aint a lot like living.

Andi, her voice a distant echo, said something about a gang of transients, and I came back down from self-destructive fantasy. A gang of transients with tattooed faces roamed their train yards and slit the airways of trespassers on their turf, she said. An entire campground wiped out overnight, all victims of rusted knives to the throat.

And so it goes. So it went.

Waffle House, Pensacola, USA, the two of us too social-outcasted for the beach scene or dance clubs. Too many military boys and teenage girls wanting to get married anyway.

I drank vanilla cokes and hung on every word. Andi didn’t shower, and didn’t shave her legs or under her arms. I thought that was weird, but she thought it was odd that I showered three times a day, and shaved my legs and under my arms. She brought me a fanzine she’d clipped together, all handwritten, proving she was a notch above me as a failing, trying-to-be gonna-talk-about-it for-a-lifetime writer. The zine was filled with poems she’d written in the middle of Nowhere America.

When she was cold or hungry.

Running away or running back home.

Lost or found.

I read every word on whichever couch I called home and felt like the biggest phony that had ever listened to Operation Ivy. I got up the next morning and put on a tie for work. I stared at the train tracks that ran parallel with the Bay and hurt for somewhere other than where I was headed.

I haven’t seen Andi since those 2002 nights at the Waffle House, but I think about her a lot. I thought about her when I got fired from that law office job a few months later, I thought about her when I drove across America in my parent’s Honda, and I thought about her when I started getting paid to run into burning houses.

And I think about her when I write.

Her friendship did something to me, something wicked between inspiration and envy. And if I ever see her face again I’ll let her know.

But for now, me and my sexist Southern upbringing hope she’s safe.

"Maybe you’ll be out there on that road somewhere, some bus or train, traveling along. Some motel room, there’ll be a radio playing & you’ll hear me sing this song. Well if you do, you’ll know I’m thinking of you and all the miles in between and I’m just calling one last time, not to change your mind, but to say I miss you baby... Good luck goodbye... Bobby Jean" - Springsteen

My Imaginary Intervention

2010-04-18T21:03:00.003-05:00

My lungs hurt worse than they had in quite some time. I fought to breathe through my nose, but a cold was making that impossible. Snot ran down my face, 36-year-old bones + muscles held with the glue of 80-year-old joints + ligaments. I was in shorts in December and I was running up and over the 24th Street Bridge. Christmas was days away and I promised myself that if I stopped running, at any point on the bridge, I would jump off.

Seriously.

Running is simple with the right inspiration. This particular day had been bad, trivial nonsense that incorporates being me, and the next day didn’t seem too attractive either. The self-wager was relatively easy to make.

I caught my breath on 3rd North outside of the Speakeasy. I gave a homeless man an unopened pack of smokes after watching him dig through trash for lip-stick coated butts, beer-soak-breath filters. Wasserman wrote a book called “At Home on the Streets”, and he’s as nonsmoker as me but I gave away the pack in his honor. I didn’t have to jump off the 24th Street Bridge.

I help people, right?

I’m doing all I can, I think I am at least. So what, I’ll try harder. I’ll quit sleep, quit work, quit breathing, I don’t care. I just want to help. I just want to matter, write out the words of razor and fire, the suffered-beating pulse of avenues & cross streets. Those were my final thoughts as I walked down the stairs…

They invited me, but I said this anyway.

“Thank you all for coming. I know you're busy, I’m busy too… life keeps most of us on heart attack courses.” I looked around the room, blank semi-interested, semi-bored, semi-concerned faces stared back. The room was a basement, it looked and smelled like a basement, the only light being a single bulb that swung from it’s cord power source. It was hot, and someone had been smoking until I politely asked them to put it out, but the tobacco and dust hung in the air. There were no windows, the smoke and dust, like me, had nowhere to go.

I counted 11 faces.

Looking around the room, I saw 11 faces of our inherited culture. Rock-n-roll was too far discovered, and Bukowski shot up and died while we were in kindergarten. The Sex Pistols were frauds and the Ramones were Republicans, except for Joey… But here we are and everyone was waiting on me to say something, anything, nothing. So I started talking.

I could feel the need for something self-destructive in my veins. I drove though the white cold rain, furious for no reason. Highway 31 and the sky had blackened over with the weather, nevermind that it was mid-afternoon. Traffic stopped on the bridge over the Nick. The Nick Rocks.

A man, haggard with a beard and wet with rain, waved his hand pushing traffic through one lane, around the wreck, the over turned SUV and the woman trapped inside. No police, no fire trucks, just a handful of everyday folks, parked past the carnage, biting their nails, crossing their arms and dialing 9-1-1 over and over. I parked and got out…

The 11 of us are victims of an inherited culture. I didn’t ask to be a part of this, neither did you; waking up cursed, morning after morning, with the anchor that I’m not doing enough with this life. Just a few hours ago I saw a man torn in two, his car folded in half like a deck of cards, the dashboard pushing bluntly through his gut and into the backseat. His right arm was twisted behind his head, eternal dark, eternal sleep. The chief cancelled the Engine Company I was riding with, instead asking for a coroner. We went anyway.

I parked in the middle of 31 and got out, it was still raining cold on 31. The Nick was under me, with it the nonsense memories I had of the one time-convenience store. Being turned away from Black Flag for only being 12-years-old, being the opening band for Jawbox, finding my truck windows bashed in under the viaducts. Thanks for memories…

I walked toward the SUV, my skin burning, the adrenalin and self-destruction boiling…

There were three children on the corner of Montclair Road and Montevallo, two boys, one girl, a dog on a chain. They wore green and black, filthy clothes, patches on their jeans, bull piercings in their noses. Typical homemade tattoos, typical homemade punk rock look. Birmingham has been sick with transient punk kids through the years, scene invaders prone to violence and theft, since they could just leave to locust another town if things blew back on them.

These were not those kids.

Their eyes were hurt, their ribs were obvious, they were wrong turns and bad ideas. The girl, maybe 17, held a clever sign that said “On the road and out of luck”. I handed Janey money to hand them through the truck window. I told her to tell them to stay out of trouble. She didn’t say it.

Self-destruction boiling I stuck my head in the broken passenger window of the SUV and looked down at the woman trapped under the wheel, flat against the pavement. The windshield, spider-webbed but still in one piece, was the only way in. There were sirens in the distance and traffic was stopped up on both sides of the highway. 911 would be a few minutes. The handful of everyday folks, hyper on the violence, talked over each other with scenarios and ‘what ifs’. They all stopped when I punched the windshield.

A second hit pushed the glass forward and I grabbed the entire shield and yanked it back, yanked it back enough for a point of entry. Blood was running freely from my knuckles and forearms. The SUV rocked on it’s side when I got on the pavement and crawled in, too far gone to turn back now.

Wandering children must travel in threes. Just hours ago a trio of dirty punk rock boys showed up at the station, on the road and out of luck with no clever sign. The youngest looked 13, and handed me his birth certificate to show me he was 18, and I didn’t even read it. He had a guitar slung over his back, and his older brother had a bull nose piercing. Actually, they all had dumb tattoos and piercings (sound familiar?) so I gave them money to get back home, get back to Florida, and I told them that if this was a con, and they stayed in town hustling folks for change for beer and cigarettes, that I would find out, and that I would kill them. It was hard not to laugh, but I said it. It sounded tough, like Alphonse Capone or Frank Castle. I was only half-joking.

Somebody grabbed me and told me I was bleeding. I laughed and screamed “Get your fucking hands off of me!” and continued the crawl. The woman was trapped and hurt in a seatbelt, and under the rearranged dashboard, but mainly just scared. Working on my knees in broken glass I took her weight off the seatbelt, and unlocked it. I told her to press her face against mine. Then I pulled us both off of Highway 31. Sirens even closer, police pouring out of their cars, I pulled a large piece of glass out of my hand and went home. I nursed my wounds in a hot bath, I watched the water film over into a brown red, the sting of every piece of glass against the heat of the water.

I help people, right?

I am doing all I can. And so what, I will try harder. I’ll quit sleep, quit work, quit breathing, quit living and dying and quitting, I don’t care. I just want to help. I just want to matter. Those were my last words as I walked away from the 11 other faces of our unrequested inherited culture. Up the stairs and out of the basement, turning my back to the only people that have ever believed a word I said.

I smashed the light bulb on the way out and muttered “I’m on my way to save the world”, eyes focused on whatever comes next, my inherited culture as the backdrop for self-destruction and importance and a reason. No sleep, no hesitation, no backing down.

Born against.

“I’m on my way to save the world” - Operation Ivy

American Distance

2010-03-16T17:50:00.003-05:00

(This is for Andrew & Dolarhyde, who gave me his CD and I listened to it until 4am and then wrote half of this in a notebook. This is for Clay and Judas Cradle who fell in love with metal and fought their way all over the USA map. This is for Wasserman and None but Burning… and every single one of my friends who threw it all away, stepped into the abyss, and went on tour.)

I woke up under a million burned out stars in the Flagstaff Arizona mountains and went to bed in a cheap Las Vegas hotel. The contrast of the two surroundings disoriented 21-year-old souls, a four-hour drive between cities was no time to adjust. Flagstaff was snow freezing in July, the mountain air burned our nostrils, but this was nature so none of us cared. The first thing I noticed in Vegas, aside from the neon lights and their inducing headaches, was the pornography. It lined the streets and gutters and we were ankle deep in glossy paper and cardboard, exposed flesh penetrating exposed flesh.

Our show in Flagstaff, 1995, never happened, but a year and a month later we went back and played, maybe, Exhaust’s best show ever. The Arizona comeback took place in a mountain side gazebo, the 100+ anarchist-nature-style punks more adapt to burning nostrils than the four yolks of Exhaust. I hung from the wood rafters and explained our song “Will” a screamo-emo tune (always) about a preacher telling Candace’s family that her suicide was God’s will. I dropped to the ground in unison with Andrew crashing in the drums and 100+ anarchist-nature style punks went crazy.

It’d be too easy to say that ‘you had to be there’ or ‘go on tour for yourself’ to understand this kind of thing. Start a band, annoy your parents, your girlfriends and practice at awkward times, awkward places. Rent a storage unit, a warehouse, a loft. Do something, be in a band, play shows, go on tour. Glamour-less, money-less, and in my case, talent-less, but throwing it all to hell because it all falls under punk rock, and I’d been wearing that title on my name tag since the mid-eighties.

En route out of Las Vegas for the first and last time we stopped at a fast food chain mirage in the middle of the Nevada desert, erected for road-weary travelers, drifters and suckers (chalk us up under all three). I met a 17-year-old employee on a smoke break, Christy, and she was impressed with my poor fashion sense and band status. I never led anyone on about being in a band. All we were doing was nothing. Nothing special, nothing exotic, nothing socially or financially or romantically beneficial. It’s a band. It’s punk rock. I shrugged a lot when I tried to explain it.

She begged me to take her with us and I refused. I just laughed.

Years later she found my number on the back of an Exhaust cassette and called. She’d just had a baby, she was 19 now, she still worked at Arby’s and she had nowhere to live. She told me I should’ve let her go with us. “Look at me now, look at my life now”, she said, tears in her voice.

Portland to Seattle was an easy three hours north but it was 2am and raining and we had covered insane distances to get to Portland in the first place. We were tired, mean, and getting too skinny… ribs sticking, faces whiter than usual, and sunken eyes. Brannon drove too fast in a van that drank oil like watered down beer. I watched his head drop as he dozed over and over, slapping his own face hard to come back to the wheel and the responsibility of a van full of southern white-boy punk-rock kids. (I’m writing this 14 years later so it’s a safe assumption that the self-slaps were effective). Red Bull had yet to become the common commodity it is now or we would have been bathing in it.

Tooth and Nail Records #2 man in charge, Bill, fell in love with Exhaust’s Dischord-borrowed sounds after I gave him a copy of the same cassette I’d given to an Arby’s Nevada girl. Tooth and Nail, then, was releasing wave after wave of successful bands, many or most with religious backgrounds. (Something Exhaust was far from). Bill and I both knew that Exhaust expressed different versions than the label’s current roster but we both chose to ignore the obvious. Sort of. A real record deal was talked about. Contracts, paid studio time and more touring.

When Bill finally called, Andrew and I were drinking Gatorades on a swingset at an elementary school, worn out from a poorly-played game of basketball. “Are you a Christian band?”, he asked, “not that it matters”. I could have said yes, I could have lied or trumped up my role and my band to be something we were not. Rock stars, millionaires, popular… or Christians.

Six months later Exhaust’s career on Tooth & Nail had watered down to a guest spot on a compilation CD called “I’m your Biggest Fan”, sharing space with bands that graduated to Pepsi commercials and sold-out fairground arenas.

And we stayed poor white-boy punk-rock types and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

We found the infamous DIY creation example of Gilman Street in Berkeley… North California coming on strong after a series of gangster failing LA shows and dominatrix days. (See an old essay I wrote called "Greetings from an Eerie-sweet Place") The show was sold out, not for us, no no no, but for the heavyweight matchup of Los Crudos- Hispanic political heroes, and Weston, New Jersey goof balls. Mohawks and spikes had made a fad comeback with Rancid’s 1995 outing of the wolves, and North California was covered in them. We stayed with friends in Oakland and Oakland is/was every bit as touch and rumble as they say. Our friends later that month lied their way onto a daytime talk show, with a fake bad romance and nationally-appealing drama.

Onstage at Gilman Street goes a long way. Exhaust had studied/modeled/attempted our stage presence after handfuls of other rock-n-roll nobodys that we worshipped while the rest of the world ignored them. The code was simple:

Play your heart out. Tear their hearts out.

A self-review would write that Exhaust. made up for holes in talent with emotion-terror and attitude. We were nice, we were smiles but we did not give a fuck. The 600 mohawks and spikes on Gilman Street got the same show that the four drunks in Albuquerque did. Strained-vocal emotion. Emo-terror. Out of breaths. Out of our element. Out there.

We shook a lot of hands and hugged a lot of necks in Berkeley. The hippie fight back scene of the sixties now had shaved heads and loud guitars. A year and a day later, back in Oakland, back on Gilman Street we played to no one, maybe 17 people, and aimed our claws and fangs at their hearts too. We stayed in a warehouse loft, the drummer of Operation Ivy living next door. Our this-year host said the drummer collected bi-monthly checks of $30,000. Reward for being a part of the greatest recordings to survive the late eighties.

The original lineup of Exhaust played its last show in St Louis, August 1996. Mike drank beer because it was free and we didn’t get paid. We’d driven straight from Denver (go look at a map) and the night before we’d driven from Seattle to Denver (look at the map again). We hurt-tired, we hurt for home and we were beyond poor now. And I wouldn’t have had it any other way. There were rusted nails in my throat and broken glass in my heart when Mike quit the band a few weeks later. I still hold that grudge against him too, that’s how much being a part of nothing going nowhere meant to me.

And I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve had the rest of my life to get things in order, make plans that make sense, and learn to be an a-dult. A busted-up van and a handful of southern white-boy punk-rock types with a shoebox of emo songs was the opposite of all that. Stumbling through cities, American explorers blindly following a notebook full of venue directions and contact numbers. Screaming lyrics hoarse to a crowd of hundreds or a crowd of 3-4 and, finally, being a part of nothing going nowhere that taught me something I will never let go of:

How to be me.

“I can’t stand this singing, I can’t stand this song. I can’t stand being home, lord, I can’t stand being gone.” -Tim Barry

“15 hours for a cancelled show, somewhere in Nowhere, Ohio… I think I just want to go home.” - Dolarhyde

The Endless Meaningless Murder Summer.

2010-02-14T09:39:00.002-06:00

(Originally handwritten on the back of a gang prevention brochure)

The stuffed animals were once white, now black-charred and dripping wet, dark marble eyes staring, forever staring. A stack of clothes melted together, sequins & sashes, coat hangars reshaped into iceberg runs of plastic. Malcolm X books survived, as well as Birmingham 1960s civil rights pictures. The memories of this town, in that era, never go away. There was snow and ice on the ground outside and the fire confined itself to one room, in one apartment. It ate everything in it.

The kitchen was sidewalk narrow, I had to turn to the side to walk through in 40 pounds of turnout gear. A barbell was loaded up with iron plates on the floor below the sink. A Rubik’s Cube sat next to two hammers on top of the water heater. There was a stack of books on the counter. The kitchen was a jail cell. Weights and peanut butter jars and reading material.

I thought of Joey.

It was the endless straightedge summer and hardcore/punk rock/emo bands toured across, or tore across, the southeast with the steel-eyed drive of General Sherman burning down Atlanta. A packed car driving to Athens, Auburn or Memphis to stand in a cramped living room and watch our heroes bleed on microphones meant nothing. It was just gas money and laughs and yellow lines on the pavement passing by you at 1am. Wasserman and I hosted more than our share of bands, only we cheated slightly and rented out an old store front for the music. I tried to keep my living room clean.

Joey came from the Midwest and told us he’d played drums for Coalesce before doing an ounce of prison time for stealing a car. He was straightedge like us, and wore the similar war paint tattoos, the shirts and hoodies. He knew the lyrics, the same ones we did, the same ones that some of us had written. Re-located in Pensacola the four hours of I-65 meant nothing to him and his girlfriend Angela when it came time to be a part of things. There was Bear Witness and Caption. Haste and Exhaust. 8th Day.

The word “emo” didn’t take a wrong turn until the end of the 1990s. The four miscreants of Exhaust once stayed up all night on a beach swing set arguing over what was emo and what was not. Cars, haircuts, backpacks. We had a vicious reputation for not taking anything seriously and self-deprecating senses of humor. And that was in ‘95.

Hot Water Music played a pool party and life could not have gotten better.
I remember Angela there.

Angela had crystal-glowing eyes and didn’t talk very much. She was tall and thin-shouldered and constantly self-aware of her posture. Brown hair. Tour shirts. She was one of many I’d see asleep on my living room floor after nights of noise, or upstairs at Sluggos in Pensacola… leaning against a graffiti-wall in the dark bar lights.

Everyone did silly stage dives into the pool when Hot Water Music played the set list they virtually let us write. It was an endless meaningless summer and often, I’d sneak away from Alabama bartending to be a part of it all. Amber and I ate I-65 South alive that day, in pursuit of lyrics with meaning and growling guitars, Pensacola, USA.

More than once I wandered into a hardcore show, barefoot and covered in sand, salt-wet board shorts. And that was alright. I was in Pensacola, USA and no beach is prettier, the horizon disappearing behind waves and seaweed. A nearby beach bar would leave their speakers on all night and I don’t think I ever heard a song that Sammy Hagar wasn’t singing. Again… that was alright.

Two Thousands

The decade rolled over into a new century and nothing got easier. No longer part of Exhaust, no longer doing shows in a downtown store front, and nervous tension over a beautiful daughter on the way. The desire was still there, the voices, the passion, but things had changed. I remember seeing Boogie Nights in the theatre and walking out when William H. Macy’s character, Little Bill, put the gun in his mouth and the film rolled the reels from 70’s free-for-all to 80’s brutality. The relevance being that I don’t handle change very well.

Southeast roadtrips became fewer and further between, the living room floor no longer covered over with sleeping bags, tattooed skin, and black-dyed hair. I’d moved into a crummy Southside apartment across the street from an all night disco, the thump thump of the bass going until sunrise. Amber and I shared the space with no a/c, stolen internet and two attempted break-ins. Our slumlord, to this day, remains one of the most hated men in Birmingham, USA.

The phone lines were down when I got an email from my Mom in Pensacola. It read “Call me ASAP. One of your friends just killed another one of your friends.”

When the law caught up with Joey he was running down train tracks and draining blood from his wrists, both of them slashed to ribbons from the same Spyderco knife he’d use to stab Angela to death. Facing down the guns of Pensacola Blues, and coated in the drying brown-red blood of two (his and hers) he told them that he was the man they were looking for. The paramedics bandaged his wrists, the police put handcuffs on them, I seem to think that he took one last look at daylight…

I’m not sure of the ‘why’, but from bits and pieces of court testimony, and police reports and friends too close to it all, I know a great deal of the ‘when’, the ‘where’ and the ‘how’.

Joey stabbed Angela a total of 17 times. She fled to a neighbor’s apartment and banged on his door, midday, as Joey continued stabbing her while she screamed in a cell phone to 911. Whatever crimson image her neighbor saw kept him in shock, and a shut-in, for months and months. Joey ran for the train tracks when the door opened, the Spyderco knife now turned against his own wrists, Angela’s body collapsed, running streams of blood.

A month later and it was still the endless murder summer... Amber and I went to Panama City Beach, of all terrible places, to see Hot Water Music and whoever else at the Warped Tour. The punch of the lyrics had new meaning. The guitars now felt like they were cutting open my veins. On the way home I stopped at an all-night burger joint to meet Pensacola friends. We talked about Joey. We remembered Angela. We agreed that life was unfair… unfair that there were so many horrors in this world and, sometimes, all you can do is watch. We hugged good byes and, in the parking lot, I told them I was going to open a bar someday and call it the Speakeasy. I drove back to Birmingham, USA.

Another month later and I raced away from closing down a Southside bar to UAB’s hospital to be there when Janey was born, be a part of it all.

Summer was officially over.

(This essay was supposed to be my “Jungleland”. Drifting characters and late late nights, and the interaction of the two. Parking lots, living room shows and beach sand. That idea took a wrong turn along the way. I just finished reading a book where the protagonist had a voice in his head driving him. The voice said “Push… it ... down…” whenever he began to dwell on his actions or behavior. Whether it was regret, or sadness, or anger.

Push it down.

A lot of words written above came from something that I’d pushed down. A lot of words I’ve written over the last few years come from something I’ve pushed down.
Today I met a woman who’s husband was shot to death; left her and their daughter behind to fight this world alone. Her daughter is nine. Janey is nine. Life hurts all over. No one is exempt.
Push it down.)

“Shiver and say the words of every lie you’ve heard. First I’m going to make it, then I’m going to break it while it falls apart.” - Echo & the Bunnymen

Shallow Discontent.

2010-02-02T07:32:00.004-06:00

(This essay is about music. I love music. And I listen to every single band mentioned or quoted below. Who cares…)

Big city. The trains kept waking me up. That, and the cold in between the cracked mortar of the brick walls, and the nightmare that I’d lost five years and Janey was 14 and I was stuck running in circles. I woke up crying. I woke up cold. I was hidden away in a 2nd Avenue North Fire Station, centered between a true speakeasy and the Family Courthouse. There was a book about Satan on my night stand and I tried to go back to sleep.

He turned his wrist in to shoot himself in the heart.

I’ll stop there. Enough.

No, no I won’t stop I won’t ever stop. I’ll walk into every fire you set, I’ll grind glass in my palms and I won’t quit. And I’ll pick up your dead bodies. Forward motion. (Forward motion means I will write about it all)

Again.

He turned his wrist in to shoot himself in the heart. His wrists were scarred-slashed from last week’s attempt, and they were done the right way. Semi-sharp razors running from the veins to the forearms. It was cold in the projects, it was loud from the family member’s screaming, and it was blood-pooled from where he’d turned his wrist in to shoot himself in the heart.

Still alive, and screaming to let him die, in a cheap chair, reclined in a corner. Pepsi cans stacked in front of ash full trays, home cooked meal left uneaten on the plate and it was 6:30am. The police went in with us simultaneously. The gun was on a counter top and I was freezing cold, tough guy that doesn’t wear a jacket on 20 degree Tuesdays.

To me this was “Everybody Wants to Rule the World”. English-accent diatribe bounced echoes behind colorblind eyes, in between the snatch-and-grab to get a pulse-barely man to UAB’s trauma hotel. For him it’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” a 70’s mantra on turntable vinyl turning, crackling, running around over the grooves. There’s no need to play the album backwards since the hidden messages are in the chorus.

Take your own life. Anyone can do it. Or take one, because anyone can do that too. Advice? Stay on the highways.

The highways of the Tragic City keep you out of the neighborhoods… neighborhoods forgotten over with abandoned factory hopes and shop-glass dreams. Soaped-up and dust store front windows. This is Lower Common Denominator economics and short term leases. The streets are not streets, they are alleys and pot holes. The houses are not homes, they are four walls with a roof-leak ceiling. The children are not children, they are the thieves, victims and bystanders of tomorrow. Kingston pushes against Woodlawn and into East Lake, my personal favorite*
*(When New Orleans arrived in town during a recent hurricane scare, the tourist gangsters beelined their violence to an all out war on Oporto and 2nd Avenue North. Across 77th an Asian shop keeper has killed two, attacked multiple and refuses to back off. 44 oz sodas and stolen beer. Once again, and said from long ago... East Lake eats you up.)

Downtown numbered avenues separate the East from Elyton, Ensley, Pratt City, and the other heavy hitters of the West. Stay on 31, believe me don’t get off 59, 20 or 78. Don’t even look off the highway, don’t make eye contact with the shadow-heart of the city.

Stay on I-59 through Kingston and the dead gang boy we pulled off a porch with a bullet piercing underneath his arm and into his lungs bouncing into his trachea. We locked the door, locked in the thick pot smoke that got me, straightedge boy since the eighties, really high really fast while his friends drew guns and wanted to see a magic trick. The magic of resurrection. The one cop in the house called in a 10-33 and an army and a stream line of blood ran over a tattoo of a David star, poorly carved in blue-black ink, with some cliché words of God judging him. Stoned, I went outside and the police calvary roped off the area with machine guns and yellow tape.

Inside I’d leaned my back against the door to keep the neighborhood from coming inside, their screams tearing open a silent night of Kingston, the creaking industry sounds of Stockham long long gone.

Stay on I-59, the safe passage over neighborhoods this big city tries to bury. But just staying on the highway... it’s not always enough.

Big evil city. Winter was just some girl. Cursed with the complex of never saying “no”, the complications of going along to get along. A boyfriend’s bully older brother cornered her once in a downstairs bathroom, there’s no romance in kissing like that. Winter bleached her hair white like snow and had buck front teeth that worked for her and shrugged off the bad shadows of the city. Winter had two kids and there was that time a different boy cornered her, held her arms, and shoved fingers inside her and she told me that it wasn’t rape because she never said “no”.
“You never say no” I said. This is “Sweet Jane” meets “Jane Says”, a mashup of sad, mixed musical notes that play the message: There was something here for me at one time, but even that’s gone too.

Winter smiles way more than I do, a pretty freckled-blonde smile. I thought about her once and I didn’t look at pornography for five years. The heart of the big evil city keeps beating.

So forward motion dictates to go to hell with it… let’s get meaningless. Lets re-write Anarchist manifestos to Rich Boy or Motley Crue. We no longer need Strike Anywhere, Public Enemy or (early) Against Me. Do you think that’s what I listen to when I conspire? I write “romance-dead-tragedy, with some string of hope barely threaded”. I don’t need reminders that this town is hell. I need alcohol-esque escape. I need songs with puddle shallow meaning, lyrics of nothing.

Look at my shoes, my haircut, my watch, they make the man, right? Flat black soles, a cheap Timex, hair not an option. This is N’sync’s “Bye Bye Bye” in the speakers, not Fugazi’s “Song #1” or anything that matters, or anything relevant or anything that will last. That said Big Evil Crumbling City…

I’m not going to work so hard to be your hero anymore. I don’t need jacket patches and silver spikes to prove my discontent and,

and someday,

I will be the one to bash in your beating heart.

“You can't win. You know that, don't you? It doesn't matter if you whip us, you'll still be where you were before, at the bottom. And we'll still be the lucky ones at the top with all the breaks. It doesn't matter. Greasers will still be Greasers and Socs will still be Socs” – S.E. Hinton

International gathering of Failure Narcissists

2010-01-11T21:34:00.002-06:00

(I’ve kept this one stashed back like a pair of brass knuckles. I’m not going to count it as my first for 2010 but damn if it’s not a precursor. This is a multiple-personality year. This is the year of schizophrenia… late nights, ultra-violence and pouring gasoline on wounds. This is my year to let go. One more thing… after today the titles of these essays will not be so damn 90’s indie-rock cryptic. Scout’s honor.)

I knew her from somewhere and she knew me right back, I think that’s why she spoke up. I couldn’t place her, she didn’t place me, the two of us standing in her doorway, three turns deep inside a women’s shelter buried on the forgotten side of downtown. She may have once been a hostess at some restaurant I’d go to every weekday for months, the whole city knows I’m a creature of habit, a disciple of repetition. She may have been a dress maker I would pass by in storefront windows of Homewood, me running away demons, her with a tape measure and a mouthful of pins.

Or she may have been homeless and dirty and asked me for cigarettes in a parking deck at 3:00 am and I told her to fuck off cause I don’t smoke and my back was wrecked from work and I don’t share well with others after midnight.

She just wanted to help now. Her glasses were chipped and taped and her clothes were mismatched and her teeth were crooked and she was younger than me and it was after midnight and I turned around and spoke back because she just wanted to help. There was a row of lockers in the barracks. There was a different bible verse taped to each one.

So you help me, Doctor.
That girl, I can’t get her out of my head.

Seeing her made me want to smash mirrors.
Seeing her made me want to burn American flags and paper money, vomit blood on televisions, throw away family photographs.
Run away to Portland, land of the runaways, strip clubs, and heroin. (in that order)
Sadly though, I don’t think she was ever really there.
So tell me who I was talking to and, more importantly, who was talking back.

My parents told me, and tell me to this day, very matter of fact, that I can do anything in life that I put my heart to, put an effort to, give a fuck about doing. And I’m trying Doctor, I’m trying with fading strength, and bitten lip stress, heavy metal soundtracks at sunrise. The poisoned bastard on the shrink’s couch wants to follow the rabbit, the pen, the paper… the writer.

I could morph Chuck Palahniuk, easy. Watch this:

The piss smell met us at the door. So did the entire family in the living room, handfuls of children pre-school to high school. 8am and the adults are drinking beer. 8am and no one goes to school on a school day. She.
She locked up in the bathroom with the pills that kept her sane, her pills that kept her unlocked. We banged for a few, she opened. Sat down in the living room naked. Her body was beat up by gravity and crazy, she put on a robe full of moth holes, vomit stained. Her hair was picked apart by small rodents, her nails were pieces of melted plastic.

“Ok, I’ll take my pills.”
Her son said “fuck this” out the door, the nakedness that was his mom went to the kitchen and got two beers and poured them in a dirty cup.
The flies buzzing were unaccommodating. The urine smell was a good host, it stayed close by.

Or Henry Rollins? He has tattoos and muscles, I have tattoos and muscles. No problem, he would finish this fun memory strong:

The things I remember most are all insignificant. The hundreds of figurines piling off of an end table, all of them black except for two. Her wild-haired-son stormed in and out of the front door, opening a screen door with no screen. Just a hollow frame on front of a home. There were rows and rows of flowers leading up the walkway, or down to a Crown Victoria on the street with the windshield bashed in.

Robe open, she washed down a handful of sane-pills with the two beers. A black and white copy of a news article was taped to the wall. The headline said “Evans to be put to death.” A quote, highlighted in yellow, read “I don’t wish harm to his family, just him.”
In pen it was written over “He does wish harm to his family too.” Black Jesus paintings surrounded all of us- the family, the firefighters and the flies.

But Doctor, I just don’t feel a thing anymore inside this continuing pursuit of defining identity. The corpses no longer leave me numb, no longer leave the sweet-sad taste of loss and regret. A girl with chipped glasses three hallway turns into the shelter, now that’s another story. But the dead? The dead leave nothing. I’ve crushed ribs in before many many times to bring back life, and I have had some success, but the failures, the dead, I shrug away.

No Doc, I don’t want the pills, twice a day. I don’t want shots every Wednesday in my stomach and I certainly don’t want to sit in on group therapy. Other people’s problems are something I absorb every day, my job choice has me hunting for them. When my lips are bitten in holes of skin, chewed for rat food (Palahniuk would say) and my muscles ache for the last time forever (Rollins coffee table stuff).

When you find me left for dead,
but still breathing in a public park,
stick the IV in my carotid and I’ll turn my head and watch the fluid push under my skin, into my neck, into my blood veins. Any more intravenous medicine please push through my cheek, just under my eye, I can’t stand to see my shoulders bleed.

I don’t want pain killers Doc, I want pain reminders. Mace and a tazer, bullets and batons.

Are you still there? Doctor? Are we still discussing my kingdom of rust and dust, broken glass scattered in the parking lots of my childhood, which is, honestly, not too far of a walk from your office.

Validate me.
Only you can’t.
I'm sitting here shaking, pen in hand, furious hurrying to jot down the details of suffering, of struggle, mine and others, before I forget. I know what this is.

The girl in the shelter, and the happy endings to stories that I am re-writing daily… and YOU.
None of you are really there, are you?
…

“You don’t get to keep the parts of the country you like, ignore the rest, and call what you’ve got America.” - Warren Ellis

Read my knuckles. They’ll say STAY GOLD.

2009-12-13T11:01:00.002-06:00

(For Amber O. You and I are gonna go the distance, I promise. Forever Family.)

I wandered through Hartford, Connecticut as the out-of-place white-boy Southerner, read too deep in the misadventures of Aaron Cometbus and coffee-charged on the localism of Mark Twain. It was 2002 and I was in town with just enough time to watch Autumn turn leaves gold and neighborhoods turn to steel red-brown and dust. In the 1860-somethings Yankee soldiers poured out of their homes to march on Atlanta in the sharpest cut of Union-blue uniforms. Northern charm and grace became reputation for the next century. Near-water pleasantries and manners. I was on foot and looking for all of the above, enough time to kill before airing “0274”, a documentary I directed.

Don’t be fooled by the name. Hartford is a tough town.

I ended up on an out-of-place street, potholes and bottle-trash. The teenage mothers were hanging over balconies with two kids apiece tugging on their shirt-tails. Cars stopped each other and exchanged product for currency, their transmissions not even in neutral, just another day. The sun was setting and that marked my time in the middle of somewhere I didn’t belong as OVER.

Don’t be fooled by my size. I’m intimidated easily out of my comfort zone; for this tale let’s indicate that zone as the Post-Confederate South.

The documentary screening fell to pieces, the promoter backed me into his office to show off his drugs, computers, and family photos. I bit my nails in his solid white-decorated studio apartment above a nightclub, cornered in a town that had not shown me the Mark Twain accent I’d anticipated. “If it wasn’t for the forest I would hate the trees,” or something like that was once said. The promoter disappeared, I’m assuming, to find someone actually interested in cocaine, laptops and baby photos.

I found his assistant, a young fake-tan female who wore all spandex and hairspray, and passed along the message: I’m leaving and not coming back.

Don’t be fooled by the confident swagger. I go schizophrenic-useless in unanswered situations, zero to 60 in a Jackson, Mississippi second. I sat parallel-parked in Hartford, Connecticut (population 125,000 + me) in a borrowed car and banged my head on the wheel, distraught over the what next. I had no idea, and no money, low on gas, food in a backpack. I opened and closed my fist, imagining the times I’d foolishly punched out windshields, teenage anger angst attitude* and ignorance. Busted bloody knuckles over something dumb, a country highway outside of Mobile, East Lake late nights, or Highway 31…

(The Highway 31 incident was actually a semi-valiant reason, and I was in my thirties, but I was fueled on a chewing rage, so it makes the T.A.A.A.* list)

The great “0274” film tour of 2002 was pieced together like a Frankenstein map, half by me and half by a Florida nurse named Brooke. Brooke was dripping with metal piercings, muscles and Elvis tattoos. She was married to some big time radio dj and condemned to residence in Pensacola, Florida (population: Navy boys, beach bums and too many conservatives + me for one short year) She helped me selflessly, with no rewards outside of bragging rights, and those aint worth much. I dug through a notebook of contacts to find the name under the photo-showing drug-ingesting promoter. I read the next name wrong, or it’d been written down wrong to begin with, but it stuck.

Rust.

Russ was 18 and living a college life in Storrs, Connecticut at a small college called UCONN. He met me in a parking lot filled with stickered up SUVS, anything goes from Phish or Portishead to the Social Distortion skeleton or Crass logo. Russ was straightedge, bundled up in the uniform- hooded sweatshirt, converse shoes, dime-store holes in his ears. For the next two days he fed me on a stolen meal card, snuck me into their weight room with a stolen gym card and let me run alongside his pack of friends. Straightedge is easy at 18, his whole table in the cafeteria wore the hoodies, had the shoes, had the ears… and I listened to them talk so excited over the rest of their lives. Brooding filmmakers, writers, and teachers, all neck deep in the life and music that spilled out of the DC hardcore scene like a black plague brooding in the fur of rats.

Don’t get me wrong. Straightedge can be a great thing if it doesn’t eat you alive.

My film screened, the room was full, and the university actually paid me. Home-fucking-run. I left UCONN en route for the West, or Boston, I can’t remember. Russ and I hugged and swore to keep up. We did for some time.

Until

I called one time and it just rang. And rang. No machine, no answer, no Rust, and no idea why. I found an old email account and wrote “just checking in”. Weeks later Russ’ girlfriend wrote back that Russ was sick. Sick sick, and it didn’t look good.

I called again, sometime down the way, and his number was disconnected, further emails were never answered. Disconnected, I was on the other side of the country, lost at a late night diner alone, 2am. I watched tables of drunks come and go, I watched loners, fellow wanderers sit down, eat with prison manners, eyes on their food, pay, tip a buck or two, and leave into the rain and wind.

A UCONN cafeteria table…

The table in the cafeteria… a handful of the future, younger card cuts of every idea I had growing up in the scene of unpopular screaming music. Making movies, writing books, or standing in front of a classroom. I’ve always hated the phrase “let’s be realistic”, but I know what happens when you get older. The fire inside fades. The fire inside turns to necessity, survival, apathy. It turns into cold winds and power bills, new-born kids and steady paychecks. But I’m selfish. In my mind there’s a table at UCONN conspiring against the world right now, beat-up Converse shoes, blue-black hair, Time in Malta t-shirts. Russ is right there with them, studying the works of Gilles Deleuze, or justifying anarchism, and not shaking with chemotherapy. He is right where I left him. They are all right where I left them.

Don’t get me wrong, I did leave them behind. I left them to rust. Slowly crumbling into steel red-brown and dust, akin of wrong turns neighborhoods in Hartford, Connecticut (population: a thousand other towns). The world is waiting to turn them into something else; something other than everything they want to be. So I left them there, I admit it.

I let them rust.

“It’s our life, we do what we choose. Black jeans, black shirt, black shoes. Mom and Dad still don’t approve. Save me from ordinary. Save me from myself.” - Modern Life is War

The first of many words without you

2009-11-05T13:58:00.001-06:00

(My ex-wife, upon hearing the horror subject of this essay, the morning after it actually happened, told me that I really needed to talk to somebody. Well… I’m talking now.)

Tommy said She came by the fire station as a kid. Ten years old, Her and an older brother on bikes- buying cokes from the machine, putting air in low tires, needing cups for the water fountain. The neighborhood surrounding Legion Field is over flown with kids on bikes dodging between cars and making fun of the crazies walking like zombies from their dorm room halfways. Young is good. It’s really good to be young.

The 300-foot rectangle of yellow caution tape was just… tape, but the contents of the Projects, a volatile crowd, respected the boundary. There was only one cop on the scene, and that was about a dozen cops too few. Young children sprinted by the Engine in a November night race, see what’s going on see what caused the red lights, blue lights and full moon screams. I stepped out of our backup Engine, in it’s last week of use before an awaiting doom to scrap metal and/or training for Rookie Schools, and told Davis “This does not look like it’s going to be much fun.”

Early that morning, in a different set of projects, a different side of the Grey Lady, our soon-to-extinction Engine pulled up to a man on the ground, shaking and foaming with seizures. Nothing more than a coincidence, Her older brother walked by, no longer on a bike, no longer running routes off Graymont Avenue. He wore a black hoodie, the hood unnecessarily pulled over his ears. November is still warm where we come from. It’s really good to have warm Novembers. He nodded his hello, kept walking. We picked up the man in the dirt and strapped him to a cot. I brushed the leaves and dirt out of his eyes.

People waved and yelled us in. No one likes seeing this. The thugs, the involved, and the folks trapped next door as neighbors, honored the yellow tape but screamed for someone, anyone to do… something. I put an air mask over Her mouth and nose, Davis cut off her jacket. Lieutenant called for a backboard and for someone to find a pulse, screaming that she was a “load and go”. The Rescue Truck backed up in the narrow alleys of Elyton, we tore the yellow tape to let them pass.

19, where was I? Lying to myself and pretending to be a college student, driving back and forth from Montevallo on a daily basis, and listening to bands like Nation of Ulysses, or Nine Inch Nails, or Juliana Hatfield (I was as schizophrenic then as I am now). I was tall and too skinny and worked out (without a clue how) to compensate. I delivered pizzas, I played hockey, I girl-watched at Century Plaza, and I slept late. Nothing life changing, or life-extraordinary, but I was, after all, only 19. And 19 is a really good thing.

Mother didn’t respect the boundaries of the tape and stood over us, looking down at her daughter. A second cop showed up, half-heartedly holding her back. No one could blame her being there, hovering, because me, in her shoes, a father cursed to walk this world with a never ending worry of his own daughter? I would have eaten my way through yellow tape and city badges and anything else that stood in my path. But that’s emotion, that’s pain, that’s flooded endorphins. I was there as a first response, we were there to help. Mother was eerie calm, standing above me when she said “I’m just curious if my daughter is dead or not.”

I found a pulse. It was strong, beating over 100 times a minute. A pulse like that contradicted everything else in the Projects’ parking lot.

I rode in the back of the Rescue with Eric and George, Station 6 medics, one on each arm raising needles for IVs, a four lead for signs of a heart working, oxygen pumping, hopefully, to still moving lungs. Tommy drove us in, a 4-5 minute tornado from the Elyton Projects to UAB’s Trauma Center. Tommy was pulled off the Engine specifically to drive, a demon on the wheel, unaware of things like “right of way” or “brakes”. The second turn he creased pushed us close to two wheels, and slung me forward across the 19-year-old girl.

My forearm pressed against her forehead, the spill from her blood and brains smeared my skin.

Mother said it was a disagreement with another girl. The police had a baseball bat roped off inside the yellow rectangle. It was hard not to notice. She left the project with a strong pulse, still alive, even if momentarily. Leaving the projects breathing is a really good thing. The strong pulse didn’t show up in the back of the Rescue Truck so Eric bagged her, violently feeding her oxygen while I crushed her sternum with compressions. For the record she died on a trauma table. Literally, she left this world in between a parking lot and 4-5 minutes of lights and sirens.

I was 19 once and sleeping on my parent’s couch. I can remember smashing my eyes shut to fight off the insomniac-depression that I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. Zero goals, zero direction, zero inspiration. This went on for weeks before it hit me that it didn’t matter.
I was only 19.
Realizing that I never slept better. I had the rest of my life to worry nights away, bite my nails to the quick, drink a lot of coffee.

A dozen doctors and nurses and hospital handymen went into action as soon as we pulled her from our cot to their table. I was abruptly shoved back while they put hands and saws to work. But they were only human beings, not gods or magicians, and could only do so much. I went outside to clean up the IV needles, bloodied-gauze, and brains from the back of the Rescue Unit.

Tommy said She came by the fire station as a kid. Ten years old, Her, her older brother both on bikes… Dodging cars, drinking cokes from a machine, airing up low tires. But look away for just a moment, or blink, or close your eyes and a near-decade later something domestic would escalate from words to baseball bats to guns too fast in an Elyton parking lot, in a warm November night. The neighborhood scattered around Legion Field is thick with kids that find themselves in a fight to grow up. Young is good. Damn, it’s good to be young. But…

It’s really good to have a chance to grow old.

“This is where we see who runs first. It’s you and me, and the train, the steel tracks, and the dirt.” - Defeater

PART II (Holding my breath 4,5,6…)

2009-10-22T17:13:00.004-05:00

(Part II is a survivor, pen–written in unlikely locales and on unlikely sources. The back of a ticket book, belly-up to the bar of Bottletree, during the set of Bison AD, who sound like an introduction to Viking war. The counter of the UAB Trauma Center following three shootings in three minutes. The papers were stuck in my pocket for editing and that was interrupted by a 2-alarm Woodlawn house fire. Dried out, typed and… finally posted.)

I write from the end of a sledgehammer.
I write from…
I write.

There was something in her eyes at the kitchen table. Black-starved glare for attention, cum-starved needs attention. It was sexual, or chemical, or both, and I didn’t get it. I was too young, too naive. A pleasant reminder of how desperate people can be. Exene mumbled that “we’re all desperate” and “get used to it” before 1,2,3 counts for a band called X in seedy Los Angeles bars a chainsmoke-junkie’s lifetime ago. Yes, I write the memories of others and yes, I was only seven-years-old in 1980, and nowhere near California, but I can fade away to anytime anyplace with a pen and paper and the cursed gift of not being able to forget, or to let it go.

I want to write fiction, I’ve typed that before, but fiction just seems so uneven. I may be melodramatic… I may use homemade adjectives and street-born adverbs to get what I want. Broken English, broken speech, imaginary punctuation.

But I don’t lie.

Snapshot 1: Two men, one woman sat around a coffee table outside the first unit banging dominoes. Two, wearing all red, sat in chairs, the other sat on the stairs. A pitbull puppy rolled on his back in the weeds. Extension cords ran across the courtyard, pushing power from one address to another, the stairs in the back units resembled loading docks.

Jason and I saw the car flipped over, headlights still on, wheels spinning. Before midnight I’d hold the names of the dead. Rich boy drinking again, driving again and killing again. He and I paralleled two paths of similar goals, with significant differences. I fought for my bars with credit card bills and bank loans, his bars were parents’ gifts to steer him out of trouble’s way. When we said our “hellos” in public I was usually throwing away beer bottles, sweeping up broken glass. He was busy swiping plastic and smiling teeth at young Southside skirts. Trouble, as they say, finds those that are truly troubled.

The static of my truck radio and “Glory Days” and yeah yeah yeah. Jason and I, bored with straightedge but not going anywhere, drove aimlessly in large January circles up and over Birmingham’s hills. The headlights over the bend in the road hit first, the upside down headlights. It was him, the rich boy, on his path. Reiterating, he had killed before, waking up sober behind prison’s cell-gray bars in a year-and-a-half of bad mornings.

The bad look in his eye, it was the devil inside.
Embrace excess. Die for the troubles.
I don’t smile over the dead, I can’t. But that night and now I embrace his death. And I write about it, nothing uneven this time.

Snapshot 2: The inside of the house was just a means to cross from the courtyard to the alley. A rotten mattress tucked away in the living room behind a dresser missing two drawers. Roaches walked over walls, ants crawled through open containers of food in a three-foot-wide kitchen. A pile of decade-ago magazines scattered on the floors. A college report card hung by magnets on the refrigerator, 4.0 average.

White is the minority in this neighborhood and she was white. The voices battling for her conscious had dialed 911. She was scared. It was painful, or psychosomatic, or both and I get it. Everyone else went outside, waiting on her Rescue taxi to Belleview. I stayed inside, looking through dust shelves of trinkets and photos of probably-dead people.

“So... voices… what do they say?”
“They say…”
“They say?”
“They say kill yourself. Over and over. Negative things like that.”
I nodded. “I hear them too ma’am. I just write away the voices.”
She nodded back, “I paint them”, pointing to a wall full of art. It wasn’t my kind of style, but A for effort, right?

Snapshot 3: The outside alley was rowed with garbage bags ripped open by cats, rats and dogs. A stack of one hundred Cobra brand beers piled up outside the bedroom window. A couch, faced back to the alley, was surrounded with bent or broken toys. Her husband misheard “vitals” for “violent”, and would not let go thinking that we were accusing him of abuse. We were not. He called someone on his cell and quit his job.
The wife sat in a folding chair next to a stack of a hundred Cobra cans, arms zombie straight, eyes looking through something that wasn’t there, embraced in her own madness.

I wrote snapshots and inked notes on the back of my hand.

I'm going to keep screwing around and end up writing a 100,000 word short story: full of verses about love, a buildup to pages about loss, and a twist ending about death. I’ll wipe the bloodied handprints down my jeans, heart beating so fast it cracks ribs. Arms are still wide and, sometimes, there’s even a slight smile… if just for a moment. This is really me, writing with a Polaroid memory and scrap pieces.

Ammonia bags.
Vicks inhalers.
Band-aid looking things taped across my nose.
Rubbing alcohol.

Anything it takes to keep breathing, keep going, keep fighting, writing, loving, living, dying. Over and over and over again.
This is really me. The lungs, the sledgehammer, and the snarl.
And I’ll embrace it all.

“They cover their eyes, for who wants to be sad? Life is sweet at the bottom of the sea. So don’t tread on me, for I am your brother, I was born with an American heart.” – Scott Bondy

Holding my breath 1,2,3… (PART I)

2009-09-27T23:11:00.002-05:00

(I’m going KILL BILL on this one PART I and PART II. Too many words to swallow, and I KNOW with factual certainty that the attention span of hopeless generations X Y & Z have slipped from two hour black and white cinema to rock videos, now down to 30-second pop chart clips hosted by boys half our age. Or half my age. It’s not an age thing, I hate you all.)

I write from the lungs.

Dead Warren Zevon sang about werewolves while I spit blood constantly. The tooth, rotten out and busted roots from a failed root canal, hurt and gave my face a brass knuckle finish.

The damage caused trauma caused disorientation and inexplicable anger. The lion had a thorn in his paw, the lion aint all
that happy.

Do you want to swallow honesty? Trauma inducing honesty? I’ve repressed anger and depression with sex. So there, swallow that. A September birthday may make this an old man thing, it may be a self-loathing thing but I’ve wasted away, a lot, for shallow fucking payoffs. And going to Morris Avenue for Hardcore shows is so 1980s but I found my way to the cobblestones, again, only now I’m in my mid-thirties. Have Heart headlined for a filled up junior high scene (a good thing for Hardcore, not so much for my social life).

I’ve lost my way with crowds, with movements, and with women. The older girls look too smart for me and the younger girls… look too young. Clay, six years behind me, and just now learning to suffer with the cruelty of age in Hardcore, stage dove drunk into a crowd of born-in-nineties children, all unisoned in the lyrics of “Armed with a Mind”. Again this is a good thing. A Hardcore good thing.

I embrace it.

The indecipherable lyrics, overbeaten drums, I only hear what I want to hear. A message of something, everything, and nothing. A meaning…

Embrace
what
you
are.

Embrace the screaming, the tattooed shirts, the biting lips. Embrace the cracks in the sidewalk, in homelife, in this life. Embrace the bricks of a medium-sized small town, the abandoned project bricks. Machine gun fire for free. Skate the banks of South Town, leave before sunset or they will strip your car, strip your skin. I still want Life. Love. Regret. inked on me I just can’t find any room. (My neck is off limits.)

I write with bloody handprints.

Yesterday had three bullets in him, one of three shootings within minutes of each other, within a few miles, West End. The two in his stomach weren’t pouring blood, more dribbling, but they’re still gonna kill him. The one in his hand made his fingers look like the damage of a meat cleaver. The doctors and nurses and police officers lined up down the hall. I scrubbed my bloody handprints off every spot in the Rescue Truck that kept my balance, Tommy driving us in ninety to nothing.

Have you ever really seen a dead body? Loved ones gone and missing and forgetting. Crushed in cars or hanging from a rope? Left in an alley from needles or gun shots, some sort of hole piercing some sort of vein and organ. Bandannas, red and blue, it seems so funny in Birmingham, seems so fake cause this aint Boston, or LA, or NYC.

Funny, blood pouring is not very fake.

Dead career pretty boys Aha sang something about the sun, something about it shining, and something about TV sets.

I write from the sternum.

“Engines 14, 6, 1, Truck 1, Recue 6 Battalion 2…” House fire. More accurately, the projects were on fire. Supposedly.
Just blocks away, we were the first ones to the dance. Smoke billowed out of the third unit, forming under yellow lamp lights that shined off red bricks, the sidewalk chipped through uncut grass and weeds and gravel, and the growing crowd of black females, ages 8 to 80, all pointing toward the window source of the exhaust.

“She’s burning down her own home!”
“Crazy bitch lady aint all there, she’s gonna burn us all!”

My Lieutenant pressed his face against the screen, into the smoke, the silhouette of a black woman appeared, “I didn’t call you, get away, go away.” He shrugged and called off the first response, the engines and trucks surrounding the bricks, pushing red lights flashing, strobe lighting off the faces of the curious and the concerned, a madwoman’s neighbors.

I slowed my pace, bundled down in 40 pounds of turnout gear, an air tank and an SCBA mask. This wasn’t the “big one” I’d been hoping for. Call me morbid, call me a harvester of sorrow, call me an empathetic arsonist. Call me an asshole.

But I love fire.
Embrace it.

Nonetheless, this was not one. Police cars showed up, one by one, taking over for the fire truck lights pulling away. A fat woman screamed into the middle of it all, “Miss Claire just likes to set her walls on fire, it’s okay, Miss Claire don’t mean no harm” Sleep tight next door folks, she’s only burning her walls.

The police leather-gloved against the door, hard fists and “cop tone authority” voices. Open up, open up the goddamn door.

Nothing.

“Sledgehammer would put that door in” I said, covering the words with a fake-stifled cough. My Lieutenant frowned at me. I shrugged, and rolled my eyes.

Ten minutes of leather door banging and threats passed. A female officer, small with purple streaks in her hair and jokes, lots of jokes, said “Didn’t someone say something about a sledgehammer?”

I didn’t even look up. I held out my left hand and Johnny C put the wood and metal in my grip. Johnny C is cursed with the legacy of brutality, as am I, both of our dads handing down the role of Birmingham City Firefighters. (Johnny’s older brother got stuck with it too)

The screen door pinned back I hit the solid steel door just above the lock. I felt the bounce back and I smashed again. My chest rattled. A third shot crashed the door open, the police pushed in and elbow-escorted her outside. Doctor’s orders.

A fear of firefighters kicked in all over her face. Maybe she was old enough to remember the fire hoses of the sixties and misguided orders given that should have never been followed. Bull Connor, Art Hanes-issued orders. The short female officer with the jokes, lots of them, compromised. “She don’t like you guys, I’ll take her to the hospital, no worry” Words at 1:10 am. A psych ward waiting, strait jacket on the gurney.

Engine 6 called over at 7:00 am. They’d run a “person down” call on 5th Ave North. Miss Claire was dead in a gutter.

No explaining that. Embrace it.

I write from the snarl.

In the end, I’m just like you. Sitting around, eyes forward, beer in hand, talking loud about what I’m going to do with my life. A 36-year-old boy, too loud to not have any answers but enough laced self-loathing to back it up. All hail the sheep in wolves clothing, all hail the defeated. Sitting in a bar staring ahead staring at nothing at something that's not there and hasn't been for a long time, maybe a long time is never.

Snarling. A wolf, one of many. I just write about it. I write for it.
I spit American blood through missing teeth, sleeping in America’s basements.
I spit serpent venom for neighborhoods that cities hide. “We’re number six, we’re number six” chant the killers and thieves of a city that smiles, of a city that hides, of a city that eats its own.

I write for America, I write about America. A low-level patriot, Dylan poetry, Springsteen growl, Agnostic Front anger. I write from the sledgehammer. My feet are planted in the gravel under a St Louis arch, the boys of Exhaust wasting away July. My arms punch fists on the dark street one-ways of Corpus Christi, the one arm nazi girl fighting imaginary enemies. My eyes double take the girls of Santa Cruz boardwalks. 1980 video games and handfuls of quarters, a black shirt with words like NAKED AGGRESSION poorly pressed on the front.

Hail the defeated and embrace what you are, or at least I think that’s what they sang on Morris Avenue. I just took what I needed to hear, just like I’ve been doing at a thousand venues in a hundred towns since I was 12. And I do my best to live it, and write about it… yes, this is really me… (arms spread wide)

I write,
I write from…
I write from the end of a sledgehammer.

“Are you kidding? I am Queens Boulevard” – Vinny Chase.

(Part II to follow soon… maybe next week…)

Let's bleed in circles so we never really go anywhere.

2009-08-26T22:35:00.004-05:00

Janey fell asleep to the hum of the air conditioner and I kept driving, church sign after church sign of clever sayings and quotes; the backroads of Alabama creeping into Florida are overboard with them. She slept, I drove, one of us with a lot of living to do and the other with a lot of living to write down. I was eleven years old the last time I passed through the same two-street Southern towns, riding with my Dad to the ocean, 1985. I bought stapled comic books from used bookstores, Dad bought 1960’s Playboy magazines where the centerfolds still wore bikinis. Back then I was the one sleeping to the a/c, occasionally woken up by songs on fm radio. “We Built this City” by Starship did it more times than I care to remember, but that was then.

Now, any vacation getaway I take is haunted with daydreams, voices planning a “new me” when I get back within Birmingham city limits. A stern tone voice barks for me to work harder, workout harder, type harder. A shoe gazer slur asks me daydream-away questions; life summary meaning problems and adrenalin fixes as shallow sounding as fortune cookie philosophy when said out loud. Too vague, too complex and … well too boring. Then… a gritted-teeth dare grounds me. A voice said, “eat the fix”. Adrenalin meets worthless ancient history.

Prove the past actually happened.
Childhood haunts, Neighborhood urban legends.
Prove they were ever there at all.
For starters,
break in to Banks High School.
Eat the fix.

Banks High. My mom graduated a Banks Jet in 1969, along with one of Charles Manson’s flock and a handful of NFL quarterbacks. I went there for two years in ’88 before they closed it, covered it with a middle school, and then closed the whole thing for good a few years back.

Tall chain link fences run the school’s near half-mile length, put up originally to keep out drug dealers, remaining up present day to keep out homeless.
I had to see. I had to go back.
Prove it.

I was not the first one to return. Trophy cases were smashed, tables and chairs burned. The walls were coated with spray paint marks of 14-year-old Crips and Black Gangster Disciples. I went in classrooms where I’d once stared at the clock/at the walls/at girls waiting on 3:00. (I was a pretty crummy student) The administration offices waited on trespassers (read: me) with silver fire graffitied on the walls, accompanied with a typo greeting:

“Welcoem to Hell”

I walked down halls too abandoned for echoes, finding the standing spots of nothing memories, but memories nonetheless. First kisses, teenage wishes and the Outsiders I called friends. I walked through the auditorium, still amazingly sound after a 2000 fire, three years of abandonment and 50 years under rule of the Birmingham Board of Education. I read nicknames and adolescent scratchings in those wood chairs for two lifetimes.

Someday I’m going to write a book about abandoned Banks High School and call it “Misspelled Greetings from the Afterworld”

On the way home I passed Crazy David’s house, an East Lake urban legend that disappeared into thin air. His house sits undisturbed in the middle of East Side suburbia and has remained unopened since he… vanished over a decade ago. But that break-in would have to wait for another day.

“Another day” was a week later.
Let the nightmares begin.

David, crazy David. Crazy David lived in the lungs of East Lake through the 70s, 80s and 90s. I think he spared society from the brunt of his “capabilities” for the first two decades but in the nineties… duck and cover.

The tourists, and by tourists I mean everyone that lived off the block yet drove by on a regular basis to see the house of the crazy man (read: me), were only allowed minimal insight to the madness. A tree outside covered in political agenda nonsense, windows boarded over with the same. No power. No utilities.

One night a naked, bleeding woman ran out of Crazy David’s house screaming. When the trial began he served as his own lawyer. He made it back home on probation but still a free man.
Only now he was living with a vengeance.
And no sanity, until
The G-men came for him. Two cars full, in dark suits and matted down hair. One TOO MANY death threats to President Bill Clinton, 1997. And the house, a mystery to me and a nuisance to its neighbors, sat vacant for 12 long years.

For me, the best approach to criminal activity is a direct approach. Mid-day I parked out front, smiling and waving to neighbors as I prepared for the break in. Flash light, gloves, camera and shaken nerves.
Both doors were clamped down with locks and bars, covered over in garbage and losing an eleven-year battle with Mother Nature. Through windows I could see a path stream lining through the books, boxes, clothes and craziness but could not figure out how he came and went. Then it occurred to me…
He didn’t. In the end he never ever left.

I found a loose baseboard under a rear window and yanked it out, exposing the top row of bricks. One by one I pulled them down until I had enough of an opening to kick my way in. I felt like the Juggernaut (X-men) and Andy Dufresne (Shawshank Redemption) all at once. A pack of feral cats resting on the inside of a broken window, eyeing me the whole time, was almost enough to scare me off.
ALMOST.

Heart beating painfully and sweat pouring profusely I walked the small house, stepping over the clutter of an interesting, albeit insane, life. Clothes in disarray next to a meticulously documented file system of conspiracies and grievances to society. Un-open medication next to cans of cat food and stacked books. Everything surrounded by the artwork and messages of representing madness.

“People need to feel:
1. Cared for
2. Loved
3. Important”

In 97, the law had had enough of Crazy David’s antics. The front lawn, again, covered in political outrage toward local politicians, police officers, and neighbors. Again, one too many death threats against President Clinton.

“People need to feel:
1. Useful
2. They belong”

That late late night, the two dark sedans, the G-men in their dark suits. Pouring out, knocking twice before opening his door.
Bye bye David.
Years from now, when they loosen my straitjacket straps, I’ll get a box of crayons and write a book about crazy David and the crusade. I’ll call it “Stumbling into the Mouth of Lunacy” and I’ll sell a million copies.

So,
The day dreams I have leave me wrecked, adrenalin leaving, and always pushing pushing pushing. When I do run away from it all, the voices, this city, this so called lifetime, I’ll walk down lost-hearted highways and scour the America for every abandoned idea and broken window town. I know right outside of Chicago is an empty insane asylum with an underground tunnel system to transport patients from one building to the next. Lobotomy 101 and I’m not kidding.
I know of an abandoned town in Pennsylvania…

Another time.

I blue-printed both break-ins in a Florida hotel. I slept to the thump thump thump of an eight-year-old’s beating heart. The adrenalin, man, it was a rush, and I ate the fix.
But…
At the risk of exposing multiple personality disorders, the concerns never go away. Self-destructive-challenged worry and questions, all the questions. Fortune cookie philosophy at it’s most meaningless.
Why are you so worried?
About tomorrow?
About dying?
About a heaven?
About god and country and everything that’s lost in between?
Why are you so damn worried?
People need to feel:
1 ?
2 ?
3 ?

I want to live in moments that last forever. Close your eyes forever. Tragedy in beauty and violent-perfect visions. I don’t want to be scared of my own daydreaming, I don’t want to be scared of forgetting.
And I’m going to write a book about every single moment that mattered.
I’ll call it “An Account of Nothing”.

“We’re just a million little gods causing rain storms, turning every good thing to rust. I guess we’ll have to adjust.” – The Arcade Fire

Gas station hugs, he had RED RUM tattooed across his neck.

2009-07-18T22:49:00.003-05:00

(I changed names.)
Nina grew up in mansions, white ribbons in her hair, private schools at her feet. She cut the white ribbons to pieces in high school, rich girl punk rock, freckle-faced pouty good-looks. Enough money and attitude for the tame drugs and lame parties and asshole rockers. I was a hundred miles younger than her, awkward, and very socially-inept.

East Lake punk rock kids were, culturally, always reaching and grasping at straws. We stood out in crowds of blue hair, black nails and green LSD vomit. The fact that Nina was on 86th Street South at 4am Sunday morning suggested she was a slummer, looking for kicks with a Black Flag soundtrack. A one-night stand on a basement couch with one of my friends while I slept alone on a throw down mattress. It’s tough to call 15-year-olds together a “one night stand” but…

I pulled a blanket over my head, not for warmth, not in August, but to pretend I wasn’t there, an ornament on the set of someone else’s movie. My friend never went to high school, not a day, and his parents let him run Skid-Row wild as long as he got up Monday thru Friday to lay tile. He’s still running wild to this day.

I woke up that morning and traded a dirty Youth of Today t-shirt for a clean one that said “BOLD”. Straightedge was so “in” in ’88. Nina was asleep on a couch, distant eyes dreaming. I cut through the woods that separated East Lake and Roebuck, headed home.

I heard Nina’s name again in college in a sentence that had pills of ecstasy (a new design) and lines of cocaine (an old favorite). No longer slumming she ran with a jet set of new wave kids who drove BMWs to Morris Avenue for shows or to the projects of Elyton for drugs. I wasn’t an ornament on this set but I read the script. The new wave kids gathered around a card table with paid for pills of all shapes and devices, in the basement of a house nicer than anything on 86th Street South.

Nina’s boyfriend was tall and jet set and wrapped his arms around her. He was laughing when he put one bullet in the gun, leaning his head next to hers when he spun the chamber. “I’ll live forever”, he said, still laughing as he pulled the trigger that made him a liar.

His blood and body on the floor were irrelevant. Nina was permanent-lost at the gunshot, torn up white ribbons and forever winters, dizzying the rest of the way on her own. It’s tough to call 19-year-olds in love so I won’t suggest it…

Small town stumbling over the same people on my path I’ve heard her name used in other painful scenarios: Another boyfriend, a New Orleans trade and swap, and an ugly celebrity and his female companion.
Years further she showed up in a Southside bar I was standing behind, now married, new pills and new husband. The same distant eyes looking for life to begin, end, or exist somewhere else. Nina had no idea that we’d ever met and, looking back now, I don’t think we ever really had. She wore an expensive coat, fur and plush. It looked like a blanket.

For me this summer’s nights have been laced with wake up nightmares over and over. I’m scared to fall asleep, scared of my subconscious screaming: I want to hurt, I want violence, I want to become the worst serial killer this America’s ever seen. Larry Livermore once wrote that “it’s no surprise there are so many random acts of murder, rather it’s a wonder there aren’t a hundred times more.” I read that line in 2000 and looked out the window of my then-Highland Avenue apartment, the drunks pouring out of nightclubs and dancehalls. The next night Samantha told me I was going to be a father. The nightmares would come and go, they always do.

Instant best friends. Zach and I met in fifth grade, playing GI Joe and Star Wars at sleepovers on the weekends. Over the next few years we migrated into b-movie exploitation films, hair metal and the Violent Femmes. Zach’s mom raised me on the weekends, a small pack of us roaming the safety of Mountain Brook-Irondale on foot, wanting reckless trouble but not really knowing how to find it. In ’87 I’d shied away from the Outsiders of East Lake, too tired of explaining why I didn’t do drugs anymore. Also, I liked the blanket security on this side of town.

Young friends are hard to hold onto. People choose paths to follow that fail to represent the same importance to instant best friends. Teenagers turn into their twenties and thirties before you can even laugh about it. Or, all you can do is laugh.

Zach chose. He chose a heroin needle route for safe keeping and pain removing. Before it even began he’d watched a girlfriend fade away on a course of rehabs, the strung out thing and fix-necessity. Now…

Zach’s pills turned into bigger pills turned into fake makeshift heroin into the real thing. A rock-n-roller friend turned him on and toured the country, yet kept Zach “on a leash” to prevent the strung out thing from slamming him the way it did, the way it does, the way it can. The way it will. The way you can expect.
Everything numb.
Nothing, and I mean, nothing matters, the blanket wrapped around you. The blanket makes sure nothing is wrong, nothing can go wrong and nothing can make you sad.

The fairytale unraveled when the rock-n-roller found himself stranded in New York with nothing to gauge. Zach FedExed heroin overnight hurry hurry and put the dealer’s number in his phone. The leash was off now.

Of course Zach’s dealer was from Roebuck!, the woodsier side of East Lake. A skinny rave kid that soon let the enemies and addictions catch up to him so he moved in with Zach to hide. Their relationship turned sour over money and drugs the way it did, the way it does, the way it can…

Another batch and another dealer who stayed in business while kicking off his own habit. Every day Zach and the rock-n-roller waited in the bushes for the dealer to leave for the methadone clinic so they could break in to get daily doses weekly doses too many doses… Zach said the questions were always there. They sounded like “Am I really fucking up this bad?”

I was a million miles away back then, putting on my best suit, my only suit and straightening a borrowed tie in the mirror. Leaning over the sink, throwing cold water on my face, careful to keep my clothes dry. It was 7am and I was on my way to a job that wouldn’t last that I already hated. Who am I becoming and why do I feel so helpless? Little did I know about Zach…

After failed rehab tabs piled down Zach found a way out, and the way out was eight months in a Mississippi treatment facility. Zach said it wasn’t their program that cleaned him up but the time away. Time away to ask ugly questions with broken glass answers. Sort of like “Did I really think I was getting away with it all?”

Instant lifelong best friends, bonded by youth and Youth of Today records, Avengers comics and films like “Bloodsucking Freaks” or “I Spit on your Grave”. We talked the other day and he filled in the holes of his story, the times we fell apart, the times he fell apart. Zach’s good now, trying to lead a decent life, becoming the guy he used to be. His mom, who took her share of grief from 13-year-old boys looking for trouble in Mountain Brook-Irondale, passed away this year. Her death crushed my heart, and it annihilated Zach’s, but he never went back to needles. Eight months of Mississippi was enough.

Zach said he still has a friend out there using, living in a car with a girlfriend, everything numb, everything a dream and not getting away with anything. He’ll call now and then for money, for food, for warmth. He’s willing to work for it, but Zach said he can’t be trusted. Zach gave him a blanket to keep warm.

This morning I put on a blue city shirt, blue city shorts and black socks. I took a cold shower to wake up and drank egg whites with enough fake-sugar to kill the taste. I looked at my eyes in the mirror. They looked distant. They looked tired and wired, waiting on life to begin, or end, or exist, but not somewhere else. Right here. This very minute. Janey was still asleep, arm over her face to hide off morning, just a little while longer. I kissed her goodbye, pulled the blanket over her shoulders and whispered “It’s me and you against the world kiddo.”
She hugged my neck and said “I know that already daddy.”

“Who are we kidding, there was never a plan. We followed our instincts in the worst kind of ways.” -Lucero

Read this, choke on it, spit blood on me.

2009-06-21T17:59:00.005-05:00

The mask is coming off.
Tonight I’m going out with the intentions of doing something really great. Or incredible. Or stupid. Stress-addicted, coffee-fueled and diagnosed with a hero complex and a loser complex simultaneously. A closet “god complex” too, but I try to keep that to myself, as I do the “wasting away” complex.

Put a song to it, the lyrics don’t even have to be relevant.
This is our last good bye? Jeff, it wasn’t about death but wow did people think about it when you drowned. I can’t sing or write songs so I’ve borrowed here and there to get my point across. You’re also allowed to pick an actor to play you in the re-make. He can be a foot shorter if you want, and handsome-teeth, gel-hair. Popular on some dumb show making the leap to movies, or the pretty-boy pill problem. Girls, pick your favorite famous-for-wrong-reasons angry brunette, blonde, or redhead.

I almost bought into, or sold out to, the fantasies of meaningless music, worthless films, and predictable aspirations. Martini drinks and gold-diamond bikini-tops, high heels, fast cars, open highways bleached teeth. Suits and ties and photographs lie. Too bad I have these addictions without the courage to confess them.
I put my hands on my face and started to pull off the mask, fingers digging into my cheeks and eyes, my jaw…
Ian Curtis fronting Joy Division sang that love will do something to us; I just can’t remember what.

She was black and bruised and I wanted to feel used. We asked how much. Before driving away she showed us the jagged piece of glass wrapped in tape to fend off bad guys. There were four of us and young enough to talk to hookers and old enough to know better. I pictured the slide…
People don’t start out with one shoe missing, fishnet stockings, homeless dirty beaten-face-smashed IV drained arms, mattress floor, dirt floor, no floor no roof no power no water. Seven year-old kids in the street out for something, nothing, 3:30am, life unused.
There’s a slide.
I wanted to feel used.
I want to feel used right now.

I found the rock quarry, again, at midnight, the graffiti faded rocks torn to pieces, the industry beaten gravel. Rows and rows of identical Trussville houses in the distance, now. There’s a bulldozer graved in the water, legends of impaled swimmers and cliff-divers. And now your Trussville babies can walk out the backdoor to a 110-foot drop. Now that’s a backyard! Good luck piercing the chemical layers, the pipes pushing neon colors over once-blue spring water. I left the crickets’ screaming and eerie-forest white background noise and drove straight to a graveyard near the airport. I wanted to steal an 81-years-dead corpse, but I chickened out. Typical Tuesday night fright.
Mike Ness stood in front of Social Distortion and sang about praying in a broken down Chevrolet…

There’s a slide, mask coming off…

Good times, good drugs, good girls, good rush. Picture this: a fence in West End, an alley in West End and I want to slump down against the chain links and lay down and die. Over and over if possible, but once will probably be enough. White boys in bad predicaments are always so tall and so skinny, even lying down. Motioned-hand across the throat from another firefighter, “George, you ain't gonna need that medic bag.”
The slide comes quick, the slide’s not pretty.
You don’t wake up and get dropped off in West End to die from an overdose. You don’t plan on dragging your barely-out-of-her-teens fiancée along with you. YOU don’t pick the spot against a chain-link fence in an alley where you’ll curl over and die, cops flashing their lights on your body, found you in the rain. There’s a slide, sliding down the chain links, sliding onto busted asphalt. Let your ghost hear fiancée’s indecipherable words through cigarette inhales, smeared raindrop makeup, and no shoes.
There’s a slide.

“George, I was just reading a description of a nursing home, people shitting all over themselves and such… I want you to promise me that if I ever reach such a state by way of illness, injury, or age that you will come and kill me. (My wife) won’t have the guts.” – Jason. (A close close friend)

“He’s not breathing very well”, his nurses said and he’s old and grey and they were all waiting on us. Nurses sitting on the foot of the bed, hands in their lap semi-concern-look faces. My Lieutenant craned his neck over the bed… count it down three, two, one… “Not breathing well? This man’s dead”.
So
yes Jason.
When
the time comes
I will kill you.
I will stop the slide.

I had an axe in one hand, waiting on word to destroy something, everything, anything. A thousand yard stare, my mind a million miles away. I wanted to break something, even if it was for the right reasons. My mask slid off, but the house was still on fire. The black smoke rushed my lungs, the black smoke painted the inside of my nostrils, my mouth, my eyes. The house burned and burned…
(The Slide)
Hanging out the windows of Woodlawn, hookers on the sidewalks, a gun pulled in our faces, no reason, the drugs and wrecks and voices behind me as I left for good, the twisting bruises and love/hate emotion that eats me up when I drive past. Left for good, left for gone. Long gone.
(Slide)
The car was still going 40 mph and I was through listening. So I opened the door to get out, daughter screaming, ex-girlfriend screaming. Snakes in my head, schizophrenia unleashed, temper tantrum but I'm still as un-thinking as I’ve ever been. 240 lbs of scarred-muscle emotion acting without consequence.
(Slide)
I no longer talk to my family.
(Slide)
I want to go out swinging.
(Slide)
I want to do something really great. Or incredible. Or incredibly stupid.
(Slide)
Ask what happened to me and I’ll ask you “Which time?”
There’s a slide.
The mask stays on for now, but
there’s a motherfucking slide.

“I want to be blind and dumb and have no heart. I want to crawl in a hole and never come out. I want to wipe my existence straight off the map.” – James Frey

“In this life you're on your own. And if the elevator tries to break you down… Go crazy.” - Prince

I want to drown right now too, Leah

2009-05-24T22:27:00.003-05:00

(This cannibal swallowed a 400-word piece written a long while back. So much for a 2.0 version of said previous effort. Like everything else in my life, this blog developed into a beast of it’s own.)

We are the hopeless,

Another night in my veins. I wasn't in the room when Beth's head hit the floor, but I heard the impact. The sound was an anvil dropped on wood, an aluminum bat smashing a wall. I wasn't in the room, I was in the bedroom with her daughter Tiffany, both of us 15 and not doing anything physical. Just laying there, talking. Something to miss about 15. Endless nights wasted away into sunrises thinking of ways to rule the world.
The dumbest things funny.
Mindless importance.
It was that way that night too, until I heard Beth's head hit the floor.

I’m the kid who worried too much, nicknamed “Daddy George” for too much concern over drunkenness and acid trips, age 13. Mitch Ricketts pinned that title on me and then took me to the top of Pine Tree for my first jump. “Keep your body rigid, keep your hands at your side and try not to bite your tongue off when you hit the water”, he said, too far gone on Busch beer. Then he rolled over the rocks, the water too far away for me to hear him hit.
I’m the kid who followed him over the cliff.

There are 100 magazine covers telling me who I’m supposed to be. Product reinforcement turns needless into necessity or, simply put, nothing into something. Too bad for 100 editors, because in my blackest moments of loneliness or confusion or sadness, or any other multi-syllable emotion, I picture us, me included, as transients on the side of a nowhere highway. The sign in our hands reads “Take me somewhere else.” And that’s a hard vision to send to the marketing department. No beautiful models are on the cliff with us, no mandatory sports car stock market lives.
I’m the guy who put the four words to cardboard.
I’m the guy tearing up 100 magazine covers.

we are the helpless,

We ran in the room, Tiffany’s hands going straight over her open mouth to stifle the shock and scream and awe. The 50-year-old biker that followed Beth home from a Woodlawn juke joint was passed out on the couch, an eerie upright position. A handful of Outsiders were scattered about the room as well, all of them seemingly conscious. Outsiders only traveled in handfuls, a fateful bunch of rebel soldiers… fake-patch anarchists in hiding from our families. Beth just laid there, slightly twitching and slightly breathing.
I’m the kid who worried too much.
I’m the kid that called 911.

Ask me about the “Last of the Runaway Americans”, I dare you. Having a title on the book I’m writing as farewell words makes self-demise seem so inevitable, so inviting. Writing sentences on those pages scares even me. Is there a name for fiction embraced around fact? I call it “faction”, but that just goes along with my ineducated habit of redefining words to fulfill my own descriptions’ needs.
I’m an American Psycho without the murder.
I’m the boy writing a 100,000-word epitaph.

"Uhhhhh I'm at a house, near the white projects but not in the white projects, kinda behind the airport," I stammered. 911 operators are the worst people to talk to when something is really wrong. "We're on a dead end street at the end of another dead end street!" I pleaded, frustrated at my lack of intelligible direction. Someone handed me a piece of mail and I read the address. Tiffany, rightfully so, was in no condition over her mom's condition to be of any assistance.

and we are the heartbroken.

The Kelly house burned down the other night. Again. 21 years after a schizophrenic runaway disguised as one of us set the initial flames. Thad took refuge in the brotherhood of Outsiders and the kind hearts of the Kelly brothers, sleeping in the crawlspace of their house. A folded over mattress hidden in between the walls. The other night was the third time the house burned and it’s a bitter taste when I say out loud that the house is cursed.
Thad and I fought once in a Panama City Beach hotel rooms after the chemicals in his head came unbalanced and he attacked a girl.
I’m the boy who had no business in Florida hotel rooms.

The 50-year-old biker remained in his mixed-pill, alcohol wash-down coma, despite our slaps and shoves and screams. Firefighters and cops are coming, better take his drugs. For his own good. And his money. Again, for his own good. He crawled out on all fours, literally, when Engine 8 showed and initiated the usual drill on Beth. Vital Signs. Sternum rubs. Narcan. She'd live thru that night; we'd all live thru it. I went outside and sat on the hood of a wrecked Malibu. It was 4:30 am and, on the dark side of the white projects, I stared at my dad and my future, both behind the wheel of Engine 8. We never talked about that night, but I could read the words in his eyes, behind the smoke from his cigarette. "What the fuck is my idiot son doing here?"
I’m the man that was an idiot son.
An idiot son following in footsteps and
paying
attention.
And growing up.
Now…

I’m the man with pen notes on the back of his hand, black ash and soot running from his nose after taking his mask off in a house fire. I’m the man destroying a door, a car, a wall to find fire or to save the dead. Bodies buried in bathtubs under piles of newspapers and coupon clippings, parked cars in parking lots, front porches…

I’m “Daddy George”.
Dialing 911.
Becoming 911.
I am the masochist savior, the billboard fightback figure of the carnival freaks and the fags and the niggers and white trash whores. Anyone else that America spits at, or spits out or spits on. The anger and the hurt creates titles for us all. NO ONE is immune since the signs and symptoms do not match the anecdote. So just hold on, all of you, all of us… We are the hopeless, the helpless, and the heartbroken.

Remember...
The Raider’s jacket suicide found in a cut-out room behind a Southside garage full of busted Mercedes cars.
or
The porn covered mattress in the white projects, the body there for days before neighbors wondered and we kicked in the door. The gun next to the hand next to the head next to the blood and brains.
or
The teacher’s bathtub and two feet of water and too many pills and his face on the wrong side of the bath water’s surface.
or
Candace.
I still don’t know what to say now, or what I could have said that day. “Meet me for lunch” wasn’t enough I guess. Whatever words I missed I’m sorry.
I’m the boy that made the promise.
I’m the boy that will keep that promise.

Beth was 31 that night. A year later she became a 32-year-old grandmother. That same year the police raided her house on suspicion of drug use. They found skulls and human remains from an abandoned cemetery near the airport. Last year, in a fit of misplaced nostalgia, I drove by their house on a dead end street at the end of another dead end street. It’d been torn down.
I was glad.
Days later I saw Tiffany walking down the side of the highway.
I’m the guy that pulled over and cried his eyes out.

(Janey, recently, stopped me from getting out of my truck so we could hear American Land, a poem written in 1899 by a Slovakian immigrant and re-written to music by Springsteen. We sang the chorus together loudly and held hands and I bit blood to my lip and told her that I will never ever, EVER, give up. She didn’t understand yet.
But someday she’ll be the woman that will.)

“I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise.” – Chuck Palahniuk

“What is this land America, so many travel there? I’m going now while I’m still young, my darling meet me there. Wish me luck my lovely, I’ll send for you when I can. And we’ll make our home in the American Land.” – Bruce Springsteen

Dear ghosts,

2009-04-23T22:09:00.003-05:00

It’s no secret that I don’t sleep. The sirens and last calls see to it, at least on paper. An eight-and-half year-old who sleeps opposite hours does her part too, in addition to a stack of unread books and another stack of unwritten books. But, at the risk of sounding insane, I blame it mainly on the voices in my head.

The voices in my head pound in unison with the blood pumping in my veins. They are moments and memories, the vocal chords of the dead and defeated all at once. They are stories my father told me driving through 1970s East Lake, his eyes straight ahead, my eyes outside in a neighborhood that’d find it’s stride in gun shells, reused syringes and abandoned schools. The voices are places too far gone to be anything more than memories, them too, dead or dying. Just to clarify: the overwhelming resemblances to Springsteen songs found me, not the other way around.

Late night thoughts too awake to call dreams. We, the stress addicts, unfortunately choose to dwell in an overload of human worry, converting the smallest crisis into red-wire-eyed insomnia. Recently, and I’m ashamed to say this, I stayed awake until sunrise because I didn’t have a plastic lockbox on the thermostat at the Black Market Bar.

Enough was enough. The voices were there, and had been for some time. I started listening.

I got up at 3 am, put my shoes on and listened all the way out the door. For the first time in a long time I actually paid attention, surprised at what they said. They didn’t mention college courses, 60-hour-work weeks or a 401 K. They didn’t tell me to plan for retirement or build a portfolio or open another restaurant… and they certainly didn’t tell me to get a plastic lockbox on the thermostat.

They told me to throw rocks at trains.
Confused, I kept listening.

I knew Alan was sick and I know he did it to himself with substances, but his death still stung. His nonchalant laugh and beer in hand… just another one of the wolves at one time. He walked down beaches with the rest of us, putting up with my insecurities and instabilities as good as any other. Alan was razor smart, not that it matters. Engineering degree smart. His funeral, I’ve written before, was one of my greatest regrets. I regret not screaming at the top of my lungs who Alan was to me. Awkward bike ramps. The teenage trips to the Gulf, and the heavy metal. Alan’s voice, one of many, I can hear it now…

I once fell asleep at 7am on a dirt-floor basement in Huffman, the sun not able to reach me at all.

Decades removed from a Huffman basement the voices snuck me out of Carraway Hospital, drug-pushing wires in my arms, calling me back to 1988. The cobblestones of Morris Avenue made punk seem so dangerous. Low-lit street lights threw shadows on the mohawks and shaved-head boys, the girls in intentional too-much makeup and tattered clothing. It didn’t matter who was playing, it was a reason to be here, to be there, to be somewhere. (Look at your Birmingham now Bull Connor!) Our own faux London separated the north and south of a not-yet rebuilt downtown.

The blood stains are still there, even if you can’t see them. Street fights and Friday nights, the smiling violence we called dancing. The train yards still grind rails and the rats still dig through unseen trashcans. But the torn flyers and cheap stickers, once everywhere, are long gone. The voices there are not as specific as Alan’s, but they exist; and I still have to listen.

I closed my eyes in a hospital bed, an open victim to the sun, only an hour away. I’d been five miles on foot, pumped up on drugs with names with too many syllables.

Shade told us that he wouldn’t have gone out of town with them if he hadn’t truly considered them his friends. Imagine the fear, or surprise, when they attacked him for being gay. He said it wasn’t the violence that destroyed him. It was the betrayal. After leading him on they left him near a lake, broken bones and bleeding.

So he found heroin. The numbness of the needles. The lowered expectation of living. Days wasted away into a lifetime until new friends grabbed him by the throat. Intervention. Stop this nonsensical self-destruction. They started a band. Hard- driving emo punk stuff. Shade busted his ass at a 9-to-5 and then drove to band practice every day at the same time, straight into a setting sun. He never wore glasses or shielded his eyes. He just let the light burn. He said it reminded him that he was alive, and that there are things worth fighting, and dying, for. A decade ago I didn’t really understand, not like now. The sincerity of his voice, the pain in rejection and struggle…

A voice that keeps me up at night.
Throw rocks at trains?

Deep breaths and heart pounding I closed my eyes and let a lifetime of the dead and defeated speak to me. Locations long gone. The lessons of my father’s stories. Moments and memories….

They said…

Lets throw rocks at trains.
Lets dig up bones by the airport.
Lets say life is too short and lets get bored.
Lets tell stories that never happened. No wait lets tell stories exactly the way it happened.
Lets break into Banks High School, or what’s left of it. Or lets break into that guy’s house; you know the one the government took away in the middle of the night for threatening the president.
Lets put lyrics on Alan’s grave. Something loud, a band’s name that WE can pronounce correctly.
Lets laugh at danger and jump cars on Thrill Hill.
Lets start riots.
Lets slam dance.
Lets build something amazing and then burn it down for kindling, in that order.
Lets not tell our friends, no wait, lets tell everybody.
Lets tune in to AM radio and remember our grandfathers. Yellow-gray photos taken during and after the last Great War. The factory job. Everything they did to get us where we are now. Every dream that went unfulfilled, their voices screaming the word “sacrifice” over and over. Lets sacrifice now for our grandchildren so they can listen to their own voices.
Lets write letters to the dead until we’re dead.
Lets remember yesterdays until we’re insured they will exist forever.
Lets abandon the idea of heaven and look out for ourselves for once, for once, for once.
Lets write the best unread books this world has never seen.
Lets die in shallow graves that we’ll dig ourselves in places carved out of teenage memory. A smile on our faces, unfinished books and symphonies torn to shreds at our feet. Plane tickets to the other side of the world stuffed in our pockets. Burn-scarred hands and bloodied knuckles. Photos of 8-year-old angels in our cold grip.

Lets cry our eyes out. Lets give blood. Lets give all.
Lets let go. Just tonight.
Let go.

At least that’s what they said to me.

In this lifetime you get memories and moments and a lot of nowhere plans. There is nothing else. Stop holding on to whatever definition you have of yourself, the mirror’s reflection, and your checkbook balance. Listen to the voices.
And let go.

(After writing this I collapsed in a prison-cell-sized cubicle at Station 14, the TV on CNN so the horror stories will flash off of my eyelids. Four hours later I woke up to three houses burning with 20-foot flames. Some things never change. Oh, and Shade… A few years later, at a scrawny 120 pounds, he ran into three once-fake friends that had sexually tortured him and left him broken bones and bleeding near a lake. He took an aluminum bat and crushed them into the hospital.)

“I remember you from parking lots. Skate downtown, get dragged home by the cops… You dyed your hair green, turned your mother’s grave.” – Joseph Plunket

Greetings from an eerie-sweet place

2009-03-26T11:50:00.003-05:00

(In 1994 I became the second singer for a band I would later name Exhaust. For five years we outlasted anything TOO detrimental to stop us and that taught me more than the 16 scattered years I spent locked up in classrooms and study halls. I was confronted with human nature and what to expect, and not expect out of life, learning far more than I did from the thousands of dollars my family threw at UAB. I’ve ripped up at least a dozen tries at documenting those memories on paper; I could never seem to get it right. Adventures were tortured, hysterical, endless…

Every minute mattered. And I wouldn’t trade a moment in Exhaust for anything. This is for Andrew… Brannon… sigh and you too Mike.)

Go west. We showed up in the shadows of Los Angeles late. Weeknight. I’d booked the next few shows and spirits were high among the four of us, despite disasters in Flagstaff, Phoenix and New Orleans. Texas, actually, had been kind to us, but I think we’d just gotten lucky.

Renee was just a voice on the phone, one of many Andrew and I called on our list of strangers sprawled across the map, Gainesville to Portland. Pleading with the voices to book an Exhaust show, find us a roof to sleep under and maybe, just maybe, a few bucks for gas. Hat tricks were few and far between. Shudder to Think stayed in the cassette player, and their off-center queer punk lyrics reminded us to play what you want and damn the rest.

There was a lot of non-verbal eye-contact communication behind her back when we met Renee. She was pretty in a punk rock way, with self-torn clothing and intentionally over-bleached hair, fishnets under shorts. She couldn’t help the freckles but they worked on her. You don’t envision a dominatrix in Venice Beach having freckles but… this one did.

Calling the four boys of Exhaust naïve is an understatement. Andrew and I stumbled out of Birmingham’s public school system, while Brannon and Mike graduated on the other side of Red Mountain. On the road our greatest weakness was also our greatest weapon: absolute ignorance to… well, everything. Optimism and self-deprecating humor pushed us past the big setbacks. The breakdowns, the lack of funds, the violence...

We just shrugged when our California shows began falling through, content with sleeping on the floor of her above-garage flat. Enigma was on the radio, and they didn’t tell us anything discernable; but we’d been sleeping on the side of the road and in rat-trap hotels. Meaningless music felt good.

The four of us wide-eyed everything in Venice Beach. The terrible LA traffic that led to the narrow-alleyed streets that led to her dungeon, or more specifically, her place of employment. Retro torture devices were everywhere. Cages, whips and a handcuff pinwheel. The early July heat was put to rest by the Pacific winds, something I was not used to. We walked the handful of blocks to the boardwalk, a place that, to date, had only existed for me in cinema fiction and early 80’s punk rock history. Xanadu, The Jazz Singer, or Colors. Suicidal Tendencies and Beowulf. A huge wall mural of Jim Morrison, Venice’s adopted son, went up in ’91 to stand watch over petty drug buys and purse snatches. The ocean water was California frozen, and burned through my skin. (One of those moments that I mentioned in the beginning)

“White trash is a racist term” Renee said on the way to LA’s seediest porn stores, lecturing me on the pitfalls of my, and the band’s, extremely self-destructive perceptions. We made out in the peep show booths, her in fishnets under self-torn clothing, me in a beat up Liberty Caps’ t-shirt and camo shorts. I remember leaning against the velvet-curtained wall, as far from the real world as I could ever be (The jury’s still out on that one). Jawbreaker came on the radio as we drove back through the black skies and stars of Los Angeles to above-the-garage, and they reiterated that “it gets loneliest at night…”

Our shows under Renee’s wing were perfect examples of Exhaust’s severely poor grip on punk rock reality. A gay rights festival. A block party hosted by drug dealing gangsters (actually, one of our best shows). At another questionable venue, the lead singer of Wish for Eden, a Christian punk outfit, stood in front of the stage, stone drunk, and begged us to take him along on our “way to the top”. The Exhaust response was simply more non-verbal eye-contact communication amongst ourselves, mid-set. Renee’s current boyfriend, and a selection of the Mexican gang he was a part of, waited in the parking lot. Texas, it seemed, wouldn’t be the only time that luck was on our side.

Leaving Renee behind, en route to the Pacific Northwest, was confusing. She’d big sistered us and screwed us up in the same breaths, with poor show after no show after poor show. Brannon went to Shades Valley for Christ’s sake! And here we were getting teary-eyed over a dominatrix in the suburban shadows of LA. She let Mike borrow Rollins’ book “Get in the Van”, an irony too tough to swallow even then.

A year and a month later had not been enough days for us to learn our lesson as we ventured back through Renee’s waters yet again. The shows continued their trend of being disasters or non-existent, only this time we’d been sentenced to sleep outside of her apartment, in the van, in east LA, thanks to a new boyfriend and the history Renee and I had of making out in a porn store peep show booth. A wide-eyed black man woke us at 4am, beating on the side of the van, more confused than us on our intentions. A brief confrontation between he and I resulted in him returning with a cocked and loaded gun, crossing the street, eyes straight ahead, a vigilante/lunatic with a purpose. We fled quickly to fight another day, luck again intervening. And I swore that I’d never speak to Renee again.

Years later I checked an old email address and found a dated plea from Renee wanting the Rollins’ book returned. She was writing a column for Maximum Rock n Roll and Exhaust’s five year run had ended, leaving me to bartend and scheme other ways to waste resources and time. I wrote her back telling her that Mike, now too, was on my list of people I never planned on speaking to again. I added that, in his defense, Mike was currently nine-to-fiving his life away as a bank teller and probably needed that book a lot more than she did. Not all of us can be one of Venice Beach’s adopted sons and daughters.

(The last few pages of this story would read that Exhaust ended the same way it began. Wave after wave of confusion carefully masked by 800 pounds of self-deprecating humor. No one, and I mean no one, was more abusive to Exhaust than Exhaust. But every minute, extraordinary, meant something.
At least it did to me.)

“Untraceable. Untranslatable. I can’t explain all I ever wanted to do.” - Fugazi

Hey Dad, we wear air masks in fires now

2009-03-08T22:31:00.000-05:00

Janey, the runaway American dream cannot just be about survival. Not anymore. It has to be a sincere effort/push/fight to make things better. Make your life better. Make life better. An 8-and-half-year-old’s reasons for getting out of bed every morning are so different than a torn up 35-year-old’s. So angel lets do it. Lets run away. Tonight. America is plastered across this world and surely, SURELY, we can find a fire station that will hire on one lost soul. Yes, we can open another restaurant, and yes, when you're older, you can hostess there if you want.

Coming up I never wanted kids, but situations have a way of finding you. You're mother and I used to fight like caged dogs, the frustration of it all being too much for a naive southern hardcore kid and a temperamental Yankee. I was bartending when your mom went into labor, and I reeked of beer and bleach when I first met you that night. Of course I cried, you were four weeks early and only weighed five pounds. For all my size and tattoos I’m still pretty emo.

East Lake was a meat grinder for teenagers in 1988. Packs of wolves roamed directionless at all hours, cheap cases of beer bought on Oporto-Madrid Boulevard in the backseat, an ounce of pot in the glove box next to brass knuckles. For a solid year the underage hookup for alcohol was a young black woman that worked the 3-11 shift at Conoco. Early one Tuesday night a 13-year-old wandered out of the woods and shot her in the head for a gang initiation. The store never re-opened and for the next three years I watched the weeds grow through the asphalt and over the gas pumps, until the bulldozers finally came to bury a hurt memory.

In ‘02 you were two-years-old and living in Pensacola; I was worthless, in my late twenties with a dead-end job and no future. I’d work until 3am in Southside and drive all night to see you, falling asleep on your mom’s bed and holding your hand thru the crib bars… Headaches and worries of what you’ll think of me if I don’t make things better. Did you know that I opened the Black Market Bar just to impress you? You wanted a restaurant and the Speakeasy didn’t have a kitchen. Silly I know, but I do better on no sleep and cheap coffee anyway. You’re a hell of an influence, kiddo.

In ’07 I wrote a book no one will ever read in a Vestavia library, waiting on you to get out of 1st grade. I bit back tears from your excitement to see me every day, the way your brown eyes lit up... I kindof stand out in the midst of Vestavia soccer moms and Mercedes Mini-vans, which made the walk back to the library that much more fun. We raced across the schoolyard and bounced story ideas off each other, yours always better than mine, at least more marketable…

Your grandparents let go of my reigns after one of my many close calls with self-destruction. Nights were endless or empty, often times both. Someone, lit-up on… something, would mumble, “Isn’t there a witch buried in Bass Cemetery?” and the cars were running. The train tracks grinding parallel to the headstones were impossibly eerie, but we never found any ghosts or witches’ graves. The older kids would make the trek to Mad Dog, way out in the woods of Hoover, home to devil–worshippers, runaway abductions, and animal sacrifices (allegedly). Traci Bishop, disintegrated on Busch beer and handfuls of pills, showed me an arsenal he’d put together for his one-man assault on Satan’s children. Guns scare me now just as bad as they did back then, even more so in the hands of drunken idiots.

East Lake was over run with white trash punks, skate rats and southern-fried hippies, (two of which categorized your dad) the frustration of it all being too much for directionless kids with muscle cars and motorcycles. The neighborhood taught me fear and survival, scarring me on illegal substances, violence, and going to parties. We were Outsiders and outcasts and out of our minds simultaneously, running from wolves and howling like wolves at the same time.

Janey, I’m still hiding from the wolves.

Only now I’ve traded East Lake for the outskirts of West End.
This man just now… his son waited in the parking lot for Engine 14, his grandson waiting in the car, both crying because they already knew. The hotel rented by the day, the hour, the week or year, depending on how far of a slide you were on.
Inside, one bed was covered in garbage, stacks and sacks, the other a sheetless stained mattress of cigarette burns, sweat stains and food condiments. He was dead on the floor between the two, blood staining his face a brown red crust.
I touched his skin for vitals and it was cold freezing. “Why die here?” echoed over and over in my mind. Behind a grocery store in a cardboard box would have had more dignity. Not that it matters where I do it, but I really don’t care to go out buried under garbage in a $75-a-week hotel room, not unless it’s on fire.

So Janey lets run away and you never grow up. The rest of the world is waiting with its scams and grifts to get some sort of foothold in you, or on this planet, or in their own self-worth. But, at 8-and-a-half, and as long as you have someone to protect you, then you’re bases are covered. And for you I’ll tear down the skies, a war against God.

But please…
Don’t outgrow me. Don’t start thinking I’m dumb, or outdated, or overprotective, even though it’s all true. You broke my heart once rollerskating with two of your girlfriends instead of skating with me, then won it back when you bragged to our waitress that I’d ripped back the windshield of an overturned SUV. Keep in mind that underneath this exterior of testosterone, intentional scars, and shaved-head grimace, I’m still pretty emo.

At 8-and-a-half, you can just stare out the window and selectively pick out the good in things. Don’t grow up jaded, bitter at what you think someone else owes you, or what you think life owes you. When I’m with you I try to accept the amazing in this world, picturing how it looks through your eyes.
Please don’t ever grow up, because I’m in no hurry for you to see the world through mine.

So pack a bag and we’ll leave tonight, no set destination. We could follow the footsteps of Andi in Pensacola and jump a cargo train to anywhere, but the “square” I’ve turned into might insist on a somewhat safer passage. We’ll leave behind my anchors, collected from years of trying the same thing over and over just to get by.
Just to survive.
Surviving is not enough, Janey.
You have to make things better for yourself.
Re-define the word “impossible”.

Bring a notebook for my sentences and another for your drawings. Bring books to read and re-read and trade for more books. Wear Converse hi-tops so I’ll never forget East Lake and the kids it chewed up. Worn out soles burning up on pavement. No more stolen graveyard bones, 33-year-old grandmothers, or drug dealing bikers.
Janey, that’s the runaway American dream. Birmingham to Seattle, Key West to California.

Along the way I’ll need you to remind me that life is, and can be, beautiful.
And you’ll need me to protect you from the wolves.

“I can’t seem to scream these words loud enough, or hard enough. Somebody say my name so I know I’m alive.” – Feeling Left Out

“Don’t act like your family’s a joke” – Drive-by Truckers.

We’ll start at my left wrist and go up.

2009-02-18T12:44:00.000-06:00

Damn these movies and music. The false heroes of actors and the “fuck you” ethics of punk rock have warped me past the point of any safe return. I foolishly set goals that are only probable in comic book pages, three-chord-backed screams or frame grain cinema. It was fun to call it DIY growing up. It was fun to call it entertainment, a hobby, or something to kill time. But now I’m calling it what it is.

A sickness.

I’m not schizophrenic; I just know the world is out to get me. So I’m trading in sleep for worry and heart break. It’s also more time spent with my eyes open. I’ve come to realize one thing and one thing only:

I
live
for sadness.

Broken down cars and busted homes. Who cares about mansions and Mercedes when there’s overgrown houses inexplicably empty for the ground to reclaim? The woods of Newcastle are so intoxicating. Late night legends of three boys that go missing. The late night legends said they cheated moonshiners and the story ends there, no bodies necessary, no graves ever found. Three decades later their ’51 Chevy shows up buried under the old Highway 79.

And that’s only a bit part of one story.

Hey did someone try to convince you that life is a movie? 120 minutes of antagonists and protagonists, a nail-biting problem and the courage to solve it? Do you want to be the well-dressed gentleman at the end of the bar swirling a rocks glass, every word witty and every word… important? You’ve read this far so you’re now down to 119 minutes. Tick tock, tick tock.

Me personally, I’ll need longer than two hours to burn this world down.

So I’m not that gentleman at the end of the bar either. But hey, if you are, rocks glass in hand, raise it high…
Raise your glass for forgotten punk bands. Punk rock never quit its day job or didn’t have one to begin with. Bands didn’t want contracts, or dressing rooms, or roadies. Many refused to even play on a stage. We could play “where are they now” forever but as long as someone remembers then it all mattered. Life Sentence. The Headless Marines. Caustic Outlook. Birmingham punks paid the $5 door to pack out abandoned television towers atop Red Mountain, condemned rental halls in Ensley, hallowed out downtown garages and other places far less accommodating. Three-chord-backed screams taught the ones of us listening a very important lesson.

Accept nothing.
Expect nothing.

The glory of the rock star has faded away.
An eight-page rider sent city to city in preparations for my arrival. Red m&ms, teenage girls, and beer lists. Standing on a 20-foot stage reciting some clever anecdote that will sinkline into a top 10 hit song. Lean over the moat of security guards, point at a girl in the front row wearing a shirt with my name on it, and scream, “this song’s for you, darling!”

Well this song is for Moody Alabama, a little girl lost in Corpus Christi, Texas. She compensated for her missing right arm with unbridled hatred, and justified her hate in loneliness. She wore swastikas on her clothes and seig heiled Hitler, pretending to be white power, but I could see right through it. She fought and picked fights with anyone paying attention until her dad picked her up from the show; a beat up four-door on spare tires, alcohol breath, and jaded over eyes. She told me she’d stayed in Moody for a year and hated it as much as Corpus Christi. It’s easy to hate someone wearing swastikas, but not when it’s a fifteen-year old girl. When you're lost it doesn’t matter which crummy city you call home. You may never be found. (This song’s for you, darling)

The days of the movie star are over.
Reality brutality is far more addictive. Directors struggle to recreate the most fascinating people in history, replacing actuals with script readers and cardboard cutout scenery. Put on your tuxedo and pack into the Kodak Theatre. Hold the gold over your head. Thank your mom and the academy.
Thank God, and

Thank a mother in Liberty, Missouri, outside my window at 7am, digging through the trash of the low-rent apartments I was housed in. I woke up in 2001 working for a law firm in the midst of a multi-million dollar trial, battling over a drug gone wrong. I’d been put in charge of driving the plaintiff’s expert witness from the courtroom to his $350-a-night hotel room. I’d also been put in charge of driving back and fourth to Kinkos all night on cheap coffee and FM radio. I heard her voice, too loud in the freezing winds of the west, her excitement when she’d found a jacket, buried in generic cereal boxes and emptied ashtrays, for her two-year-old daughter. I watched her put the jacket on the small girl, zip it up and walk away. I remember my legs not working for the hour I balled up on the floor, sleep deprived and bawling, as I constructed a mental blue print of this world on fire.

I bit blood from my lip that night as I drove the expert witness back to Kansas City, letting him talk too loud of private planes and celebrity clients. I could only stay quiet, plotting the flames. His empty stories reminded me to remember the three-chord-backed screams learned in an Ensley rental hall…

The superhero is a piece of paper.
Hand drawn to handle the most unreal expectations that life can offer. Bad guys are big and have guns, BUT the superhero is big too, and he’s got heart. Shine the light in the sky; pick up the red one-way telephone…
So someone can save the horror story family of rookie school. The 2.5 kids, plus mom and dad, trapped inside their own burglar bars as smoke and fire raced to annihilate their American dream. The first arriving Engine Company found their charred bodies clutching each other and clutching the bars they’d installed to keep out the thieves. Now they live forever as a spook story for firefighting rookies, a grim look at “the calling”.

So thank you and acknowledgments go to the ones that understand. Please understand that I’m scratching away the surface, leaving only one thing behind. And that one thing is what I’m supposed to be in this life.

This is for you. And

This is for the homes of East Lake and Ensley, too poor for power, every room covered with mattresses and blankets, all while wannabe lawyers argue over socio-economic politics on Fox News and the patio at Dave’s. The kids are awake at 3am because there’s no such thing as a school night. Pot smoke and pills. Gunned down neighbors. And so it goes.
I don’t fight fires in homes like YOURS. The pretty, logical layout, a beeline path to the kitchen, just past the plasma screen TV and marble coffee table, all modeled out of an Ikea catalog. The black smoke-filled houses I frequent have broken chairs pushed against doors, weakened wood floors, and boxes and boxes of nothing. And a lot of mattresses.

This is for Ricky Davis.

This is for the bit parts in my life that let substances stop them short of something brilliant, eating them alive. Hey Scott, to me you're somewhere singing along to those three-chord-backed screams that ruined our ears when we were teenagers. We weren’t THAT close I know, but man I liked seeing you around.
This is for the other side of the street and everyone on it. Because I’m just not the rock star gawk-movie type. No stretch limousine, or cigar-smoke nights of flash bulb fame and too-tall stages. But…

I am still writing MY “Born to Run”.

And I’m taking a whole lot of people with me, chapter by chapter. Sit back, hold on, accept nothing and expect nothing in return. When I strike the match I want you to know who I’m doing this for. Hold my hand, we’ll burn the world down together.

Life is not a movie, or a sold out corporate-sponsored concert. And (unfortunately) it’s not red and blue tights-covered muscles, unbreakable bones and x-ray vision, penciled perfectly in right angle boxes. But I’ll make it something that matters.

I can promise you that much.

“There are only a few things that really belong to me. Who I am, who I was, and who I want to be.” – Bouncing Souls

Five “life sentences”, six counting the title.

2009-01-19T12:46:00.000-06:00

I know what I want to be when I grow up.

Pine Tree cliff was 110 feet to the water and don’t let anyone ever tell you different. Legend was the locals, Trussville hoodrats in cut-off jeans shorts and stinking of cheap beer, would climb the pine tree at the top and let their weight bend the bark down until they dropped 110 plus feet into the fake blue water of the quarry. I never saw anyone attempt this, and I never talked to anyone that saw it attempted, but I did meet a lot of people that knew someone who saw the Pine Tree bend. This was miles before Trussville became the white-flight Christmas shopping paradise it is now. Trussville was a one road town with train tracks and rednecks and no Best Buy.

The news crews were there when they found the horse trainer’s body at the bottom of Pine Tree. Neck broken on impact and under a shopping cart that his lifeless body disturbed on his descent to the bottom. A drunk dive gone bad, I was surprised that he was the only body they found that day, underneath swarms of fat starving catfish, sweat soaked mattresses, and Food Max shopping carts.

By my count I jumped Pine Tree six times. Each time I’d wear black high top Converse to deaden the impact of the… impact; shoes similar to the ones I’m wearing now only I’ve “sold out” and gone to low tops. I watched Channel 6 news when they found his body and I swore to my unborn children that I’d never jump Pine Tree again.

Part I
I’m writing this with scar torn arms from not minding my own business. The blood poured from multiple windshield glass wounds, thinning out in the rain of last week’s storms. Reminders of my nosiness consist of small shards of glass that I’ve found hidden in my hands all week long. I stood out in the middle of Highway 31 and thought of a 110-foot cliff and how far I can fall still smiling. Granted, I’m a little crazy now, but I was REALLY crazy then. I should have tried to bend back the pine and fall further.

Her friend came running into the Mill crying and grabbed Charlie, or should I say Officer King. Officer Charlie King and I went back a ways to an era of me waiting tables at Chili’s and him working the graveyard shift at an all-night grocery. I bought skim milk from him every night until the day he quit, graduating from the grocer’s life to being a cop. I soon followed suit and graduated from waiter to bartender, still at Chili’s, where I’d suffer for three more years. I still have nightmares about that goddam corporate restaurant. I didn’t cry when it burned down.

Anyway…
Her friend came running into the Mill crying and grabbed Charlie, both of us working our assigned life slots, police and bartender, only now we’d escaped the melted streets of Irondale for the one-way circles of Southside.
I went outside with the two of them, fearing a purse snatching, a bar fight, or something equally as trivial. The image would be a lot more… severe. Her friend pointed at the car, fifty yards ahead, headlights lit, windshield shattered, and a girl’s chest beating short fading beats, life-leaving rhythms. A year later I sat in the courtroom staring back at her father, my role next to insignificant, a time and place witness of the accused. Her father’s eyes on me paralleled the 110-foot fall into a water black abyss. What else am I supposed to say? Young girls’ fathers are left on this earth to fight their wars for them. The emptiness of his losses, his daughter and her war, is a long way down. An abyss of untouched photos and high school annuals. Cheap flowers left by anonymous friends en route to the rest of their lives.

Part II
So I write these haunted memories with gasoline soaked hands. The gas burned every single cut that hid shards of broken glass. The pickup truck was still on fire with a five-gallon canister in the back that I didn’t feel like watching burn. So I snatched it out. The plastic container had melted across the top and fuel spilled all over my arms. “Throw those fire gloves away”, Archer told me. “That gasoline will never really come out.”

I told Chris where I was going and he showed up to have a beer, passively aggressively trying to stop me. No one ever jumped Pine Tree at night. And no one did it in 15-degree weather. The swim from the bottom to the gravel shore wouldn’t be that far, in the daytime, in a normal swimming environment. But in the quarry, full of stolen cars and concrete-shoe corpses, at night, in the frozen cold, it might be akin to breath strokes in a pool filled with razor blades. It got late and I got tired and I had somewhere to be in the morning, (I always have somewhere to be in the morning). Get a black marker. The excuses keep coming.

So,
When I grow up...

I want to be someone’s memory when I grow up. I want to be a folded over photograph, kept in a wallet or on the dresser. A bookmark. Taped in a locker. Tucked in a fire helmet. Crumpled up and thrown away in the most frustrating of moments, only to be dug out of the trash and taped back together. My dad, the other George Cowgill, made front-page papers fighting like mad in ’76 to save the life of a young black girl crushed in a car accident. I found the paper folded over in a stack of documents, none so memorable as that article. At least not to a seven-year-old boy that would grow up to fight the same wars as his father.

I want to be someone’s ghost when I grow up. A silent nod, a smile. A memory of craziness and laughter. “Hey remember that time George…” My ghosts wake me up at the same time every day, regardless of the sleep deprivation from all-night car crashes, heart attacks or drinks poured.

Sonny Kincaid left his father on a front porch in North Birmingham to stop the Japanese aggression in the Pacific, circa 1943. Until the war’s end he would call the USS Otus home, a ship sailing the war-torn seas to assist submarines and wounded vessels. In 1945 he came back to Birmingham to marry my grandmother, put flowers on his father’s grave and, 37 years later, take me to Rickwood Field to meet Mickey Mantle. I was wasting away in college when I found a handful of black and white photos, “Kincaid” etched in pencil on the back of every one. Photos of the celebration of the Japanese surrender. A corner ripped shot of Sonny leaning against a beach boardwalk railing, smoking a cigarette with the arrogant swagger of a yeoman. Another picture in the handful has been permanently scratched into my shoulder, black and grey ink.

Fathers’ sons (and grandfathers’ grandsons) are put on this earth to continue to fight their wars for them. So if you ever wonder where I’m coming from, or why I do this… Now you know.

No Part III
I’m NOT writing this shivering from a 3am fall in the black sky of Trussville into the black waters of the quarry. Feet and arms bruised from the impact. Soaked Converse. Nose running, swimming in a panic to get to the gravel. I just couldn’t go. Responsibility of job one and job two, and it just got too late. (Get that black marker)
Oh and, thankfully, Chris stopped by for a beer.

“Please remember all of the things I never got a chance to say.” – Rocky Votolato

“I come from down in the valley, where mister where you’re young, they bring you up to do like your daddy done.” – Bruce Springsteen

Ian Curtis was 23 (June 7, 2008)

2009-01-14T07:31:00.000-06:00

I want to write fiction. I spent the year of 2007 writing a book called CLARITY- 75,000 words of my imagination. I’d find myself writing in the weirdest spots at the most unusual times. Holed up in the once called Scrushy Library waiting for Janey to get out of first grade. Or in a casino. 3:00 am in East Lake after I saw my first hanging. I’ve pulled off I-65, I-20, and 459 to jot down some inane plot point or character flaw. I told the few people with knowledge of the book that I didn’t care if anyone ever read it. Just as long as I got through it. Finishing CLARITY, back in March, made me feel complete. Accomplished.
For a day or so at least.
Within a month I suffered a serious drought of depression.
More specifically, I felt empty.
Meaningless.

God, I wish I could write fiction.
Small hotel rooms.
The second room was walking distance from the Upside down Plaza. The old man, I guessed 80 but he was 53, was having a hell of a time breathing. And, since breathing is a necessary skill to sustain life, they called us.
I was a guest, riding with Engine 3 out of Southside, a company known for having the best scenery of any fire station in Birmingham, Alabama, or the Southeast. All day and night the boys of 3 will sit on “the wall” off Highland Avenue watching pretty girls jog by or women in evening gowns wait for the valet to retrieve their Mercedes as they smoke cigarettes outside Botegga. “The wall” at 3 is an easy distraction. I never got much writing done on CLARITY at 3.

The hotel room was a pay-by-the-week affair and the size of a walk-in closet. There was a cot’s mattress on the floor and a legless couch. The 80-year-old-looking 53-year-old man lived there with his daughter and her boyfriend. The young couple was well on their way to over aging too. I used to see the boyfriend at shows, in pool halls… somewhere, but back then his face wasn’t covered in open sores, and his legs weren’t punctured pincushions for needles.

I’d never seen the daughter before but she’d been a looker… once. Not now. For every sore her boyfriend had she had two. Blacken her eyes and loosen her teeth too. The life had bled out of her blonde hair and her dead white skin exposed blue-sick veins. The track marks were one on top of another and looked more like broken bottle wounds than evidence of brown-liquid syringes.
If her dad looked three decades older than his age then she looked four. She was a walking corpse, waiting on the undertaker and her headstone.
The old man’s part-time nurse told us outside that the boyfriend is holding them hostage in that small hotel room. The old man’s medicine, delivered weekly, was divided among them like food for castaways. When the pills run out and the makeshift street drugs they obtain are sold or snorted the mood turns into frustration.

Violence.
And despair.
Engine 3 was getting called to that room on a regular basis; the man’s failing health demanded it. One day the calls stopped. I hate to think the worst… but I do it anyway.
Eventually bruises don’t go away. Teeth are knocked out or rot out and they aint coming back either. Don’t hold yourself, or anyone else, hostage.

The business of selling a novel is a foreign language read backwards. Trying to “sell” anything makes me feel like a bottom feeder. Be the sell, believe the sell etc. Whether it’s cars or gold or encyclopedias, salesmen all possess some gift that I do not have and cannot truly comprehend. Maybe that’s my problem.
But damn, I want to write fiction.

The first room was in the darkness of East Lake and the crummiest room in the dirtiest hotel on 1st Avenue North. The room used to be a storage room, until someone got wise to the idea of putting down cheap carpet and renting it out monthly. I was the only firefighter in the windowless room, the rest of the guys standing out in the hallway to avoid the roaches and blood-vomit stains.
Besides the couple’s 12-year-old son I was the only one in the room not HIV positive.

He was a bounty hunter and he couldn’t breathe or, more accurately, was having a hell of time trying. (Please read above on breathing and it’s vital role in sustaining life). A bounty hunter, 100 lbs and rail thin, wearing all camo. Guns were neatly holstered on a chair. The mattress was a grey stained cot and on the floor pushed against cheap wood paneling.

The bounty hunter found his breath eventually. His wife, 200 lbs heavier than him, cried her eyes out, cheap mascara smearing her face. The 12-year-old never blinked, leaning against the wood paneling in mis-matched shoes and too big jeans. I grew up during the discovery of AIDS, and HIV, so standing in that room I tried, and failed, to fight off my own misguided worries. Her tears…

Fluids.

I took a big step back, out of the room. Eye contact with the bounty hunter as he nodded, happy to breathe. The 12-year-old never blinked. The 12-year-old never blinked. The 12-year-old never fucking blinked.

I tore a sign off a broken coke machine that said, “If you need coke, see manager”. I thought it was funny.
We ran a call to the hotel months later and I went by their room. The door was open and the room was vacant. They were long gone.

I want to write fiction because I am, admittedly, a control freak. I like everything to tie in together and make sense at the end. I love plot twists that, while unexpected, fit. I love writing characters that people hate to love and hate to hate. Fiction makes me feel alive, and driven. Writing fiction makes the author a god.
Writing on the reality of this world doesn’t always give me that heightened sense of existence. On a good day I see myself as a passenger, observant to the details of a world many of us do not know exist, at least existing so close to ours.

Then on a bad day…
I feel meaningless.
More than ever.
So I fight to remember the lessons learned in small hotel rooms. Never let anyone hold you hostage, even yourself. No one can tell me what I’m capable of.
Because I don’t know myself.

“Who’s going to tell you things aren’t so great? We can’t go on thinking nothing’s wrong…” - The Cars

Nothing punk, nothing nineties. (May 21, 2008)

2009-01-14T07:25:00.000-06:00

(This blog is part of a book that I’ve said I was going to write for the past four years, tentatively titled “My Dad’s Badge”. So, if years from now you’re reading any of these words in some other form of ramblings – a book, a magazine, or written in crayon on the walls of an insane asylum… don’t complain. This is also a letter to the boys of Station 2, minus the words that would only make sense to them.)

She was wrapped in a blanket and lying on the ground. The first thing I noticed was the church parking lot, full, the service not yet concluded. The call came in during lunch, but that’s okay because it was the first one of the day. She was wrapped in a blanket and lying on the ground, nose broken and face bloodied to all hell. She hadn’t been beaten unrecognizable, but only because the swelling hadn’t started.
She was 18.
He was her boyfriend.
The reasons? There are no reasons and you know it.
Her shoes were gone and her legs were covered in small insignificant scrapes, most of them bleeding. The real problem was her nose, because it was in a dozen pieces and she was having trouble breathing.
She gave the police a fake name.
She refused to go to the hospital, or press charges, or stop the cycle of re-occurring violence.
What little we could do for her on a Sunday afternoon in the shadows of Legion Field was not enough. She needed serious medical attention.
In the middle of having that explained to her, she stood up and ran off.

Engine 14.

For the past year I’ve put in transfer request after transfer request to get to 14. I begged and pleaded to anyone with “pull” that would listen.
Well I’m here now.
“I hope you’re not disappointed, Cowgill. We’ve already killed everyone off and burned everything down,” said my lieutenant on day one. 24 hours later my head was filled with memories of chaos and tragedy.

Day one.
A biker gang surrounded one of their own that’d crashed hard. They made sure to empty his pockets before the hospital ride. A gun, two knives, and brass knuckles.
A hooker ran across four lanes of busy traffic, blood streaming from her head, to tell us she’s fine and that the warrant on her record would land her in jail, not the hospital.
A woman, in a fit of jealous rage, blows up her boyfriend’s car. Molotov cocktail.
The reasons? They have theirs.

Day five. 1:00 AM.
We were wrapping up on a harmless medical call when the fire call came in. Our driver missed his turn and put us at the back of the house, but that worked out perfectly. The rear of the house was lighting up the sky. I was out of the engine before it stopped, nozzle in hand. Two hours later I was a mess. Face black, nose running, soaking wet filthy.
I couldn’t stop smiling and you know it.
3:00 AM.
He was wrapped in a hotel bed sheet and laying against a hotel door. We were watching Scarface when the call came in, but that’s okay because I’ve seen it a million times. The first thing I noticed was the blood; the blood emptying out of him from various wounds, soaking the white bed sheet and pooling on the walkway. He was wrapped in a hotel bed sheet and laying against the door to Room 6, half a dozen bullet holes in his stomach and both arms. He clutched the worst wound over a punctured artery. When he uncovered it blood sprayed wildly. The door to Room 6 opened and a man carried out his five-year-old son, pulling his face tight to his chest. Prevent him from seeing. He stepped over the injured man and his blood and disappeared into the black, keeping his son safe, if for just one more night…

Ask me on my deathbed and I’ll remember that father protecting his son.

When word of my transfer came down the pipeline everyone warned me about 14. 14 is a rundown disaster of a station, infested with rats and roaches. The neighborhood is unappreciative and will label you the enemy. Just like cops.
Well I hate roaches, and I’m deathly afraid of rats.
But I belong at 14. I belong in the middle of chaos and tragedy, a rundown firehouse in a bad neighborhood. I often joke that I should never work at a station my wife isn’t afraid to visit.
The reasons? I have my reasons.

“And in this unstable arena of what’s left or become of my America, I’m asking for this dance so come take my hand…” – Gaslight Anthem

The Places I have come to fear the most (May 13, 2008)

2009-01-14T04:25:00.000-06:00

Joe Steele should’ve been a movie. When he was five and six-years-old he’d show up at house fires in East Lake, holding his grandmother’s hand, dressed in a plastic firefighter jacket, boots, and fire hat. Telltale signs, sure, but everyone has great hindsight. He wouldn’t begin stalking firefighters for another 15 years.

My earliest memory of Joe Steele was him just standing there. Standing in his grandmother’s yard and watching cars go by, blank eyes, an eerie smile on his face. That look on his would follow me all the way up Ridge Road and out of sight. Everyday his sanity faded further and further…

Coggins, a firefighter, got hit first when Steele called to inform him that he’d planted a bomb in his garage. After a solid hour of panic the police found a paper sack full of bricks tucked behind a van, the word “BOM” written in blue marker. Coincidentally, two friends of mine would later make national news for a similar stunt that attracted the ATF and FBI. Their incident was a prank with poor timing, taking place a little too close to Eric Rudolph’s Atlanta bombing, 1996.

My timeline of events with Joe blurs at this point. I became a quick and popular target for Joe Steele’s psychotics, being young and dumb-looking and bearing my dad’s firefighter license tag on my gold Mazda 323. Joe began leaving me notes pinned on trees on Ridge Road wanting to “party” or “get high on weed”. He began calling the police to our house, complaining that my dad was beating up my mother (He wasn’t). He called the fire department, saying that I was burning my own house down (I wasn’t).

Then he showed up with a butcher knife. My parents were out of town and I was on my way out the door when I saw him. Standing at the top of our driveway, the blank eyes and eerie smile in place. And a butcher knife in his hand. He was just… standing there. Joe wasn’t very intimidating physically. Average height, too skinny, and short black hair that he cut himself.
But damn that knife, and damn that look on his face.
Needless to say the situation resolved itself, very anti-climatically I might add. He laid down in the street, arms crossed over his chest vampire-style for about an hour, then went home for dinner.
That incident, and others similar, had been enough for the neighborhood. A petition was drawn and honored to have him placed in “learning facility where he could get the help that he needed.”

My dad was called to testify.

The event was nothing short of a circus. For some reason, that escapes all bounded logic I’ve harvested from a lifetime of Law & Order, LA Law and Night Court, Joe Steele’s attorney thought it would be a good idea for him to take the stand.

ATTORNEY: Mr Steele, in this police report they claim you are planning to kill firefighter Buddy Wilks. Is that true?
JOE STEELE: No sir.
ATTORNEY: Thank you. (Attorney turns his back, walks to his table)
JOE STEELE: I’m going to kill George Cowgill’s father.

My dad said that’s when the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. It took the judge approximately seven minutes to rule that Joe Steele did indeed need help and placed him in an institutional learning facility, i.e. away from society.

I eventually moved out of Roebuck, on to the high hills of Sharpsburg Manor. I didn’t travel down Ridge Road as much so I’m not really sure how long Joe Steele was “away”. I did eventually see him again, years later, once again standing out in his grandmother’s yard. No faux bombs, or invitations for drug use. No butcher knifes. He had put on at least 50 pounds of bad weight, and it looked like he was still cutting his own hair.
He still had the blank look in his eyes.
But the eerie smile was long gone.

“I was in my room and I was just like staring at the wall thinking about everything. But then again I was thinking about nothing.” – Suicidal Tendencies.

Only 1% succeeds by the way. (May 6,2008)

2009-01-14T04:12:00.000-06:00

Show her self-destruction. The two sides of the story share the following facts: It was late, 3 am late, and she was slightly drunk and I was brutally sober. They would also agree that it happened in a townhouse off Highland Avenue that I was renting from a slumlord named Michael Barry.

Words.

She’d wanted an argument all night so she bided her time. Picking her moment, waiting to strike, and smiling the whole time in public. The front door hadn’t been shut behind us for more than a minute. I think we’re alone now.

More words.

Berating each other turned into vicious screaming. And threats. And crying. Our relationship had been over for a really long time and we had NO business being alone. Not now, with her slightly drunk and me brutally sober. She was the best at bringing out my worst. And there’s just something about a door slamming in your face. I heard something in the back of my mind, I don’t want to say a voice for fear of sounding dumb, or worse yet, crazy. But there was something… and it said “let go”. The color in my eyes melted into shades of crimson. I felt everything go numb. I let go.

The last time I came close to letting go was in 1988. I was 15 and furious, shaking upset over a crisis too meaningless to repeat. I found my dad’s gun in his top drawer and slumped down against the living room wall. I called my mom and said goodbye. But I held on. I came close, but I held on.

I crashed through the slammed door, the wood splintering around me, scraping small tears in my arms, my neck. The look on her face wasn’t fear or surprise. The look asked “What took you so long?” More words. We were both juggernauts of misplaced anger, driven on emotion, and armed with the hatred of our situation. Nothing was going to stop us now. She found the knife on top of the dresser and slumped down against my bedroom wall. A Spyderco knife, black handle.

A year and a day earlier a friend of mine took the same model Spyderco and stabbed another friend of mine to death. The courtroom transcripts said he’d stabbed her over 50 times. The murder ruined fond memories of straightedge and Sharpsburg Manor. Bands driving all night to play Unity 1605, a dozen punks sleeping on my living room floor after a show.

She pressed the knife against her wrist, and then it really got… strange. I rushed across the room and yanked her hand away from the radial artery she’d aimed for. “Show her self-destruction”, something, not a voice, said in the back of my mind. Her hand around the knife and my hand clamped over hers I pressured the blade’s edge down on my left forearm, dragging the knife for about three inches. The skin tore open and blood poured. And poured. We both dropped the knife and I stood up, marveling at the damage. A calm sobering moment followed and we agreed that I probably needed medical attention. I was losing a lot of the red stuff. Amber, my roommate, came home minutes later to the carnage of broken furniture and blood-pooled hardwood floors. But I was already gone, en route to Montclair Hospital.

It’s funny to say now but I’m glad I bled so much because it stopped us, or more importantly it stopped me. My initial idea, when I’d charged across the room and took her hand, was to press the knife under one ear and drag it across my neck to the other.
I haven’t heard her story in a long time and I don’t remember how it goes. I’m sure there are people in her life that have heard it more than once, and I bet they have incredibly interesting opinions on George Cowgill. Hell, maybe they’re right.

And that’s ok. I’ll be the villain this time.

Three dots, three pauses, & three more dots (April 14, 2008)

2009-01-13T23:11:00.000-06:00

I’m a pretentious snob,

The front yard was dirt behind a three foot fence. Assorted car pieces, pieces not parts, sprawled across the ground. The front porch was a foot shorter than me and a wheelchair ramp rolled around and around to the dirt. The house was easy to find because the address numbers were two feet high. That and the inflatable moonwalk. There were dogs, there’s always dogs, and one of them was blind.

Our host had two older brothers. The oldest was in jail, the other condemned to a backroom in a permanent vegetable state. “No one knows what happened,” our host said. We just found him on the side of the highway. Blunt force trauma to the head.”Our host just got out of jail himself. The love of his life now lives next door with his ex-best friend. His son’s mom keeps threatening to sue for custody of his 8-year-old, but the judge told her she leads too much of a “nomadic lifestyle”. The five kids at the party jump up and down on the inflatable moonwalk. One of them is Janey, who I would go to war with God over.

I pass judgment,

The world is divided among people that believe they’re owed something and those that have given up. My ideal philosophy is to fall in between the cracks of the two.
Destroy the stars and burn down the sky but don’t expect anyone else to help.
All the world owes you is a fighting chance and a lot of people don’t even get that much.

A 13-year-old girl wearing an Avenged Sevenfold hoodie kept to herself and her I-pod. I don’t know if the rips and holes in her shirt are stylishly-inflicted or financial positioning. I don’t like not knowing.

and I’m an emotional wreck.

Our host’s mother insisted we meet her bedridden son. I follow Janey into the room, ducking down on the porch. His walls were covered in photos, one on top of the other, none of which I could bring myself to look at. I know what they are. Better days. Days when he could walk and talk and understand his surroundings. Two weeks back I came home to find my neighbor beaten to death with a hammer. I didn’t blink. Damn if I couldn’t look at those photos. Janey didn’t understand why he wouldn’t get better. I had no answer.
I felt less than zero.

“Seen the carnival at Rome. I had the women, I had the booze. All I can remember now is little kids without any shoes.” - Pogues

Concerns (December 31, 2008)

2009-01-13T22:15:00.000-06:00

I’m going to get a black marker and start writing the excuses down my forearms. Personal difficulties and chemical imbalances. Self-destructive confusion and sudden, suffocating, lapses of paranoia. I used to write Candace’s name down my arm in black marker, and she’s dead now. And I miss her when I think about her, now and again.

But I still need a black marker.

Run with your wrists slit until the blood loss gets you. The head spinning, the nausea of… consuming demise. I could see what’s next being a long straight road I’m supposed to just… run. Eternal back streets and dark alleys, past buildings and stores left for dead. I once gave Red Cross a pint of blood and went straight to a treadmill for sprints. It was as close to drunk as I’ve ever been, short of the early nineties when GHB was an active ingredient in bodybuilding supplements. I'm just as curious as you on what comes next. Heaven and hell and the fictional places in between. You want a heaven? Well I do too, and when I go (checking watch now) picture your best memory of me, that rare time you saw me smile and mean it. The time you saw me cry I was so happy.

And that’s all there is. And a song.

I need a song. Rule out Ian Curtis and Joy Division… too cliché. Rule out Iggy Pop… it’s already been done. (See: Ian Curtis)

I saw my millionth dead body last shift. Eyes on the ceiling, cold uncolored-touch skin. It was in an assisted living house, a building where nightmares of growing old are born. A place where so many are cared for by ghouls that work their temporary jobs with no effort or empathy or humanity. Because life is temporary. The man had calmly stopped breathing and he wasn’t coming back. I read the cards on the wall, the same handwriting and words scrawled on the bottom of every one. “I love you- Mary”. Each card written in the same bend with the same pen and the same positioning. It could’ve been a rubber stamp. Christmas cards, birthday cards, and Valentines Day cards, get-well cards. I counted 45 cards in all.

The paramedics ran the tests to prove his heart was through and I read the walls.

“I love you – Mary”

The narcissist in me truly believes I could give Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” a run in muckraking on the assisted living houses of Norwood, East Lake and Elyton. Peeled paint walls, rotten furniture, and rats and roaches under the floorboards. The “caretakers” will leave for hours at a time and the residents will sit mindlessly in circles, dripping of bitter resentment toward the family members that are long gone, or that have come and gone and left them behind. So many of them beg to be taken to the hospital, not because they’re sick, but because it will be somewhere else. Have I ever let on how much I hate rats?

Is Don Henley and the “Boys of Summer” too corny? How about Simon & Garfunkel’s “I am a Rock”? I really like that line “I never will forget those nights, I wonder if it was a dream”. It plays over and over in my head like a broken… Damn, again the wording is too predictable.

Maybe that’s what growing up really is. Predictability. Brush your teeth the same number of strokes, the same time of day, in the same spot. Spray paint an X on the bathroom floor in front of your mirror if you're scared you’ll forget. But you wont, and I know I won’t either.

I’m just too predictable.

When you find my body I’ll be in front of a mirror, a predictable narcissist to the very end.

Swing from the rope until the oxygen-lessness becomes too tiresome. I can see the sunset skylines from my desk, as well as a picture of Ian Curtis holding his face in his hands. Outdated CDs cover my walls and a City of God poster, still rolled, sits on top of the stack. Pretty far from the slums of Brazil aren’t we? The homeless pre-teen gangsters of South America would call the Tragic City a paradise.

The woman wasn’t topless but her shirt was soaked with so much blood that’d she’d tried pulling it off, unsuccessfully, because of the stab wounds. Maybe the one in her neck, or the ones in her back or the ones in her arms. It’d been two men with two knives and the wounds seemed personal.

“I think she’s dead,” a cop said as we stared down at her, face down, in a pool of red.

“I’m not dead. I’m just scared to move,” she said

Minutes later we pulled up at UAB, everything blood stained. Clothes, equipment, memories.

Life isn’t always fantastic.

And someday I’ll believe in life after death. But not today.

Is it bad to stand over the dead and dying and pray for fire? The click of the printer and the address, the ear crushing tone, the dispatch operator reading out the initial responders of the first alarm. Maybe you can see flames or smoke billowing across the highway, tearing down Richard Arrington Blvd or in the turn lane of Arkadelphia heading into 18’s territory. If angels never answer then unheard prayers have to be acceptable, even if it’s for fire. I no longer JUST want to matter. I want to burn as well. I know I'm a broken fucking record.

I think it would be too ironic to go with ‘Last Goodbye” from Jeff Buckley, who drowned in the waist deep waters of the Mississippi River. I carry my daydream memories of him in dirty New York coffee shops, playing for pocket change, singing bleeding emotion, and dying too young…

As for a heaven…

My best memory of me will be at the beach with Janey. News crews were on the shore for something insignificant, a puff piece on tourism or a shock story on sharks, and I told her it was for a kid’s surf contest. She rode wave after wave, belly down on the board, smiling for the cameras and laughing, HARD. She was so… proud, if five-year-olds can feel pride.

I stood out in the waist deep water of the Gulf, her name recently inked across my chest. I watched her make it to the dry sand of shore over and over. Waving at me, waving to the camera crew and beaming. The sunlight fading too fast, the salt in her mussed-up brown hair… That’s where I’ll be when they find me. Cause that’s all a heaven is, or needs to be.

This may sound too late eighties re-hashed interest, tie-dye shirts on skateboarders with long dark hair and red-stoned eyes. But I think it will be Pink Floyd, and I hate Pink Floyd. The nostalgia of East Lake, two decades gone, and leaning against junkyard cars in 2 am parking lots is too much to resist. That, and the lines of “Wish you were Here” haunt me. “Did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts?” or “Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?”

Life is not always fantastic but it can be, even if just for a second in the waist deep waters of the Gulf; a pretty brown-haired girl waving at you from the shore, her name stinging ink in your skin. The sun fading away, far too fast...

(Half of this I wrote six months ago and hated. In the time that’s lapsed the woman I mentioned who had been the victim of a brutal stabbing came up to me outside Station 14 and thanked me for helping her. I didn’t recognize her at first, without the blood and wounds, but she pointed down 8th Avenue West where a cop mistakenly pronounced her dead and I remembered. And I’ll never forget.)