Three Quotes

“I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.” — Joan Didion

“You wake up one day and all the constructions are gone, the books and movies you stole from to romanticize your life make no sense and you realize that you are, in fact, living a totally fucked up, amoral life and are, essentially, everything you hate. When you lose your sense of constructed meaning you panic. You pick up new habits. This is the panic that makes people have babies, throw themselves into grueling 40 hour a week jobs, become alcoholics or religious nuts. Anything to fill the void, to construct something that means anything.” — Al Burian

“Who are you and what do you want?” — Void

Secret Spot

When you live in a small town, sometimes you end up doing dumb shit just to keep yourself entertained. One more night of frayed couches and musty conversation, you tell yourself, and I might just go mad. The night beckons. You need to move freely and feel the sky above you. You need to break the bonds of your walled-in, pixilated existence. Booze is a propellant. So is boredom.

Such was the case one August night when a group of friends and I climbed onto the rooftop of Still Hall, a university building.  There was Ty, an elementary education major who spray-painted Born To Lose across the hood of his broken down car, and Ryan, who got 666 tattooed across the tip of his dick. “So I can say I’m putting the devil in ‘em,” he explained. There was Jody, my best friend, and Dave, who looked unnervingly like my doppelganger, complete with male pattern baldness.

One of the things I’ve learned about having a solitary place of your own is to never bring other people along. Soon they’ll bring others, word will spread, and your secret spot will become not-so-secret. Or, if you have friends like mine, they’ll just attract the fuzz the first time you bring them around. 

I’d been climbing that rooftop on and off for a couple months, sometimes to stand and stare out across the lagoon, sometimes to sit and drink. I kept quiet every time. I’d always been afraid of authority figures, and since there was only one escape route—over a ledge and down a fire escape—it’s not like I could have made a getaway, not without wings. So I dwelled in contemplation and stupor, always bringing my empties with me, never leaving a trace. With friends up there it was different. Ryan and Ty ollied over heating ducts on their skateboards. They threw empty bottles off the roof and cheered when cars drove over the shards. I cringed but didn’t say anything. Too little to drink and I could never quite surrender to the unadorned joy of destruction. Nor did I want to play schoolmarm. Sometimes all you can do is wait and watch how it all plays out.

The shattered bottles eventually tipped off a passing security guard, and soon four squad cars lingered below. Jody panicked. She had a warrant out for her arrest. Property damage was the charge. On her birthday, bartending downtown, she’d gotten into an argument with her boss. When words failed to get her point across, she began hurling pint glasses. When she ran out of glasses, she grabbed a pot of scalding coffee and poured it across two billiard tables, their lush green fields giving way to a wilted brown.

The guard shined his flashlight on us and we were led, one by one, down to the waiting officers. Jody had encountered one of them a couple months prior while riding her bike downtown. Chipped yellow paint warned NO SKATEBOARDS OR BIKES ON SIDEWALK, but that didn’t stop Jody. The cop might have looked the other way had she been pedaling leisurely, cautiously. After all, that stretch of road can be a gauntlet of drunk drivers and drunker pedestrians (no doubt jaywalking or puking in gutters); the sidewalk is sometimes safer. Unfortunately for Jody, she was throttling along as if the land speed record lay within reach. Barflies and students leapt out of her way, and she nearly mowed down an entire line of concertgoers queued up outside of Otto’s. When the cop yelled for her to stop, she pedaled faster. When the cop chased her on foot and tackled her off her bike, she said: “Wow! You’re in great shape, officer!”

In front of Still Hall, Jody fidgeted nervously, afraid a flicker of recognition might spread across the policeman’s face, though it never did. A female officer lined us up and asked for our IDs. She looked them over and passed them back. Jody breathed a sigh of relief. “What were you doing up there?” the cop asked. We glanced at one another, and Ryan responded, “Just enjoying the scenery, ma’am.” She sneered incredulously, snatched my backpack away from me and asked, “Got anything that’s gonna poke me?” Upon reaching in and feeling not needles but beer, she remarked, “Still cold. You might wanna get back home and drink ‘em before they get warm.” And with that, we were off the hook. But we needed a new drinking spot. Rather, I needed a new drinking spot.

That autumn the same friends and I walked to the woods. We tucked our pants into our socks, kicked our way through prickly underbrush, and climbed a ridge of jagged, gray rocks. There by the train tracks we sat, greeting steel. Though the five of us never went back there together, I made that my new spot, and for all I know they made it theirs, too. Maybe we orbited one another in the night, mistakenly hearing raccoons when in fact, unbeknownst to us, it was just a friend hunkering down in a nearby heap of branches, watching trains and toasting boredom. It was a good place to fill your gut and empty your head, and it’s where I ended up just weeks before a girl I never knew was murdered a stone’s throw away.

Dekalb was no stranger to front page headlines by that time. On Valentine’s Day, 2008, a student from Urbana-Champaign drove to Dekalb, stayed overnight at the Travelodge, and made his way to Cole Hall with a shotgun the next morning. He walked through a side door and entered the auditorium from behind a set of large curtains, pausing onstage before firing indiscriminately into the crowded room. Ultimately he killed five students, wounded nineteen others, and blew his brains out before the police arrived. In the midst of all that mayhem the first person to call and check on me, oddly, was my landlord. “I’m alive and you’ll get next month’s rent,” I assured him.

Classes were canceled and the Interstate was clogged with parents driving to campus to evacuate their children. Meanwhile I was in a state of limbo. No class, no job, nothing much on TV except live updates from right across town. It felt too soon to buy a case of beer from the liquor store and while away the hours until normalcy, or something akin to it, returned. So I bundled up and hit the streets, staying close to the spectacle playing out on campus. I watched Governor Blagojevich give a short speech in front of Cole Hall while TV crews looked on. His hair was so shellacked that even roiling gusts of February wind couldn’t muss it. Students held vigil in the MLK Commons, the campus free-speech-zone usually peopled by animal rights activists, anemic antiwar protests, and the hellfire invective of visiting Westboro Church members. Today there was nothing but wet eyes and frostbitten bouquets. There was so much raw emotion, so many people looking for comfort in the embrace of fellow mourners. Yet I felt entirely detached from it all. The day’s events were horrible, yes, but then so was every front page headline, every page from any given history book, every dark impulse waiting to manifest itself in blood. We need not look far for evidence of man’s inhumanity toward man. The fact that the bloodshed happened right outside my front door made little difference to me. Its proximity changed nothing. As I watched students drive away in cars bedecked with yellow ribbons, I imagined, in a jag of self-righteousness, the lives they would never mourn, the people torn to pieces by weaponry we’d all helped pay for.

The second night after the shooting, as TV cameras scavenged the wreckage for crying, contemplative faces, my friends and I congregated at the Hen House, where we buoyed ourselves with a schizophrenic mix of humor and malice. Already the town was plastered with signs that read Forward Together Forward. It was supposed to be a message of unity but to us it was just gibberish. We came up with our own versions. Forward Together Fast Forward, Forward Together Loop-de-Loop Slight Nausea Forward, et cetera. We were trapped in a bizarre world of heartfelt sentiment that we couldn’t tap into. It wasn’t that we were sociopaths or anything. Rather, it was almost as if all of it had nothing to do with us. We were sympathetic, but it was the sort of sympathy one feels when slowly driving past a bad car wreck on the highway and thinking, How awful.

Two years later the school shooting became just another moldy old story I told to Kaylene as we drank in Dekalb, the town where I’d attended college. She arrived in full bloom. Her once shaved head now sprouted red, curly locks that cascaded down past her shoulders. Green, vine-like tattoos ringed her freckled arms. She wore sandals instead of her usual combat boots, and it occurred to me that that might have been the first time I’d ever seen her toes, even though we shared a bed for six months during our Chicago days.

Kaylene had moved back to Washington from Chicago five years earlier. She kicked around her hometown of Wenatchee for a while. It was kind of depressing, she said. Her friends were stuck in the same old ruts. Too much drinking, not enough motivation. Her father was in poor health and his memory was starting to go. The town’s memory was starting to go, too. Some of the apple orchards where she once played as a child were razed. In their place a luxury hotel sprang up, though no one seemed eager to book a room there. Wenatchee, “The Apple Capital of the World,” was willing to sacrifice its very essence and still no tourists came. That seemed like a bad omen.

A couple years later Kaylene grew restless again, this time in Seattle. So much to see, so much to do, yet she found herself tethered to her ten-dollar-an-hour job and the obligation of rent. So she plotted her escape. She saved up money, bought a lime green van with dinosaurs and dragons painted on the side, and embarked on a cross-country trip. Now she was here, in front of me, recounting her journey so far. “How long are you gonna be in Illinois?” I asked. “I don’t know,” she said, “I’m kind of making it up as I go along.”

Going to Dekalb wasn’t her idea. She wanted to take me to Chicago but I declined. A year earlier I’d been mugged at gunpoint near a friend’s house on the north side. The city had developed a foreboding quality to it ever since then, much to my chagrin. I lived on the south side at the time, and when I ventured out in public, either riding the bus or walking to wherever I was headed, I often had a panic attack. Sometimes in the midst of my episodes I’d vomit. The basic elements of existence became difficult. The corner store seemed miles away, especially after nightfall. I rarely traveled across town to see friends anymore because I began quaking and vomiting en route.  I couldn’t silence the sirens in my head. Not surprisingly, I hadn’t returned to the city since moving away and wasn’t eager to do so. Not then, not with Kaylene, when I might spoil our reunion by having a total breakdown, leaving me rudderless and puking on the street while she looked on horrified. Neuroses can be difficult for friends to comprehend or accept, all the more so when they come spring-loaded with the threat of projectile vomit.

Dekalb was hosting Middle West Fest that weekend. Though I didn’t care about any of the bands playing, at least it was something to do. And hell, with friends working the door at most of the venues I might even be able to get myself and Kaylene in for free. I felt self-conscious. I didn’t want the town I’d spent so much time in to seem boring to her, and there seemed to be no simpler corrective to boredom than overdriven guitars, overdrinking, and yelled snippets of conversation over the din. At least that’s what I thought then. Really, it’s just boredom at a higher decibel level.

We never made it to the show anyway. While smoking outside a local bar, Kaylene’s purse was stolen off our table. Inside were her phone, debit card, photo ID, camera, birth control, journal, and some cash. Damn near everything. She had only left it there for a few seconds, asking me after lighting her cigarette, “Do you think my purse is safe in there?” and then answering her own question by placing her cigarette on a ledge and walking back inside. The table was empty. No one had seen anything. Kaylene phoned the cops and a policewoman met us outside the bar a couple minutes later, after we’d polished off what was left of our pitcher. The cop took down Kaylene’s statement and turned to leave. “Isn’t there anything else you can do?” Kaylene pleaded, tears already in her eyes. The cop shrugged and got in her cruiser. “We’ll notify you if it turns up,” she said as she pulled away.

Kaylene and I spent the next hour and a half roving around town, becoming intimately familiar with every dumpster, trash can, and shrub within a two mile radius. “Maybe they just took the money and ditched the purse,” she said. “What am I supposed to do without a phone or an ID? How the fuck do I even replace a Washington ID in fucking Illinois?” She was still crying, though from time to time she laughed at the absurdity of the situation as she peered into yet another dumpster. “I fucking hate this place,” she said. I’d heard that plenty of times before. It ought to be Dekalb’s official motto. They could even plaster it on every sign leading into town, just so people would know what they were getting themselves into.

I told Kaylene about my mugging and how the first place the muggers tried to use my credit card was Popeye’s Chicken, and how that piqued my interest and inspired me to try Popeye’s for the very first time not long after. “It’s my favorite place to get fried chicken now,” I said. “Fast food fried chicken, anyway.” I also told her how one of the muggers asked, with the gun pointed directly at my face and my pant pockets already emptied out, if I had anything else on me, and how I reached inside my jacket to hand him my phone, not thinking, not feeling—an animal ensnared. “I had naked pictures of my ex girlfriend in that phone,” I told her. She responded, “So what? Whoever stole my purse could be looking through my journal right now, my innermost thoughts. That’s way more intrusive. Who cares about tits?”

Eventually Kaylene gave up on her purse. “Can you at least buy some beer?” she asked. We stopped at American Liquors and I bought a six pack. Without her ID she had to wait outside.

In the woods, in my new spot, we drank and talked when trains idled, stared in silence when they drowned us out. Though the night had turned to shit it felt good to sit and drink with Kaylene, to reminisce and swap new stories. I told her about the school shooting and she asked where I was when it happened. I said I’d been on my way to class and that if I had left my apartment five minutes earlier I would have been walking right in front of Cole Hall as the shooter went about his grisly business. A lot of people have similar stories. My friend Joe, a veteran who spent time in Iraq and Afghanistan, was working as a security guard at the Holmes Student Center that day, right across from Cole Hall. Some of the wounded students ran into his building. The screams, the blood, the whirring helicopters overhead—it triggered his PTSD and he spent a couple weeks holed up in his apartment after that. My sister, meanwhile, said she was supposed to be in the auditorium right next door but had skipped class that day. It made for a good story, full of gravitas and a dreadful what if component, but later I found out it wasn’t entirely true. Her class wasn’t until two hours later.

It makes sense. Some of us exaggerate and lie and dwell on what ifs in the aftermath of a tragedy, I think, because we want to put ourselves right there in the middle of it; we want to be a part of it while still remaining safely out of harm’s way. Maybe then we can attempt the impossible task of making sense of what has happened. Or maybe we can justify the unease we feel, the uncomfortable knowledge that we dwell in the midst of chaos. You and I, we inhabit the same fragile flesh and are subject to the same macabre, celestial odds making, the common bond of uncertainty. Maybe we’ll fall off our bike and skin our knee. Maybe someone will stick a gun in our face and take whatever’s in our pockets. Maybe someone will emerge from behind a curtain with something (what is it?) in their hands while we take notes in our biology class. In some small and indirect way, when the damage done is on a scope we can barely fathom, when we recoil from it, we all experience the fallout together, whether through dismissal, grief, crocodile tears, whatever. You and I, we’re in this together. Forward Together Loop-de-Loop Slight Nausea Forward.

Kaylene and I leave our empties behind by the train tracks. Not because we’re lazy, but because if a cop stops us while we make our way out of the woods I don’t want to be caught with a backpack full of drained beer bottles and get a ticket for drinking in public.

About a month later an eighteen-year-old art student walks through the same woods Kaylene and I had been in, the woods where I hunch down in my secret spot, my little sovereign parcel of amnesia and seclusion, drinking and watching trains, wondering where they’re going to, where they’re coming from. The student is red-haired and has a sunflower tattoo above her right breast. Her nose is pierced. She carries a camera, takes pictures. A stranger approaches. He’s a heavy-set man with a goatee and a slight mustache. What does he say? What does she say in response? What can she say? They find the charred remains a week later.

On Aging and Vanity

Some years ago, while buying smokes at a gas station, I witnessed a reunion between two old high school friends. “Holy shit! You’re bald!” said one of them. “You got fat!” said the other.

Back then baldness was a sore topic for me. I’d begun to lose my hair a year earlier at the age of nineteen, and when the guy at the gas station let loose with his greeting of “Holy shit! You’re bald!” I thought he was talking to me. It was like facing an insult comic who had run out of punchlines and decided to coast through on pure vitriol instead. Imagine my relief, then, when I realized that I wasn’t the one being heckled after all.

Still, in those days I felt as if I were under constant scrutiny. It was a neurotic, self-obsessed projection, I know that now, but heightened self-awareness is the bane of anyone who feels defective.

One of the near-universal aspects of going bald, especially at a young age, is the all-consuming desire to stop or reverse the process. Late night TV is awash with commercials that promise to bring your hair back to life. Surgical procedures, prescription medication, and all manner of snake oil are available. In my case, I kept pretty much every option on the table, but right from the start I skipped ahead to the most drastic one. I convinced myself that I needed a hair transplant.

It seemed like such a quick fix, and so cutting edge. Doctors had successfully transplanted chest hair onto patients’ heads for chrissake. With that sort of ingenuity, they could probably raid your taint and really fill out the top if need be. Regardless, the procedure was no cakewalk. It involved scalpels, blood, stripped flesh. I’d read about lots of botched operations leaving folks permanently mangled. And besides, with an average cost of five to ten thousand bucks, there was no way I could afford it, so I turned instead to Plan B: Propecia.

Propecia is a hair loss medication. It comes in pill form and costs about fifty bucks a month. The bottle bears the following warning: “Pregnant women should not take Propecia and should not come into contact with broken or crushed tablets.” I wondered why that was exactly. Were they alluding to possible birth defects? Flipper babies? Cleft palettes? Little werewolf children bursting out of the womb with matted hair from head to toe? Surely anything capable of mutating an unborn baby can’t be good for anyone, pregnant or otherwise. But at the time that wasn’t my primary concern. Instead it was the second part of the warning label that caught my eye, the part that read: “Sexual side effects that have been reported include: Decreased sex drive, impotence, and decreased ejaculate amount.” To be fair I didn’t care much about that last one. (Does anyone really want to jizz like a fire hose?) But with the other two warnings fresh in my head, I took to jerking off a few times a day, like clockwork, to assure myself that my libido was still intact. Self-gratification can be a boring, ho hum exercise to begin with, but by my second re-up it had devolved into total, robotic joylessness. It was so clinical I may as well have been administering a scoliosis test.

There was another problem, too. I felt a growing disconnect with the way I presented myself to the world and the way I actually felt. I was hewing to the empty embrace of vanity even as I outwardly tried to project a fuck-all attitude. I wore a punked out leather jacket and did plenty of stupid, nihilistic shit but back at home I had a bottle of anti-balding meds waiting for me. How bourgeois, how shallow.

So I let my prescription expire and entered the third stage of my voyage: Complete and utter spite for all things hair-related. I figured if my body was going to rebel against me, fuck it, why resist? I adopted a scorched earth policy, attacking my head with a pair of clippers and feeling pretty great about it. But when I was done, holy fucking Moses, take my word for it: Nothing will make you look so gaunt and sickly, so patently ridiculous as shaving your head for the first time. It recasts your facial features in a whole new light. The angles are all wrong. Each divot and bump on your head are fault lines that throw the entire picture out of focus.

There are other negatives too. Like, say, when your friend gives you a box of his old skinhead clothing and you decide, oh what the hell, some of this stuff looks cool, what’s the worse that could happen? Well, let me assure you: Wearing a bomber jacket and a Blitz t-shirt when you have a shaved head will, I repeat will, ensure that a group of real skinheads threaten to kick the living shit out of you.

Another drawback to having a shaved head is that it leaves you vulnerable to the elements. I learned this the hard way when I shaved my head down to the scalp with a Bic razor prior to a trip to Bloomington, Indiana. It was mid-summer and I spent two days wandering around in unforgiving heat and glaring sunlight. Within a day I was so sunburned that my scalp broke out in blisters and oozing kernels of pus. By the end of the weekend I looked like I was wearing a diseased baboon ass on my head. Truly horrific.

But in spite of resistance from skinheads and Mother Nature, I continued to shave my head for a couple years, until I eventually got bored with it and moved onto the next incarnation: bearded combover combo. It’s a beginner’s combover, you might say.

Last year I TA’d for a professor who had the real deal, a wispy bridge of near nothingness spanning an ocean of pink, dappled flesh. It became all the more cartoonish when he and I walked around campus together. Fighting harsh winds near University Hall, his hair would break free from its moorings and flap around like a creature ensnared. One time, after we’d made it indoors, I watched in horror as he licked his fingers, ran them through the frazzled, upended mess, and slathered it back onto his scalp. But hey, when you’re sixty-something-years-old who the hell are you trying to impress anyway?

Which leaves me to wonder if my anxiety had been bound up in youthful conceit all along. That would be my guess, and I assume that most everyone has their own hang-ups, their own self-flagellating assessments. Maybe it speaks to the fixity with which we cling to our youth, to our conception of a static self sealed away from the onward march of time. But alas, teeth rot. Skin weathers. Hair falls out. The selves we knew cease to be. And really, who gives a shit?

When it comes down to it, we should all be so lucky to have a chance meeting with an old friend years down the line, to queue up at a gas station and marvel with humor and a little bit of venom at the ways they’ve changed, and in turn receive an affirmation of our own change, our now-ness, all the while accepting the inexorable truth that to be alive is to decay, and that there are far, far worse things in life than a bad combover.

Letter From an Old Friend

Written by Matt Lazzara (April 2, 1982 – February 15, 2004)

 

“this is all true. september 7th, 2003. the clock is ticking…

i don’t think a lot of people sit around and contemplate their lives. i mean, people think about their futures and what they’re going to do, and what they should have done in order to achieve something, but i don’t think anyone contemplates their present. what they’re doing right now. everyone’s heard of living in the moment or living for the moment or whatever, but i think very few people act on it. myself included and that’s something that i regret immensely.

life is a finite thing. obviously, everyone’s life is going to end, but mine has a time limit. no surprises for me. and depressingly enough, that time limit is going to run out rather soon. i’ve never really told anyone how long i have left, or what exactly (in great detail) is wrong with me, because i would rather my friends viewed me as a vital, volatile, silly human being rather than an animated corpse. a dead man walking. that’s being unfair to them, because they deserve to know what’s going on, and they are amazingly supportive human beings. but at age 21, most people don’t understand or know how to contemplate the thought that someone you know, or care about, is going to die. and i’m terrified that if they did know, they would abandon me for more secure, lasting relationships.

so every day, every minute is vital to me. the most mundane things are breaths of fresh air. the things that most people take for granted but shouldn’t – a kiss, a pudding fight, a good long walk or an intriguing conversation – are now intensely important to me. and i think they should be important to everyone. the fact that i know i won’t be able to experience these things make them achingly more important to me, and they make me desperate to achieve them one more time.

i want to close my eyes and kiss a girl one more time; the kind of kiss that makes you feel like you’re floating, the kind where you forget to do something with your hands because it’s so good. i want to go camping, and lay in the grass and think about how naively beautiful the day is. i want to shoot off fireworks and run away when the cops pull up. i want someone to hold my hand and tell me something nice about myself. i want to be able to read the paper and deride george w. to someone, and have them hate that asshole with me. i want to sit on a stoop late into the night, drinking shitty beer and telling stories. i want to feel alive, and not dead or dying. and i think that those things – the most trivial and passing connections to the world and people in it – are violently important.

so this is my contribution to you. i’m desperately telling you – all of you – to take advantage of your youth and vitality. i hear too many people talking about college and getting shitty jobs afterward. i hear too many people talking about work and how this and that sucks. fuck, we’re all wasting our lives doing things that disconnect us from everyone else! you don’t need a four or five year plan, and you sure as hell don’t need to worry about your future. worry about right now, and what you’re going to do tonight. worry about feeling innocent and immature again. worry about making every day something to talk about, and not just another blank page in your life.

i used to act like you. i had a plan. i had a future. and that all blew away. but right now, i barely have a present, and that’s how i’ve realized the error of our ways. please, please, don’t get old and die of cancer, and realize that you did nothing with your life but make plans that never happened. don’t miss opportunities anymore. if you like someone, tell them. if you think the time is right to kiss someone, do it. if you feel like you’re in a rut, do something stupid and silly and fun. if you feel the world is ugly, make something beautiful. stop being so cautious. some movie line said: if you take life too seriously, you’ll never get out alive.

trust me, as much as life sucks sometimes, and wow, do i know it sucks, it is still the only thing we know. it is the only thing that matters, and it’s wonderful. life is a beautiful, ridiculous, tragic disaster, but it’s the only thing we have. so don’t let it lie by the wayside in pursuit of crap that’s barely important. people are the most important resource, and so are the relationships built with them. i feel the pinch of that more than ever now. if we could spend 400 billion dollars to cure cancer instead of building and maintaining weapons, i wouldn’t have to write this. so this is, essentially, a plea. this is the most personal thing i’ve ever written, and i hope it reaches more people than i ever could.

don’t forget this is the only life you have. make something worthwhile out of it, and no one who you’ve laughed, cried, kissed, or bled with will ever forget you.”

 

 

Popping Trucker Speed with Frederick Jackson Turner

It looked bad in Minneapolis. The rain came like thick sheets of cellophane, and something ugly dipped out the clouds for just a moment before returning skyward. It would’ve been fine except Karen’s cat, Parachute, was doped up on anti-anxiety meds and decided to sleep under the brake pedal. No one likes crashing cars or breaking cat spines, so I did what I could. But when I tried to swat him out of there he just lazily pawed at my shoe the way stubborn, doped up cats do. America! Even our fucking pets flaunt their neuroses.

Following I-94, we were spared the urge to gawk at Rushmore and make snarky comments like: “Ah yes, the ballast afterthoughts of a dead-eyed nation” or some such bullshit that surely would’ve gotten us pelted to death with souvenirs. Beyond the craggy chasms and sprawling flatlands where T.R. played dress-up, we spotted fenced-in bison, a lot of them, staring dumbly into space. They looked resigned. Forlorn. Like maybe extinction wouldn’t have been the worst fate after all. So when we stopped for lunch, I ordered a bison burger, because, I mean, what the hell?

We ate crushed up diet pills and drank econo coffee until Missoula. It was the Fourth of July, and we celebrated with malt liquor and ooooh’ed and ahhhh’ed our way through city streets while shitty kids with rat tails threw firecrackers at our feet. When we passed out in a stranger’s front lawn, he didn’t even bother to wake us up. Maybe his hospitality got the better of him. Or maybe, like us, he was just too drunk to care.

“The West,” writ large, is a sentimental sinkhole, but it all seemed so apropos that final day, as I, sunburned with blood-speckled gums, had sex in a tepee on Vashon Island. When all was said and done, I would’ve surrendered myself to the Sound and floated along until the ocean swallowed me whole, until I breathed my last breath or washed up on some foreign shore, bedraggled and bronzed, limp with languor, ready for a new life, a new language and lover, but the water was too goddamn cold so instead I drank wine in a lavender field and burned some more.

Auerbach Falls Down a Flight of Stairs and a Tiny Irish Man Tells Him to Take it Easy and Breathe

My dad bought it at Sportsmart. He enlisted scab labor to hold it true. Mr. Halfner, scalp gleaning, smoothed the concrete. “Like a pancake,” he said.

Dad threw his back out during a pick-up game years ago. So we stretch.

Aaaaaaaand stretch.

1-2-3-4. Muscles that sound foreign. Somehow not our own.

He shoots like a catapult poorly built. Jerky motions, release too high too slow. A low-flying blimp could block it. John Stockton on ketamine, maybe.

Jumpshots, like Egyptian slave labor, are about triangles.

Tuck that elbow. Tuck it.

Dip your hand in the cookie jar.

Fitting, I guess. To save money he used a metal baking sheet and magnetic chess pieces. Every play left the chubby kids open.

And we passed. I swear we passed.

He never wore Zubaz. And he never yelled. He wanted me to pass more.

Last night the hoop danced with gale force winds, and the snow circled in and out.

In and out.

Fighting Time

When I was in third grade, the namesake of my elementary school was changed from J. Edgar Hoover to Herbert Hoover. Apparently issuing assassination orders doesn’t bode well for one’s legacy. The real joke, though, is that the name will have to be changed once more if Herbert’s blind faith in laissez-faire capitalism — which precipitated the Great Depression and its attendant misery — is ever as reviled as J. Edgar’s autocratic proclivities.

At the time, however, my older brother Kevin had his own explanation for the name change.

“You know those vacuum cleaners, the Hoover ones from the commercials?” he asked. “It’s that guy. Herbert is the guy who owns all that.”

Aside from convincing me that our school was named after a vacuum cleaner magnate, Kevin also filled me with phony stories about the elderly school janitor, Mr. Ed. Mr. Ed was ancient and musty, a brittle giant seemingly forged from dust.  He hauled his monumental body around as if it were a curse, his jerky motions belying a lifetime of baggage. Atop an otherwise bald head, his wispy gray forelock defied gravity, moving like a periscope, probing and prying and dancing its obscene dance while he laid down sawdust on a fresh pile of vomit or paced the hallways to the jingle-jangle tune of his tool belt. There was a malevolence about him, an imposing gravity to his very presence. Something had soured inside of Mr. Ed. The accumulated experience of a lifetime curdled and turned poisonous where in others it flowered into sanguinity. For many of us it was unusual to see a scowl fixed on a wizened face with such finality. Our grandparents shared with us advice, stories, crooked smiles and the cure-all offering of Sunday afternoon cookies, while Mr. Ed shared with us only the implicit promise of disaffection. With the downcast eyes of stoics and sinners, we wilted beneath his gaze.

“He cuts off kids’ wieners, you know,” said Kevin. “He did it to a kid who stuck gum on the wall; threatened the rest of us, too.”

I thenceforth became acutely aware of every single garbage can’s location, from classrooms to hallways to the playground. I tossed my gum into trash cans compulsively, fearfully, and eventually stopped chewing gum altogether.

Behind my grade school, in the sprawling field where yellow, water-hungry grass gave way to a cluster of trees, a high school kid put a gun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, staining the white rock he perched upon.

I ran past that spot three times a week for three years of my life, on speed training days and race days, the rock never losing its novelty, its sense of ecumenical doom. Sandwiched between two evergreen trees about fifty yards from the finish line, my eyes instinctively sought it out as I barreled down the home stretch, fighting against the indefatigable, yellow-numbered time clock.

There’s something primal about running, especially running in a group: sinewy muscles expand and contract in lockstep strides; rubber soles assail the concrete and beat out a bleating, percussive rhythm; exertion and singularity of purpose strip away the minutiae, resurrecting those evolutionary imperatives laid waste by automation and complacency. The body works just as it was intended to. The mouth favors grunts instead of words. When you stop running, your head swims with endorphins and you’re bound to those on your flanks by sweat and collective exhaustion. Then you get your breath back and real life begins again.

It was strange that Kevin and I ended up on the cross-country team in the first place. As I began to learn around age fourteen, turning into what you hate is one of the universal themes of punk, and a similar force was at work when my brother and I became runners. Walking home from Hoover Elementary, our politeness unraveling and running out of slack somewhere along Cambourne Lane, we used to attack the high school cross-country team as they headed west towards the swamp. It wasn’t that we hated them or anything, but since they couldn’t fight back, they were easy targets. They bore the full brunt of our ennui-driven rage until we learned that kissing girls was more fun than harassing people. We’d spit on them and swing our backpacks, plumbing the dark depths of our pre-pubescent lexicon. “Faggots!” “Dickweeds!” “Nice tights, pantywaste!” And there we were, less than a decade later, clad in the same tights, our genitals squeezed in a lycra grip, running past grade school kids who antagonized us just as we had antagonized the unfortunates before us, tiny fists registering nostalgia and shame somewhere amid the irritation and pin prick pain.

Though some of the kids on our team were running merely because they were looking for something to do after school, most of us were more enamored of the process of yearning and consummation, the competitive crapshoot of failure and success. Our shins were riddled with puncture wounds doled out by the quarter-inch spikes of those we attempted to draft behind; we shat behind shrubbery when our stomachs gave way, returning from a six-mile loop without the socks we’d begun with; some of us were hit by cars and ran the remaining miles back to school in spite of welts and possible fractures. And all of it was for naught unless we won, or at least sated whatever our own particular goals may have been, because there was no status to be gained from running. Our sweat was the sum of our ambitions, and, once loosed from the white chalk starting line, we were alone; the universe was occupied only by our empty heads, hungry legs, and the eternal ticking of the clock that stood God-like next to the finish line. No one else cared. Girls didn’t flock to our ectomorphic frames – all hipbone and vein – wrapped in revealing short shorts that felt like a pointless formality. If we had wanted to get laid we would have learned to play instruments and started bands, which is what some of us did when high school ended and vices became more attractive than regimen.

Kevin was a senior when I was a freshman. His class was full of guys who had been friends since grade school; they had been running together for years, forming inexplicable bonds. Leading up to the state finals at Detweiller Park in Peoria, they went undefeated and, every single week, were ranked first by an IHSA committee. I tagged along with them, being preened and prepared, a de facto heir to whatever it was they were hoping to bequeath after their departure.

Detweiller Park was an explosion of last gasp beauty. Every autumn since then I’ve been overwhelmed by that earthen decay, arriving with the wind and bringing me back to those sweeping, colorful chasms that sprawled out before me, distant tents tribe-like in their allegiance to team color, the swell of the crowd reverberating through the trees while people I didn’t know ran in races I didn’t care about.

I don’t remember the details of my brother’s race, only that it began badly and ended even worse. Sprinting from one edge of the course to the other, yelling myself hoarse and watching it all fall apart, I wanted to jump the yellow ropes and pull my brother to the finish line on unspoiled legs. I wanted to give him that trophy that then seemed so important but now seems so pointless, because to coronate particular moments is to overshadow substance with ceremony.

The team finished a disappointing sixth, and no one on the team earned all-state honors.

On the ride home, raindrops flitting across the car window on their amoebic march into oblivion, I felt more aware of the temporal nature of life and the absoluteness of that moment than I ever had before, even more so than I had when standing before my grandfather’s casket a few years prior, thumbing a piece of cardstock with the lyrics to an old Irish ode printed on it. That may sound hyperbolic or calloused, but it’s true. The disappointment and pain of someone you care about is always much more unbearable than your own pain. It makes you feel helpless. And, at its very basest, time renders us helpless too. We are subject to its certainties, its ceaseless pull and tear at our bodies. Racing was a controlled fight against time, bestowing only momentary victories before real life began again and that supreme moment of crossing the finish line in triumph was distilled into a poorly manufactured trophy to be packed away in boxes and eventually discarded. What really mattered was the residue of those victories and losses, the friendships and stolid determination earned through toil and camaraderie.

Our high school’s newspaper, The Sextant, used to print a year end supplement in which seniors wrote their high school wills, metaphorically giving away possessions, memories, advice. I opened it during lunch and flipped to my brother’s name. “To my brother, Sean,” he wrote, “I will the knowledge that dreams must be chased down.”

A Hymn for the Bruised

I’m doing what he told me to. I’m walking behind the older boy, the blonde one who moved into our neighborhood a week earlier. I’m trying to move silently, stopping every few steps to stifle the sound of my empty thermos knocking around inside my lunchbox. I don’t think it matters if I’m silent or not, really. The older boy has such heavy footsteps that probably anyone, no matter how loud they were being, could sneak up behind him. Still, it feels right to creep along silently. Each step feels purposeful. I’m not sure if I’m supposed to punch him or just jump on his back. My brother didn’t really say. I think I’ll punch him, though. I just hope there’s no blood. I won’t be able to stand it if there’s blood again.

——

The first act of violence I ever committed took place inside a church. On Christmas Eve, after the second service, my older brother and I played tag, chasing each other through the church’s empty aisles while waiting for my mother, a deacon, to clean up. We weaved in and out of coatrooms and careened down long concrete hallways. The lights in the parking lot flitted through stained glass windows, gilding the dull wooden pews in reds and yellows and greens. Above the altar, where the priest doled out grape juice instead of wine, hung a sanitized Protestant crucifix. No blood, no look of anguish. Death by torture never looked so banal.

My brother began to harangue me in the middle of our game and I started to cry, which only goaded him on more. Then, for the first time in my life, or at least the first time I can remember, I stood up to him. I can’t explain why I chose that instance, or what exactly pushed me over the edge, but at that moment, in that cavernous church where every Sunday I sat bored and bristling while platitudes echoed all around me, I silenced my brother’s taunts by splitting his head open. I pushed him, his head hit a pew, and blood started streaming. I felt righteous. He had only himself to blame. His words had caused the mess, not me. As he staggered up the red-carpeted aisle, shrieking and sweeping the blood from his forehead with trembling hands, my insides clenched, and my righteousness was quickly replaced by dread. I felt small, powerless. The blood spanned two aisles.

My mother was counting the day’s collection plates in one of the church’s tiny backrooms. When she heard my brother’s wailing, she sprang through a door next to the altar, a coin-filled envelope still in her hand, and rushed towards him. Scooping him into her arms, her eyes met mine. To this day the speed and fluidity with which a mother’s face can switch from pity to judgment amazes me. We spent Christmas Eve in the emergency room, my brother receiving stitches and motherly coos while I garnered only iciness.

——

Afternoon walks home from school with my brother and his two friends, Nick and Jeremy, tended to become highly choreographed explosions of juvenile rage. Under the clement gaze of houses left empty by working parents, we flicked off the crossing guard and hurled new and exotic swear words at each other and anyone unfortunate enough to draw our ire.

It was a way for us to create personas loosed from pleases and thank you’s and hand-me-down Sunday morning attire. Any other time or place besides those few blocks from school to home, we were well mannered. It surprised me, then, when my brother one day singled out a classmate of his and decided, along with his friends, to fight him.

There was nothing particularly disdainful about the new kid, nothing to make him an object of our scorn. He had never slighted us. Nothing offensive had ever come out of him mouth. In fact, I don’t think anything had come out of his mouth. Not during that first week, at least. He was new. New and solitary. Easy prey, my brother and his friends figured. I’m not sure if there was much calculation or forethought that went into it. The only explanation I can come up with is that they figured they had something to gain, a way to climb a few rungs on the social ladder. It surely wasn’t about revenge or passion.

The plan was for me to start the fight, and then my brother, Nick, and Jeremy would run up and start throwing punches.

“You okay with this?” my brother asked.

I said I was. It felt like a bonding rite. I would’ve agreed to anything.

While my brother spoke about the impending fight, his lips settled into a snarl. He looked bemused, dangerous. It was thrilling and terrifying. It made me feel the same as when I rode the Ferris wheel with my friend Chris and he rocked our car back and forth. Swinging wildly in the night sky, I stopped caring. Chris laughed maniacally, streaks of neon light glinting off his braces, and I started rocking the car with him. I was scared of heights but at that moment I ceased to care about gravity, concrete, the frailty of the human body. It was strange to experience such feelings of transcendence and freedom while yoked to hulking steel arms whose sole function was predictability. The speed, direction, and duration of the ride were all predetermined. Disaster was the only variable. Perhaps that was the thrill of rocking the car: not the adrenaline rush but that tenuous line between predictability and chaos and our ability to exert control over it. Below us, the people milling around game booths and food stands looked small and insignificant. The new kid now looked small and insignificant, too.

In actuality, the kid was anything but small. He was over a head taller than every one of us. He had a large build, the kind of physique that in a few years would shed its doughy innocence and propel him onto football fields and wrestling mats. But at that moment, on that street, in the shadows of empty homes, the kid looked more awkward than strong.

Trailing behind him, readying myself to begin the fight, I started to lose my nerve. Every gardened pathway between houses became a potential escape route. I considered quickening my pace and plunging headlong into flowerbeds and bird fountains, my thermos knocking away uncontrollably inside my lunchbox, each defiant stride bringing me closer to home and my much anticipated half hour of pre-homework TV. I didn’t want to fight. My parents had always told me never to hit anyone unless they hit me first. But I wasn’t thinking solely in moralistic terms; I was also worried about what would happen if I got caught fighting. My parents’ iciness toward me after my brother’s hospital visit still weighed heavily on my mind.

Looking back over my shoulder, my brother and his friends shooed me onward with their hands and mouthed, “Go, go, go!” The kid was almost at the corner of the street. His shoes, Reebok Pump knock-offs, squeaked horribly. He continued ahead, alone and heavy-footed.

If I didn’t jump him by the time he reached the corner, I decided, I wasn’t going to go through with it.

Three houses before the corner it happened. I don’t remember jumping on him, only dangling from his back, one arm hooked around his neck, the other swinging wildly at his head. He bucked me off, reeling around and landing a punch to the side of my head. I collapsed in someone’s lawn and he got a look at me for the first time, realizing that I was younger and much smaller than him. I was crying. He looked apologetic, like he might start crying too. That’s when my brother, Nick, and Jeremy pounced on him.

We walked down Green River and took a left on Cutters Mill, heading toward our homes. A bright white flash of pain ran loops inside my head. My brother’s friends were hurt, too. Jeremy had a giant welt beside his eye, growing redder and puffier by the minute, and Nick held his hip, the spot where he landed when the kid picked him up and tossed him. My brother was the only one left unscathed. The big, blonde kid had fended us off, but to my surprise, my brother and his friends started celebrating, congratulating themselves and each other. I joined in. My brother patted me on the shoulder, asked if I was okay, and told me I’d done good.

—-

Over a decade later, around the time I started frequenting bars, I found myself in Chicago with friends, at a bar I’d never been to before. The place was crowded and I headed outside for some air. Shortly thereafter, the bouncer hurled a drunk out by the collar. The man stumbled off into the night slurring threats, only to stop midway down the block, turn, and run back towards the door with his fists primed. A melee broke out. Patrons and bar employees streamed outside, spilling into the street. Taxis swerved around them. People kicked out windows. Pedestrians gawked. Backing away and sidestepping tangled bodies, I kept my distance. A friend of mine appeared in the doorway, reached into his pocket, and pulled out brass knuckles. He disappeared into the crowd, and when I next saw him, he was running back into the bar, blood on his hand and a satisfied smirk on his face, celebrating bruises he’d never have to account for.

Route 74

The Fireside Bowl on Fullerton Avenue used to host all ages punk shows. I saw some memorable ones there, including a booze-soaked Dillinger Four show on St. Patrick’s Day. During their set, a friend of mine working the door had to eighty-six a drunk who snuck in with a two liter soda bottle full of whiskey. He was passed out on the sidewalk by night’s end. There were some shitty moments, too, like at the Slaughter & the Dogs show, when a skinhead threw me into a bench and I reeled around to find him and his buddies leering at me.

I moved into the neighborhood right around the time the shows stopped. DIY spaces are ephemeral to begin with and the Fireside had long been rumored to be destined for the wrecking ball, so the fact that it was still standing seemed a victory of sorts. Dropping in with some friends after the transition, I drank a couple beers and played the jukebox. The same old employees remained. “I’d rather be at the riverboat,” said the bartender. Bewilderingly, the bathrooms were clean and none of the patrons had bullet belts or stupid haircuts, at least not intentionally stupid haircuts. My friends and I had expected to feel some sort of nostalgia but instead we felt bored. We could’ve been drinking beer in any bowling alley.

When I was younger and making my way into the city from the suburbs, I rarely ventured away from the venue. But now Fullerton was the lifeline that tethered me to Chicago and the Fireside was just another passing building that blended in with the scenery. I took the bus to work five days a week, sometimes six. The el rattled above Milwaukee Avenue, sending pigeons swooping onto cornices and fire escapes while dark men with pushcarts made their way down the avenue. When winter rolled around, old ladies up front complained about inaccurate weather forecasts. One of them called WGN’s Tom Skilling a motherfucker. Yet they were the ones who asked if I was okay when the bus braked sharply and my clumsy ass hit the floor, their sagacious eyes falling upon me like salves.

Billboards transitioned from Spanish to English near the Kennedy Expressway. Beneath the overpass, on a concrete wall stained by road salt and dripping water, stood a vague, dark image, its contours crystallizing in the eyes of the faithful, who claimed it was the Virgin Mary. Flags from Central and South American countries soon flanked her. Votive candles illuminated the praying crowd, many of them kneading rosary beads, their eyes closed or fixated on the stain. Only camera shutters and cars could be heard.

My roommates, my girlfriend, and I decided to walk over one night. I felt like an intruder, a tourist whose heart alighted at the sight of devotional tears. Since I saw only salt stains, I hung on the outskirts leaning against a pillar, hands crammed into my pockets. After taking a few pictures, my Catholic roommate walked up to the wall, crossed himself, and touched his finger to the Virgin and then to his earlobe, where a giant, discolored growth portended cancer. In that instant all judgment fell from my eyes.

A couple weeks later someone spray painted “Lies” across the Virgin’s face, and the flags disappeared the same day my friend Nicole did.

I spotted her at the intersection of Fullerton and Halsted on my way home from work. She was carrying a duffel bag. I called out to her and she crossed the street, her smile revealing crooked, chipped teeth. It was sunny and warm and the contents of her bag clinked. She said she was looking for someplace to emblazon her goodbye to Chicago. I wished her luck and hopped on the bus, but not before she gave me one last chance to tag along.

A couple days later a postcard arrived from Morgan County, seventy miles northeast of Denver, where Nicole’s van had broken down. A rodeo scene adorned the front of the postcard, the rider holding on for dear life atop a bucking bronco. She said she’d been spending her nights painting freight trains. I imagined the hisses and rattles. She sent another postcard soon after, this time from Fraser, Colorado, writing: “It’s cold and the moon makes the mountains blue at night.”

Outside my window, overlooking Sacramento and Fullerton, I envisioned her goodbye on the wall of some building. Crude peaks crisscrossed one another, and below them were the words Mountain Fever, written with finality.

Sky High in the White City

Before trash bags full of her possessions mingled with pigeons on my back porch, before a cop cruiser stopped us while walking the drug corridor on Milwaukee Avenue, before she moved back to Washington, I waited for Kaylene at the intersection of Fullerton and Clark for what felt like a first date. She was late and I was reading a book about the Russian Revolution. Commuters fumbled with change while my brain fumbled with pronunciations.

Emerging from an alley off of Clark where she shared a studio apartment with a friend, Kaylene walked over to the bus stop. She wore a homemade Descendents t-shirt, her head was shaved, and bug-eyed sunglasses shrouded half her face. She was high, though I didn’t know that at the time.

“Where to?” she asked.

I stood and shrugged, and we instinctively began walking toward the lake and then south toward Navy Pier. The lakefront teemed with bicyclists, rollerbladers, and joggers. Boats skidded across the water in the distance, sails swelling with the wind. Kaylene told stories about growing up in Wenatchee, Washington, the “Apple Capital of the World,” and her time in Hawaii the year prior, where she lived on the beach with the other homeless kids.

At Navy Pier we passed a troupe of clowns and a bunch of crying children. Retreating to a railing, we watched seaborne birds dive headlong into murky waves and emerge clutching fish in their beaks. Back in fourth grade, my class chartered a boat and took a field trip on the lake. I vividly remember dead fish floating everywhere, accompanied by a terrible smell. Lake Michigan’s charms are few but I liked the view from that railing.

Looking into the distance, Kaylene asked, “Want to ride the Ferris wheel?” She was partly serious, partly teasing.

She’d already learned plenty about me while the two of us drank in the downstairs bar after work. She learned about my siblings and my favorite albums, my hopes and past failures. She learned that I didn’t drink whiskey or dance, putting me at odds with two of her favorite pastimes.

She learned about my fears, too. Elevators. Dying. Heights. Sickness. Not necessarily in that order.

In the years since then, Kaylene has been skydiving. I’ve seen the photos. She has a parachute strapped to her back and a smile on her face. The plane is in the background. She doesn’t look nervous whatsoever. If it had been me standing at that airfield, the picture would have looked much different. Imagine a flyspeck set against green fields. That tiny dot, so blurry and unrecognizable, would be me running away from the plane as quickly as possible, shedding my parachute and flight suit mid-sprint.

We walked down the promenade past vendors selling cotton candy and popcorn, the Ferris wheel framed by my mind’s terror. Beside the Ferris wheel stood a ride equally menacing, its cables whirring through the night, riders dipping and soaring, faces mere feet from meeting pavement. “Maybe we should just go on that instead,” said Kaylene. I shook my head no.

Confronting and overcoming a fear is usually made possible only through grit and perseverance, focusing single-mindedly on pushing yourself to your limits, either through a gradual process or by taking the leap outright: allowing the tarantula to crawl up your arm, flinging yourself into the ocean, greeting the plane’s takeoff with a stoic sigh. It helps when the possibility of a kiss is dangled out there, as was the case for me. It was Kaylene’s lips, not bravery, that lured me into that line. I stood waiting, my mind rioting, stomach ablaze.

The first Ferris wheel was built in Chicago during the 1893 World’s Fair. Some believed the cars would come crashing down in wails of grinding steel, their occupants crushed to death, sullying the White City with blood. But as luck would have it, Ferris’s design was sound and the steel behemoth and its riders were spared from catastrophe. Instead it was a serial killer by the name of H.H. Holmes who left a crimson mark. He murdered fairgoers unlucky enough to lodge in his hotel, a sepulchral structure of trap doors and soundproof rooms, its basement equipped with fire pits and vats of lye. Though the madness of bloodlust and the madness of human ingenuity are not mutually exclusive, knives and gas-filled rooms scream death while a creaking Ferris wheel merely whispers it, issuing forth a languid exhalation for the paranoid and high strung to hang their fears on.

But that offered little consolation as the wheel spun us up into the night sky and some dead crooner sang about Chicago over the loudspeakers. Behold the lake, the lights, the lives of millions stretching toward the horizon. Behold me, one of the millions, quaking, nauseous, and ruefully drifting skyward.

Kaylene just sat there smiling, and I trained my eyes on her when they weren’t shut tight.