(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
3.16.2010
2.14.2010
The Endless Meaningless Murder Summer.
(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
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
2.02.2010
Shallow Discontent.
(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
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
1.11.2010
International gathering of Failure Narcissists
(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
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
12.13.2009
Read my knuckles. They’ll say STAY GOLD.
(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
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
11.05.2009
The first of many words without you
(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
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
10.22.2009
PART II (Holding my breath 4,5,6…)
(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
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
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