Maybe It Doesn't Care - A Work In Progress Part 2

Some Memories, Ruminating...

I just miss you.  I just want to talk to you.  Not even for an explanation.  I don’t think you would even have one, if you were here.  God dammed that is frustrating.  I know so much about why you did the things that you did, throughout your life.  But at the end there was a mystery that didn’t have a plot. 

You would have loved it last night.  We huddled around a campfire under the desert sky.  From the hillside, I could see only the electric lights of two other houses, burning low and pale.  There was guitar and banjo, beers and laughter.  It was a night full of song and story.  Just like you always pictured we would have.  I know that was always the way you pictured everyone.  Better than we ever really were.  You bragged about your friends the way that others talked about movie stars or musicians.  The hard part about this was none of us ever lived up to that.  How could someone?  I would always get frustrated with you about that.  You would knock yourself down to make everyone else seem taller.  You would build makeshift pedestals out of undeserved praise.  When all anyone wanted was to have you around.  To have you stay.  But after your words of kindness, you were always halfway out the door. Did you know that we all loved you anyhow? 

A man walked into the hospital one night while you were working.  He said that he had been in a car wreck, and had walked into the hospital from wherever the accident was.  You told me that he was a young guy, roughly your age.  He was in fairly good spirits, and asked if he had a concussion.  You tested him and released him quickly, telling him he was fine.  He was supposed to talk to an officer before he left to report the accident.  But fifteen minutes later, you heard that he had walked out of the hospital, jumped the barricade and ran into oncoming traffic.  You were so haunted by that thought.  We sat outside talking about it for hours.  You couldn’t understand how someone could do that.  Why would they do that? 

I have always been the kind of person that made assumptions about the world around me.   I think that at some young age I was instilled with the idea that there is a certain way that things are supposed to be.  This is naïve, and it has gotten me into trouble more times than I can count.  And it is totally unfair of me to assume things are supposed to be a certain way.  I go through these self-righteous moments in my life where I act as if the answers are all so easy.  But really, those times are only framed around the idea that I am at a stable or successful point in my life.  God, at those times it is so comfortable to point the finger at others, and say what fuck-ups they are, what they need to change or do differently with themselves to be happier, as if I somehow know what would be right for them.  And truthfully, it is only because I need to stand on those shoulders to feel better about myself.  The worst part is, I can feel it when it is happening.  I don’t even need a seconds worth of reflection to realize what a complete prick I am being.  As words fall from my mouth, I can feel my brain telling me to STOP.  But I know it isn’t going to happen.  At best, I will later vindicate myself by saying that it is only that I care so much.  That is why I am concerned with others.  It’s not being nosy.  I care.  Sure. 

I will dig into my head or heart or wherever it is that this is all hiding to try and find the places where you are still hiding.  Those parts where I still need that big brother.  Where I need someone to tell me that everything is going to be all right.  For so long that is what you were to me.  It was so important.  Our friendship was so important to me, because when I was hiding behind you, peaking over your shoulder to whatever it was that was terrifying me so much, it was easy to act strong.  To act like an adult.  Is that it?  Is there anger still there because you made me go through that alone?  Is it embarrassment having been associated with you, as awful as that sounds?  That telling all the people that I know now (who I want to think that I am a sophisticated adult) about my friend who overdosed on prescription drugs somehow implicates me even though I have never had any kind of drug addiction in my life?  Is that how fucking shallow I am?  Maybe I am.

You can’t save anyone.  When did I learn that?  I know that for a long time, I didn’t believe that.  I thought that there was fair, and there was right, and I knew the difference.  As if there is some scoreboard that is kept.  That determines when someone should be changing direction, or do the right thing.  I don’t understand why that never bothered anyone else the way that it did me.

1/30/06

Mike and I had started working for a property management company, driving back and forth across the Wasatch valley, walking into one dilapidated hole after another, trying to find some kind of potential in them.  Most of these were apartment complexes that had been converted from old polygamist houses, and each unit was a testament to creative space management.  Ducking under boxed in heating vents to get to the bedroom, or showers being built into closets, with the water drains tying into the dishwasher, so when you took a shower, your coffee cups ended up smelling like old spice body wash. We would find out how much the investors would be willing to spend, and that would create the final decision of how much work would be put into each place. We would tear out walls, electrical, plumbing.  Huge snakes of wire and copper piping would litter the front lawns of the tenements while we worked.  Most of the clients were just glorified slumlords, and the work ended up being shoddy just by default.  It was honest work, though, and the two of us would drive the thirty miles, through howling snowstorms to Ogden, in Mike’s little red pickup truck, with my Husky dog Buckley sitting in between us, all three of us squinting through the windshield to find the lines of the road.  Mike knew more about construction than I did, and I had to lie and fake my way through a lot of it that first year.  But Mike always covered for me. We actually had a lot of fun, considering how awful the job was most of the time.

There was the 300 pound dreadlocked sex offender who requested that we put in a double sink in his kitchen because he was a professional chef, even though he had a tarp for lawn trimmings and a piece of rock climbers rope nailed into the wall of his bathroom to serve as a shower curtain.  A week later when Mike went back to replace the bathroom sink cabinet, the sex offender stood just inside the tiny bathroom, blocking the door and casually mentioning to Mike that he “swings both ways if the price is right” and said that he occasionally likes a little white meat.  The sex offender was evicted a couple weeks later, after complaining to our company that the two crackers (me and Mike) that had been in his place last month had been coming in his apartment in the middle of the night, stealing his shoes and leaving through a trap door in the floor of his living room.  He told the receptionist that he had gotten on his hands and knees to try and find the break in the carpet where the trap door opens but that we were clever and had hidden it well.  Two days later he was caught trying to accost the pregnant girl who lived next door, saying that she had smoked all of his crack.

The property management company had hired a couple of guys to help out with the less refined work, mainly moving furniture and appliances when tenants were evicted and abandoned their property.  One of the workers, a middle aged man named Tyler, ended up helping us out here and there, and had become known to us as ‘Poopfinger’, after an unfortunate experience from the beginning of his employment.  He had been assigned the job of clearing out the yard of a house that had been recently vacated.  The renters in the house had stopped paying their rent, and were essentially just squatting on the property, intermittently setting up court hearings about their pending eviction, and then rescheduling them, which apparently means that as long as this process is being juggled, the owner cannot serve the eviction.  Pretty smart for a couple of snaggle toothed meth heads.  They knew it was just a matter of time until this process wore itself out.  So they neglected to ever clean up after the two German Shepherds they kept in the backyard.  When the house was finally vacant, Poopfinger dragged a garbage can out back, and with a shovel and rake, proceeded to fill the entire can with dog shit.  Once he was finished, and he had dragged the metal can around to the dumpster, he realized that it was almost impossible to lift up. Dog shit, being impressively dense, can weigh much more that people anticipate.  Undeterred, he slung the can back, pitching it wide, to try and gain enough momentum to reach the lip of the dumpster, and in the process, he managed to horribly twist his back, rip off the fingernail of his ring finger, and dump about half of the can on himself.  By the time he made it back to the office of the property management company, he had created a makeshift bandage of paper towels and duct tape.  But he was still covered in dog shit.  Mike and I asked him if he was planning on washing the wound on his hand.  “No way!”  He said.  “You know how bad that would hurt?” 

One of our investors called us that spring to say that he had evicted a young man who had recently returned from Iraq.  His apartment was in a string of non-descript, sad little beige boxes right outside of the razor-wire fences of the Air Force base.  The owner had the Sheriff serve the notice and escort the young soldier away.  After they had changed the locks, we were to go in, and haul anything that could be sold to the pawnshop, anything that could be used to the goodwill, and everything else to the dump.  We went in and it looked like the guy could have come home at any minute.  There was food in the fridge, furniture in the living room, a bed, clothes in the closet.  It looked like he left without taking anything.  His bedroom was a whirlwind mess, a soiled mattress floating on a sea of empty beer cans, porno magazines, dirty clothes and empty pill bottles.  I picked up one of the pill bottles and realized that it was a prescription for an anti-psychotic medication.  There were also letters from his doctor, and it appeared that our friend had not had his prescription refilled, as per his doctor’s orders.  This revelation occurred in tandem with Mike’s discovery that the dresser drawers were full of 9 Millimeter handgun shells.  But after watching the roaches scatter with every drawer we opened and couch we pushed aside, still we found no gun.  Maybe he didn’t leave here empty handed after all.  Then, with a precision timing of a sidesplitting comedy, or maybe a horror film, the phone rang out and startled us both to the point of a mild heart attack.  It was the owner saying that the renter had called him and sounded threatening, maybe even drunk, and that we shouldn’t be surprised if he showed up.  In the event of that, we should just ask him to leave.  Nope, we are surely in a horror film.  “Fuck that” Mike said.  “I’m not getting paid fifteen bucks an hour to get into hand to hand combat with some asshole.  Lets just get everything we can in the trailer and to the dump.” At that point, getting a few bucks for a couple of items at the pawnshop was the last thing on our minds.  Self preservation kicked in and not getting shot became the name of the game.  I don’t know if there are words to describe the visceral enjoyment of dropping a couch off of a balcony onto the street below.  The thrill of throwing a thirty-six inch television out of a window.  It’s all those ‘Lord of the Flies’ moments from childhood.  You forget actual English, and the monosyllabic sounds of ‘YES!’ and ‘WOOOH!’ are all that is needed to communicate satisfaction.  Not one single stick of furniture survived, and although the job was being completed quickly, our joy dissipated when I discovered a crossbow above the refrigerator, which reminded us that if our soldier buddy returned home now, things were actually worse for us than they had been when we started, because now we were not just the jerks who worked for the guy who kicked him out, but the douchbags who laughed while they broke all his shit.  We cleared out the entire apartment in about two hours.  We never saw the tenant, and although I feel bad that all of his stuff ended up at the dump, I was glad just to not get shot.  I got fifteen bucks for the crossbow.

10/11/01

After a handful of false starts and a failed relationship, I was finally in my own place in Salt Lake City, after moving from Ogden.  I moved onto the end of a dead end street in the industrial section of the city.  The street was called Kilby Court, and the warehouse at the end was mine.  I had a loft for my bed, a clean-out drain for my sink, a refrigerator for beer and frozen burritos, and the bar I worked at was walking distance away.  It was perfect.

I painted the walls and the floor, blood red with yellow and black lines moving in all directions.  I hung up art and wrote my favorite poem by Neruda across the walls in six inch high letters, over the breakfast nook, above the loft, and when I circled the room once, I went back over it again.

I wanted to start a band that was just about good songwriting.  Like something from the 60’s or 70’s.  Mike was the first drummer I thought of.  I wanted a big no-frills backbeat, Max Weinberg style drummer.  Someone who just wanted to play for the good of the song.  I never even thought about someone else.  We both idolized Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen, and Mark Lanegan.  I remember that after we had gotten Johnny and Bugsy on board, we started writing, and drinking.  Those were the two things that band did well.  We would show up to my little hole in the wall apartment at the end of Kilby Court.  We practiced in my kitchen.  At times I think about that, and I originally had to show my wife pictures for her to believe it.  We practiced in my kitchen, for Christ’s sake!  Imagine that.  Now THAT is being single and in your early twenties.  The guys would show up with cases of Keystone beer that I am sure are meant for groups of fifteen people or more, but between the four of us, we would write and play and drink and try to remember everything but invariably forget most of it by the end of the night.  There would be piles of aluminum, mountains of beer cans on every available surface.  The microwave, stovetop, coffee table, amplifiers.  In fact, I remember that Mike had a talent for balancing his beer can on his floor tom drum while he played.  If he was in a drum fill and needed to hit the floor tom, he would use that as an opportunity to drink out of the can.  It was a moment of unbridled dexterity that has never been matched in my book.  There were instruments everywhere, and random friends would show up to drink our beers and join in, sometimes people coming into my apartment, joining in for a song on accordion or tambourine, drinking a beer, and often times leaving before the song had finished, not a single word passing between any of us.  For a year or two there, it was like we had our own miniature version of the sixties. Often times, I would try out new songs that I was writing, and we would huddle together in the opposite corner of my loft, where the couches and my many bookcases sat, also covered with beer cans and full ashtrays.  In those moments, the band sitting and listening, concentrating upon the chord changes and the lyrics, I felt more appreciated than I ever have playing in front of a crowd.  In a lot of ways, I wish that we had never recorded, never played a show, never left that room.  In there, we were better than we ever would be again.  We listened and created in a way that never needed an audience.  I don’t think that we knew then how special it was, what we had.  I remember playing something new, “The Art Of Catching Trains” an acoustic song I had recently written, about a girl I had met in West Virginia years ago.  It was sappy, and lonely.  It ended with the protagonist driving off on a dirt road to nowhere.  I remember Mike listened to the whole thing with his eyes shut tight, and when it was over, he broke into a big grin, looked over at Bugsy and said “I don’t know about you, but I’m buying my mom a Cadillac when our record goes platinum.”

6/15/95

My senior year of high school, I met a group of like minded kids who played music, understood the value of music that was strictly released on vinyl and only available through mail order, and had great senses of humor.  While I still lived at home with my mom and brothers, most of these guys had already graduated high school, or dropped out, and moved out onto their own.  Several of them had rented out an old, run down house in downtown Ogden.  In the 80’s and 90’s, downtown Ogden had become rougher than expected, with even the nicer areas of the grid laid neighborhoods attracting some unsavory sorts.  Years later, after the Thiokol factory and the steel mill shut down and meth addiction ran rampant, I was scared to even walk down the street of a corner I lived on in my twenties.  While this may have been a somewhat adventurous place for a group of young men starting out on their own, my new friends tried to fit in by buying a ragged, flea infested couch from the Salvation Army and staging it on their porch.  They were accepted into the neighborhood immediately. 

The house on 28^th street was a haven for all kinds of kids; all of us coming to act the way that we thought adults did when they were on their own.  Namely, shoot pool on the billiards table that occupied the entire front room, start a band that practiced and played shows in the basement, and throw one party after another after another, while trying to meet girls.  Most of these endeavors were in vain, and having a house to be able to take a girl to try and have sex didn’t change the fact that most of us who were single were also hopelessly nerdy.  When I see pictures of that time now, I marvel at the fact that I couldn’t see that a Native American choker necklace with size 40 jeans wasn’t a winning combination.  I’m sure that my mother tried to tell me it was a bad idea, but who in the hell listens to their mom when they are 18?

One of the strangest additions to our activities was the Krishna temple.  An hour’s drive south of Ogden was Spanish Fork, and in the early 80’s, a retired Olympic gold winning marathon runner and Hare Krishna convert had settled in Spanish Fork, Utah, and begun recruiting converts.  In the late 1990’s, they finally had enough money to build an actual temple, with Indian style turrets and Moorish awnings.  It’s enough to make you drive your car off the freeway if you don’t know it’s there.  It looks like aliens had abducted an entire building from New Delhi and dropped it onto one of the most white bread, bland towns in North America. 

Back before they had the real flashy temple, and the llamas that roamed the hillside had free reign over most of the temple grounds, we would travel down there every couple of months or so, always wanting to get the small beaded necklaces that the devotees would sell at the gift shop, along with bumper stickers emblazoned with quotes from the Dali Llama, and t-shirts with the phrase “love animals, don’t eat them” plastered across the front.  

Maybe It Doesn't Care - A Work In Progress Part 1

Mike,

I wish I knew why this happened.  I’m making a mess out of this.  I can’t find the words to explain how I feel.  Only you would find this funny.  That I can’t find the words.  I’m thinking of crowded summer parties, with me racing to try and finish all of the little odds and ends, and you stopping me by the fire light, introducing me to friends of yours and wanting me to tell some story about the two of us, or even a story that was just about you, that I hadn’t been there for.  You would say to just tell it; because you loved the way I told it.  You were bragging again.  Always about your friends, never yourself.  Yet here I am, without the words to tell the story.  Now that it really counts.  When there is so much riding on the story.  And I’m sorry, buddy.  Because I don’t know if I actually can.  It’s too big.  It’s too steep.  I don’t know if I have the words for this one.  I can’t hide behind the easy clichés.  There is no tidy way to wrap this up.  Or even start it. 

Who would have thought, all those years ago at that house on Jackson street, when we first met, where you told me about the white waters of Alaska and gave me your tattered copy of Walden, that fifteen years later this would be the state of things.  You in the ground, and I’m here, staring at the painted, striated landscapes that you would find beauty in, in some way that I am trying to, but I don’t know if I can.  I know it’s important.  I know that I need to.  It will matter later. 

So I came to the desert to talk to you.  Or maybe write to you.  A you that doesn’t have a name anymore.  Or at least a name you would use.  It still seems inappropriate that we would say your name and it seems like a hymn, or an incantation.  As if another story will never be told about you without heads being bowed in revelry, in respect.  I can’t just tell some silly story about you trying to get laid, or falling into the fire pit without it ending with some parable about cherishing life, or the futility of it all.  It sounds childish, but that is not fair.  It is not fair that you got to take that with you.  I loved you, and I feel I have ownership to those stories, too.  To the silly, scruffy, blurry eyed you that I knew since we were just kids.

But since your death, there are others of you now.  Some shattering that took place.  There is now a you that has gone beyond, to see something that I don’t even know if I believe in.  There is a you who is now a monster, something without a name, or a face, like some wolf at the door of mortality.  There is a you that is a tragedy, a last minute mistake of addiction, or a halfhearted gesture of self-destruction.  Which only serves as the world’s saddest equation.  One side of the scales is accident, and the other is suicide.  So many friends have ticked away the long hours of the night counting and twisting and adding up the evidence to one end or the other, as if one answer would drag you up and out of the box we watched them put you in to say “Sorry, sorry everyone.  This was just a simple mistake.  Didn’t want to worry anyone.  Everything is fine.  You can all go home now.”

You would have loved it last night.  We huddled around a campfire under the desert sky.  From the hillside, I could see only the electric lights of two other houses, burning low and pale.  There was guitar and banjo, beers and laughter.  It was a night full of song and story.  Just like you always pictured we would have.  I know that was always the way you pictured everyone.  Better than we ever really were.  You bragged about your friends the way that others talked about movie stars or musicians.  The hard part about this was none of us ever lived up to that.  How could someone?  I would always get frustrated with you about that.  You would knock yourself down to make everyone else seem taller.  You would build makeshift pedestals out of undeserved praise.  When all anyone wanted was to have you around.  To have you stay.  But after your words of kindness, you were always halfway out the door. Did you know that we all loved you anyhow?

I’m dancing around it now, and I know it.

We were going to celebrate your birthday after we had band practice.  That was September 11^th.  The joke had always been that it was perfect, because you were an EMT, and your birthday was 9-11.  Then the towers were hit in New York.  We practiced anyhow.  At the end of that dead end street, we opened the doors to the garage and played.  We wrote a sad song for a strange day, a song about growing up.  It was overcast, and raining.  Remember?

We weren’t going to really do all of the things we sang about in those basement band practices when we were kids, filling my poor mothers house with loud bad music.  Punk songs about rebellion, driving off into the sunset and a love more pure and real than the world had ever seen.  But you, you never stopped believing them.  You wanted nothing less than honesty, a love of fire, bursting at the seams, a life of magic, unfettered and true. 

You dreamt of red sand and plateaus, the Mars like alien landscape of southern Utah.  You traveled there, not telling anyone of your plans.  Gone one day, your room empty, a bed with no sheet.  Just a dusty land-cruiser and your dog for a co-pilot.  Following a faint red line on a faded yellow map.  A vein through the wind carved stone and sagebrush.  You slept under Joshua trees, with a blanket of stars spread out overhead.  You were happy.  I thought you would never leave.  I wish you hadn’t.

I think I felt closer to you back then than I ever did at the house on Gunnell.  I think maybe you were further away from me then, moving faster down another path, and that may have something to do with it, but also the fact that we were older.  Maybe it is just harder to get close to someone like the way that we could when we were kids.  Maybe it all changes.  Maybe it will never be like that again, and that is why it is so hard to forgive you.  Or why I feel like you have abandoned me.  The truth is that you didn’t abandon anyone.  You died.  That is all that happened.  There are no promises to keep when you have actually stood at the edge of the cliff like that and stared down, decided to jump, go to a place that none of us can follow you to.  There is no such thing as abandoning.  There is no such thing as a broken promise anymore.  There is just living and not living.  There is no deserves.  I should feel embarrassed to even mention it. 

***

I came to the desert, to where you called home.  Where you wanted to make a home, finally, away from the neon and fast foods, the traffic lights and distractions, to find peace.  I came to the desert to try and look into your heart.  To try and understand any of this.  I would have to write such a fiction, to do that.  Even if you were here now, no one could say what was in there, which is both funny and tragic, for someone who seemed to wear his intentions so loudly.

You would have hated to be remembered as someone selfish.  But who we say we are and what we do is so seldom the same thing.

You wanted your life to be a song, or a movie.  Something heartbreaking and haunting that you could quote to others, with hands clasped at your breast, falling into one another, saying “Isn’t that tragic?”

But listen-

We only feel that way because the horror is manufactured, the heartbreak is make-believe, and we are still safe.  I honestly don’t think you understood that.  You were so frustrated with the idea of having to have a job, mind-numbing responsibilities, unglamorous obligations, and the idea of settling down, that it would send you into drunken rages, tearing down the walls of your bedroom, painting words of philosophers onto the doors of your house, shouting “THIS!  This is what we need to be doing.  This is the way we should be living!”

I would look back at you, trying to understand, and you would shake your head, disappointed, and walk out the door, stumbling into a rainy night and down the dark, wet streets, leaving me watching from the doorway, frightened.

You said you wanted to walk into this strange red landscape and disappear.   Like vanishing from the pages of the book has some heroism to it.  Maybe that’s true.  Maybe it does.  You wanted to be Ambrose Bierce.  But instead you ended up more like Hemingway.  For all of the lion hunts and Mexican sunsets, all of the women and whisky, he still ended up with a gun in his mouth in Ketchum, Idaho.  You were that way, too.  Why do we paint over someone’s whole life with the brush that they died holding?  It’s unfair, but almost uncontrollable. 

You told me a story once, over beers and laughter, about huddling against the wall of a bus station in Alaska, nineteen years stupid, no money, no ride, no jacket at two a.m., with both arms inside your t-shirt, flicking a cigarette lighter just to keep warm and feeling more alive than you ever had.

Where does this story go now?  Does it still matter when the thought of a nightstand crowded with empty pill bottles knocked to the ground by a frantic family trying to wake up you, their dead son comes rushing at it’s heels?  It should matter, but I don’t know.

***

I guess believing doesn’t mean being right.  I was hurt and devastated for so long, and in the end, it didn’t mean anything.  No answers.  No moral.

I often play pretend mathematician, or maybe soothsayer.  I rattle my bones and throw them onto the ground, hoping to explain something that just happened, or is going to happen.  The idea being that I will find some golden ratio, some statistic that will keep myself and everyone I care about safe.  Every time that my car slides out on a patch of ice down the canyon, or have a cough that persists for longer than a week, I try to use Karma to weigh out the odds that I will be alright.  Did I give money to charity, did I hold the door open for someone.  These factors will determine my survival.  Now, I know that is all horseshit.   We leave everyday up to chance.  Even over the course of long stretches of time, it is still random chance that determines our outcome.  If you had slipped off of the ledge of a cliff, would I be ringing my hands over the loss?  Sure, but not for the same reasons.  What if I saw that you had the chance to hold onto something right when you stumbled?  I would wonder why you didn’t try to grab a hold.  But if I follow my metaphor far enough, it falls apart, because what I get is this:  If the fall wasn’t sudden, if it took three years for you to clear the ledge before you fell away, why couldn’t I reach you in time? Was it a painfully slow time lapse, where the intentions of the actions cannot be predicted until it has become far too late?  It would be reassuring to think so, but in truth, I fear I may have just stopped watching when it was most important.

Whatever the perspective is on the truth – and it is perspective, where a few small steps to the left or the right can make the landscape drastically change, and it is truth, like some great stone monolith, weather worn, granite, a millennia old, truth with a capitol T truth – There are some undeniable facts.  You did call me up out of the blue to tell me that you had tried to kill yourself.  A drug overdose.   That is truth.  There is no perspective.  What was I supposed to do with that information?  I told you that I thought that you needed to get help.  You told me that you were going to get some.  I can’t honestly say now whether or not I believed you.  I know that I wanted to believe you, but I was also scared of you, and so sad.  There may have been a part of me that felt like I was off the hook.  “There, see?  I did the good thing.  The thing that a friend would do.  I told him to get help.” As if it was that easy.  You just tell someone to go get help and PRESTO!  Everything is all better. 

How did you get there?  It interests me, because I know that there was a low point for me in my life, and I thought that maybe I was at the bottom of something, with nowhere left to go.  That I was standing on a precipice that overlooked some massive void.  I never want to feel that way again.  It was dehumanizing. 

My stepfather killed himself when I was 19.  He drove off into a white snowy canyon one December afternoon and was never seen alive again.  My family had settled into a slow and deliberate dance with his depression for so long, it’s almost all I can remember of him.  A quiet, fragile loneliness barely holding on in a house full of screaming, laughing kids. It was easier to deal with the idea of someone giving up when you are at that young.  The whole world seems tragic and star-crossed and worth dying for.  As sick as it sounds, I treated his death like some parable.  Some lesson I could learn.  I don’t want to make that mistake here.  I want to really feel this.  But I don’t know if that is possible.

I’m not sure if I can actually forgive you.  I don’t even know if that’s important.  I think I was mourning you long before you died.  You had changed so much in such a short amount of time.  I felt that you were heading down a path that no one could follow you down.  I was waiting for you to turn around, see how far you had come from everyone who loved and cared about you.  I wanted you to realize all of your stupid mistakes, to ask forgiveness, to take it all back (and you could still have taken it all back).  But then you died, and dying made the change final.  No turning around.  No coming back home.  Wherever you went to, you went alone.

Not being able to go back.  We used to joke about that.  When you were still working on the ambulance, you told me that story that should have been harrowing, but because of the way you told it, it was actually hilarious.  A story about the drug dealer who, in a fit of paranoia, stuffed all of his product up his ass, only to try and retrieve it later by fishing around up there with an unbent hanger.  After puncturing everything inside himself including the bags of drugs, he had ended up strapped to the gurney in the back of your ambulance, higher than a tight-rope walker and covered in his own ass blood.  You said “when that happens, you have officially gone too far to bake your grandma cookies for her birthday.”  You lose touch with something.  You have crossed a line.  It’s called propriety.  Or dignity.  But I watched it happen to you too.

I may have come here to stalk your ghost.  It might be all I have left.  Along with a box full of photos, your ex-wife’s rosary, and your tattered copy of Walden.  I remember how you gave that to me the year we met, back when we were both wide-eyed kids.  You always idolized Thoreau’s belief about material things.  You said that was why you had to give the book away.  I get it; it’s a really romantic concept to have no worldly possessions.  But what about the rest of us now?  When any of us would fawn over a grocery list you once wrote, or a photo from a slightly different angle than all of the ones that I have memorized.

And the hardest part of any of this is that for all of my writing, all of what I am here trying to say to you, there will be no response.  It is just being emptied into the ether.  I am standing on some lonely, dirty fog drenched shore just throwing bottle after bottle out into the cold indifferent sea, and none of them will ever reach you.  That isn’t happening.  There is not a happy ending in the next chapter, and you validate any of this.  The bottles will just litter the ocean floor.  A clunking clinking sun-glinting mass of should haves, would haves, halfhearted regrets and pleads.

You had a Scottish wedding in New York, unspoiled by the rainy afternoon, with bagpipes playing and the bride’s bouquet thrown into the Hudson.  You seemed like you had reached a moment so important.  One of those adult places where this would be a moment that defined you.  But I watched your marriage disintegrate so fast and your bright eyes sink deep into your skull and you grew so thin.  Not just skinny but frail, like a boat sail hung too long in the salty wind, threadbare and broken.

Believing doesn’t make someone right, and after hearing your planning of stepping off the edge of the world so many times, how were any of us even surprised?  We shouldn’t have been.  But I always believed you were meant for more.  Of course I did.  We all did.  I thought that you were so melodramatic for bringing those ideas up.  After a few drinks and here he goes again, about how he won’t be around forever, and we had better all get used to the idea of that.  It annoyed me.  I thought you were so full of it.  And here is the strange part.  You were right.  Absolutely you were.  But I still don’t believe you.  And this is something that I do not understand for any reason.  How can I not believe you?  You are dead.  You were telling the truth.  This is not denial.  I just still cannot bring myself to look at the world that way, I guess.

The Firepit - written November 26th, 2010.

There was a storm three days ago that I think most people thought would end the world.  I think at this point, I don’t think that the world will ever end.  Things just change, things that we work on for so long fall apart and slide away into the background, and we continue on and on, only stopping every once in a while to remark about what we can survive.  At the times when we do stop and turn to say this phrase, which is a very true phrase, we may notice for a moment that the person who we are speaking to, whose hand we are holding, might change.  Not to say that they are an entirely new person (although at some truly tragic points in our lives, this may be true) sometimes we just realize that in all of our growing, changing, and surviving, this other person has as well.  Well of course they have.  And maybe what is so surprising isn’t that they have changed, but that in sharing the same space, the same halls, the same rooms, even the same bed, we have somehow failed to notice that they did, or naively thought somehow they wouldn’t.

Mike died in May, and now it is November.  I hated how warm and sunny it was when he died.  It should have been a torrential blizzard.  No one should die when flowers are in bloom.  No one should die the week that summer vacation starts.  All of those children screaming bloody murder as they bust out of school house doors, making pirate ships out of low tree bows and knowing that almost three months is still forever when you’re nine.  Meanwhile, there is a full chapel of confusion listening to a proxy for God try to tell us about some other version of Eternity.  One that seems final.  Not an IS but a WAS.  Remembering to speak in past tense.  And all the saved souls and Christ’s tears and thirty something’s wearing the only suits they own to show up to some silliness that won’t help make sense to any of this.  Then I prayed for the summer to end. 

We have this fire pit.  HAD, actually.  We are leaving this house in two days.  I remember when Mike brought us down to see the house for the first time.  After all the hard work he had put into fixing the place up, he never wanted to live in it.  I think after that first, year, he always referred to it as ‘our’ house. We moved in during a magic spring, with everything green and swaying in the breeze of new beginnings.  And you only get to feel those once, during a time before you can know what’s around the next corner.  With my wife, who was only a girlfriend at the time, and our dog, who was only a pup then, we brought all of the meager belongings we had, bought a hammock and strung lights in the tall trees.  It was nice.  We stayed for years.  Barbecued meat, sang songs, opened presents and drank till the sun came up.  Friends moved into the vacant houses on the other sides of the fence.  We made plans to plant new trees.  We painted rooms and stayed there longer than I have ever lived somewhere since I left my mother’s house.  Now the ground is frozen and we are leaving.  And the lights in the trees have only a bulb or two that aren’t burnt out and the hammock rotted after we forgot to take it down when the seasons changed.  But there is still this fire pit.  The one that Tory and I built from old adobe brick we saved from a gutted house one March weekend.  It is beautiful.  It was our totem.  Like pagans or savages, we sacrificed one heaping pile of wood after another during those long summer nights.  Any photos I have of this place, the parties we had, the friends we saw, they are all illuminated by a firelights orange glow.  I remember when Mike told me that we might as well fill in the fire pit, since everyone was growing up, and he wouldn’t be around that much anymore.  As our resident drunken madman and landlord, Mike felt that it was he who was keeping us up nights howling at the moon and lighting bonfires.  And in a way, I guess he was right.  Every fire that was lit after he died that summer was somehow in memory of Mike.  Every movement that was made was a memorial.  Every party thrown, a wake.  Even months after his funeral, the simple gesture of picking up beer bottles from around the pit or rearranging the lawn chairs seemed like a sacred task with some weight to it.  The houses here are still his, no matter what the bank says.  And the fire pit will stay long after we are gone.  It doesn’t bother me to think that all of this has ended.  I now feel so far from the way it was before that I can’t even feel the shock of change.  And the changing of my life has been like this blizzard, sweeping in so quick that I forgot what it was like to be warm, and only have photos to remind me how we were before.

HYPOTHERMIA

or

The Story of My First Suicide


Why do they say ‘take their own life’? “He took his own life.” It doesn’t seem like that. If anything, it seems more like they are giving it away. That is what my father did.
He was originally from salem oregon, but i always pictured his figure walking the red plateus and rocks of santa fe, new mexico, where he did his residency in psychiatry. like some lone alien on the red sands of mars. so distant from his family back in the green rolling hills that my mothers house perched on in south ogden, or the tall timbers of the northwest coastline. that stark arid desert is where i put his ghost still. not in some sad still hotel room. not with a bottle of phenobarbital. not in the image i sometimes dream about, which is this:when i was ten, my elementary class went to the Ogden Nature Center for a field trip. we were to stay in the several run down cabins that were available for classes such as this. The building was old and smelled like neglect. Due to the fact that we would be doing hiking and snowshoeing, the counselors there had several safety films to show us, and this being the time before vhs or even really beta for that matter they showed the safety films on actual FILM, the reel ticking away as a badly cared for sound system cracked and hissed over the loudspeaker p.a. in the auditorium of the cabin. Incidentally, i remember the first vhs tape that my father brought home that we could actually RECORD ONTO, as amazing of a feat that was in those days. It cost him a fortune, but the whole family sat around the gigantic zenith consol, that had the shitty knob that broke, so you had to get the pliers out and grab the end of it to turn it, and we watched the olympic marathon footage that had originally aired at six p.m., but now thanks to technology, we could watch it any damn time we pleased, god bless it. According to the films, there were several things to be aware of and concerned with when in the woods during winter. for every precaution, there was another sad story of some unfortunate soul who had gone astray, lost in the pristine white sea of trees, doomed to a cold death. There were so many dangers, so many volitile situations to worry about. but the most frightening i still can imagine vividly. the basis of the subject was hypothermia, and the victim in question was a hunter whose name i cannot remember. but for storytellings sake we will call him David. David wandered away from the rest of his hunting buddies when he thought he spotted a ten point buck and was convinced that if he could trail after it, then he would have a real prize for his wall. the image i remember the clearest is him walking off into this abyss of snow peppered aspens, smiling and waving at his buddies for the adventure he was about to have. the announcer came on, booming over the loudspeaker, saying "IT WOULD BE THE LAST TIME HIS FRIENDS WOULD EVER SEE HIM ALIVE AGAIN."the next five minutes shows his increasing anxiety rise, wandering aimless, lost in the snowy woods, after mere footfalls, no longer caring about the deer. just trying to find his way out. with no water and no provisions, becoming more and more bewildered as the snow coninued to fall relentlessly, as snow tends to do. no longer being able to see his tracks to find his way back, and while trying to think rationally about his perdicament, he became more and more numb, his body no longer able to feel, the blood not getting to his limbs. finally realizing how dangerous his situation has become, David sits down against the base of an old oak tree to try and think, and calm himself down. while sitting there, he begins to cry. The movie explained that the lack of blood and oxygen to his brain had caused him to revert back to an simple, childlike state of mind, but even there, in the warmth of the cabin auditorium, surrounded by other little ten year olds sitting indian style on the hard, carpet floor, i was glad that the overhead flourescent lights had been shut off, feeling my own hot tears streaming down my cheeks, scared for the confused hunter. He sits there and cries and tries to think of some solution to his situation. But he has no flares, he has no food or blankets, and he is getting tired. After a few more exausting hours, there, at the base of that cold dead tree, he decides it would be a better thing to just fall asleep, numb as he is. the next scene is his hard, frozen body being found by park rangers several days later.my nightmare is always the same. my father, walking into those woods, smiling and waving at everyone. So sure of himself, and so unprepared for it all. the next five years of his life would be the slow maddening descent into psychosis. thinking that the feeling of hopelessness would subside if he just stayed busy. trying to pull himself out of his relentless sadness and the morose hood of death. and the slow inevitability of acceptance that would come.no longer able to see his tracks to find his way back.
he begins to cry and tries to think of some other solution.he decides it would be better to sleep.numb as he is.
i remember how he dissapeared that day. december thirteenth. he was gone all day, and as the sun set and the snow began to fall, our apprehension grew. We all knew about his ‘condition’. Having hushed conversations with siblings in hallways about how dad started hearing voices that weren’t really there. Every hour in his absence made him seem stranger and stranger to me. i remember that turbulant night, the wind high and the snow a flurry of shapes in the darkness. my mother continually breaking the long silences at the dinner table to say how she expected at any moment "for him to walk in, smile his odd little smile and say in a soft shy voice how he was sorry to make eveyone worry". but that didnt happen, so we stopped waiting and started trying to look for him, driving aimlessly through the city seeing if we could spot his car. At one fourty five in the morning, i was sitting in my uncles four runner, perched at the edge of the trecherous canyon road that veered off to the town of morgan, my uncle stopping and looking at me."do you really think he would be all the way out here?" he said.i stared out to the blackboard night seeing the ghosts of snowfall and said"no."we turned around, went back to my mothers house. i went to work the next day, and at two thirty in the afternoon, my aunt called to say the had found him. FOUND HIM. like a lost dog. like a pair of glasses or an old shoe. but what she should have said was FOUND HIS BODY. in a motel covered in frost. covered in ice. a body. in a hotel. My father. in morgan. just a few miles down the road from where my uncle and i turned around. i have not been up there since, but the dream that comes is one of a gentle summer night on that canyon road, and a sickening reminder frozen there still. a dirty drift of snow marking those tire treads tuning around, leaving one hunter behind.I can still see him sometimes, smiling and waving at us as he walks off into those woods.







Addendum 1: Phenobarbital was first introduced as an epileptic medication
in 1912. At the time it was known as Luminal, and was used for anticonvulsant
activity. An average recommended dose consists of anywhere between 15 to
40 milligrams for an average adult. 45 milligrams and above proves toxic.
Phenobarbital has been a real hit with the suicidal crowd ever since it first
came onto the market.

Addendum 2: It gained its greatest notoriety in 1997 when Marshall Applewhite
and his followers at the Heaven’s Gate Compound in Rancho, Santa Fe, donned
their jump suits, white Nike tennis shoes and ate bowl after bowl of applesauce
that had been laced with Phenobarbital.

Addendum 3: As a trusted physician, my father had written himself a prescription
for the drug sometime in November. He had then admitted to my mother that he had
the drugs and had been thinking of using them. After she had convinced him to flush
them down the toilet, and had stood over him, watching him do it, she tried in vain to
have him commited. Later that month, he wrote a second prescription. This one he kept.

Addendum 4: According to the book Final Exit, a handbook on euthanasia and assisted
suicide by Derek Humphrys, head of the Hemlock Society, known for their unorthodox methods, Phenobarbital is the most commonly used drug in suicides.

I Sing The Stupid Defeatist

>

(this is an apology)


You died and I really wanted it to mean something profound to me. I wanted to feel as if these are the hardships I endure in my life and this is something I have to learn how to live with. But that isn’t real. And just because you killed yourself doesn’t mean I have to feel sorry for you. That is some sick selfish fantasy I have acquired to feel more normal with this information. Of course I have to be devastated. I can’t just own up to the idea that it made me feel awkward and I didn’t want to talk to your friends about it. Even my admission right now feels like it is for irony’s sake and not because I truly want to make amends. I remembered walking down to the coffee shop that day, and it was so cold outside that my fingers were actually in pain from the frigid air. It was such a dreary, depressing morning that it seemed appropriate that some tragedy had taken place. It felt like the low, black clouds knew what had happened, and were bowing their heads in reverence. I envied them. I envied the clouds and the rain and those who had been a good enough friend to you to be truly affected. I remembered feeling helpless and stupid at your funeral. My suit fit weird and I met your parents. I bet you never thought that I would meet your parents. But there I was, right in line with everyone else. Probably the only dry eyes in the place. It’s not that I am callous or bitter, it is that I was watching it to take it all in. The THEATRE OF LIFE. I know, it sounds like I am a total sociopath. You know something? I have always wondered about that. I don’t know what it feels like to be inside anyone else’s head, so how do I know if I am anywhere near normal?

Case in point: I may be the only person who sits at an intersection when a light turns green, wondering if it is really green, OR if I have finally lost my mind and I just think it has turned green, and I will speed out into oncoming traffic, killing myself and taking several other perfectly sane people with me.

Listen, according to the DSM 4 diagnostics manual, sociopaths lack moral sense, control of impulses, they don’t learn from mistakes and have little to no empathy for others. That feels like where my head was. I think for a while there, the only thing that was really keeping me from going crazy was the fear that I was going crazy, if that makes any sense. Then you went and died, and maybe your death wrecked me because I was already on my way there myself, and seeing someone else do it first made me feel like the second kid to show up to school with an ALF lunchbox. You know, like, we each had our own independent motivation for doing it, but you just got yours out there quicker, so now if I do it, I was totally copying you, or its because I was secretly in love with you, or we had some death pact, or there was some Shakespearean-like betrayal.

The reality is that I couldn’t deal with the association. I hate that part the worst. Did you think about that? It isn’t ever just “Man, Carl looked really happy in these pictures. He sure did love going fishing!” It’s “Man, Carl looked really happy in these pictures. He sure did love going fishing! I wonder if he was thinking about hanging himself in the bathroom with the telephone cord when this picture of him was taken. Do you think he knew how much weight the light fixture could hold when we went out to eat that one night? Maybe he had tested it with the garbage can and found out that it started to seem to lose its integrity at one hundred and eighty five pounds and that’s why he didn’t want to get dessert even though they had his favorite because then he would have weighed too much to successfully hang himself and hey, what if he had gotten dessert that night and the death by chocolate fudgarama he would have eaten would have boosted his blood sugar, thereby raising the level of serotonin in his brain, and as we all know, high levels of serotonin affects impulse control. He would have thought more about the consequences and he would have weighed too much anyhow! Why didn’t he eat that fucking fudgarama?!?!”

See, when someone kills themselves, they have cast a stigma across their entire life. Every memory of the person is now accompanied with an image of their cold blue body in a vacant hotel room, the slits hatched down the wrists, and blood strewn across bathroom tile, the body swinging from the end of a clothsline. These grotesque visions come barking at the heels of the loving memory of the person, like rabid dogs. It’s almost impossible to separate the two.

I used to have this dream where I am in the old house where I grew up as a kid. My stepfather is there, and everything is fine. But then I remember that he is supposed to be dead, and then everyone else remembers too. Then he remembers, and he starts panicking, crying that he doesn’t want to have to be dead again. I would wake up to the bright blue horror of five a.m., and know that he was still out there somewhere, in the ground.

I’m not mad. I don’t even have a right to be. And maybe just as two humans on this planet that happened to cross paths I can mourn for you without it seeming forced or selfish. Is that alright? You killed yourself, and no one knew why. Least of all one who took time to write it all down. Maybe that’s what changed my mind. Lord knows I don’t want a bunch of fucking ass hole acquaintances showing up to my funeral and blubbering to my mother just because I had a bad week and decided to check out.

Sorry. I don’t know that. Just shooting my mouth off.

I wrote an ending to this piece about the precious nature of life. Something about stars, or birds, or those unattainable moments that keep life moving. Those things we should hold so dear. But I know that. Anyone still alive knows that, even if for just minutes at a time. So I erased it, and I will dignify my goodbye for you without wrapping this up in a cute analogy, or without reading a fucking Robert Frost poem, or without mentioning God, or the Celestial Kingdom. Instead I will just say that you are dead, and many will not sleep tonight due to that.