Pieces of my Parents, Remnants of Me

The sticky sweet stench of horseshit and heracy permeates the landscape in my dreams.

It always starts with me walking in the early morning hours, the night hiding my sins in purple-black obscurity as I stagger down 13th Street from Hoyt east to Broadway. I reach the apex of the slight incline around Rockefeller when I see it: one tail-light of my dad's beat-up 1962 Mercury Comet aglow way off in the distance, the right turn blinker flashing for no good reason, stone cold dead at the curb near the Broadway 7-11. At first it appears empty, but as I inch closer I can make out a silhouette behind the wheel; really, just a disheveled clump of hair slumped over the steering column.

A siren in the distance grows louder, closer. Instinct has me accelerating from a stumble to a jog and then a sprint. The siren careens 'round the corner and just as I reach the passenger side of the vehicle, the officer rolls down the window of his cruiser and fires an automatic weapon at the Comet's windshield, the spray of glass knocking me to the ground. Johnny Law then aims squarely at the gas cap and grins: Bam! My dad's car is engulfed in flames now as I stare at the cop staring at me. He slowly removes a black leather glove and then his Ray Bans. Oddly familiar. And then I wake up, sheets damp, head pounding. This cycle repeats itself every few weeks and has for some time. There hasn't been any variance that I can recall, nor am I aware of this repetition during the dream itself, no anticipation or foretelling of events, it's as though each instance is the first time, every time.

Back in the waking world, I embarked on a journey into my ancestry this past week, both figuratively and literally. Jetting across the country to Seattle to partake in what has become an annual get together of my siblings this past Saturday. The sibling shindig has been going on for nearly a decade now, though it was my first. There are other opportunities to see them - holidays and such - but this is the one day that it's just us (no kids, grandkids, in-laws, etc.). And really, except for L., who I grew up with, and to some extent S., who lives near L. in Arizona, I'm just now getting to know this brood. It was enlightening, sharing stories and the drama of our respective lives, and it put me into a nostalgic frame of mind. Or maybe I was already there.

After the sibling thing, L. and I headed up north to Bellingham, WA to check out my father's early childhood hometown, peruse the landmark drug store our great uncle ran back in the day, and in general walk in the footsteps of dear ol' dad as a toddler, when he could still walk without weaving. It was enjoyable visiting an area that has grown and changed over the years - the Fairhaven section is a happening little hamlet of shops, coffee bars, and restaurants - and yet still pays homage to its history. Most places never seem to maintain that balance and are the poorer for it.

That's not why we came to Bellingham, really. The primary driver for this trip down memory lane was not simply to tip-toe through baby daddy's tulips but rather to locate and visit the grave of our paternal grandfather, who died less a year after our pop was born. We didn't pinpoint his final resting place at the Bayview Cemetery, despite diligently combing through the section their map claims was his. He died in 1925 and a lot of the tombstones from that period had decayed to the point of being unreadable, so we assumed one of those must have been granddad's. The following day, however, L. logged onto findagrave.com and discovered recent pictures of our grandpappy's slab in relatively fine shape, eminently legible. We were already an hour's drive back down south at this point, though, and weren't up for making a second pilgrimage just to see what we were already staring at online. Still, had it not been a Sunday the day before, we'd have stormed the cemetery office, demanding excavations and DNA tests! This was, after all, the man whose sir name we'd have proudly worn had my dad's stepfather not later adopted him, saddling us all with the putrid moniker weighing me down to this day ("putrid" is an appropriate adjective given our step grandfather's generally miserable, SOBesque demeanor).

Monday, I had a wonderful lunch with a childhood friend I'd recently rediscovered on Facebook. I hadn't seen him in over 36 years, so we had a lot to catch up on! These were my good memories of childhood, outdoors playing with the other kids. It turns out that we were both mostly oblivious to the acute dysfunction burning up the inside of the other's home, each fearful that it would boil over into the streets and expose our family's festering wounds to the neighborhood, unaware that we were in fact not so distressingly unique in that department. Domestic dysfunction might be as unique as a snowflake when viewed through a microscope; however, it's often sadly similar seen through everyday eyes. But outside, with the other children in the 'hood, I was free to be ... well, a kid. And so was he. We had some great times together and it was good to reflect on them.


After my lunch, L. and I visited the graves of our maternal grandparents. We had been there before as children, but still needed help to find the right "garden" in south Everett's Evergreen Cemetery. Luckily, it was Monday and the office was open. We eventually found grandma and grandpa, after some miscues and a personal escort to the location. (The escort got confused herself; the sections are not marked on the grounds, only on the associated map, and the map itself wasn't nearly detailed enough given the byzantine layout of the grounds.) This was the only grandma I knew (she died when I was eight). This grandpa died two years before I was born, but L. knew him briefly (she was five when he passed).

We drove through almost all of the streets of our hometown of Everett in between all this grave "digging." I had weaved a similar path a dozen or so years ago and have since made the journey virtually courtesy of Google but it's always revelatory making the in-person drive-by, interesting not so much because of the things that have changed but rather thanks to the things that haven't, and there are still quite a few falling into the latter category (probably the reason Everett hasn't been able to transform itself over the years, despite numerous concerted efforts toward that end).

Each time through Everett, I discover at least one thing I'd missed in previous treks. For instance, Washington elementary school is now a retirement home. The old brick building is still intact in the center of the compound, with newer structures surrounding it where the playground once stood. The iron monkey bars are long gone, though! As my sister remarked, we might one day come full circle and end up as child-like codgers, playing out our last days running around the grounds here just as we did in our youth. Ray's Drive-In on 14th and Broadway is still hanging in there as well. I recall eating out at Ray's on numerous occasions as a kid. In more adult matters, the Blue Moon - right across from Ray's - and the Doghouse Tavern still remain, though my dad never claimed either as favorites of his (taverns in Washington State can only serve beer and wine, you need to go to a "lounge" to get the hard stuff my dad used as fuel). Several members of his "posse" were known to frequent these dives on occasion, at least one of them - Darlene - enjoying the ambiance and denizens enough that she owned a Blue Moon "tavern" jacket.

So here I am now back in Philly, out of the cold dampness of the Pacific Northwest and into the sticky oven that is the Mid-Atlantic on this particular day in late May. The unofficial summer season kicks off tomorrow afternoon with the mass exodus "down the shore." And me? Well, I'm newly chock-full of my origins and now contemplating time's forward direction. I think I've finally hammered home to my psyche one unavoidable fact of nature: the future's the only past we can affect by our actions. In short, "Get over yourself and move on with life already." Amen.

Cold

Cold.

Exhaust fumes rise from the ice as her vehicle rumbles to life.

The rear view betrays only futility with chalky gray cheekbones and auburn highlights.

She swears and kicks it into drive as I'm left behind to contemplate "fuck you" for the last time from her particular high horse.

Winter's choking laughter deafens the city in silence as I slip into enthusiastic apathy.

Cold comfort. Hard bitten, burning me numb.

Club Med

May, 1983. I remember landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier the first time mainly because of the relief I felt after the nausea of the ride.

I'd been in the Navy for over six months by the time I touch down, two spent in San Diego at boot camp and the next four in Denver at the Navy intelligence training command on Lowry Air Force base. (Whatever happened to my "Rocky Mountain Navy" t-shirt?) I graduated in late April and I got my orders to the Ike, which had recently deployed to the Mediterranean Sea for a six month cruise. So they fly me to Sicily where I wait for transport out to the boat. That ride comes in the form of a Navy C-2 Greyhound "Carrier Onboard Delivery (COD)" aircraft, the ever reliable ferrier of mail and people.

After an hour or so of stomach churning turbulence, the C-2 makes a slow banking turn and a sickening dip to then fro. The seats face toward the rear of the plane and I'm strapped in tight against the backrest, cranial headgear and earplugs not really helping to muffle the whine of the props but making it impossible to hear anything else. There aren't any windows so I have to take the word of the flight crew member who shouts, "Five minutes!" Until the clown yells it again 10 minutes later.

Then suddenly, Wham! An instant of a few Gs sitting on my chest and the trip's over: I've just gone from over one hundred miles per hour to zero in the space of a second. The ending is anti-climactic. Taking off from a carrier in one of these lumbering beasts, I'd later learn, is where the real drama lives (you wonder whether or not the catapult has given you enough speed to straighten out and fly when it feels like you're nearly vertical and about to go tail first into the water ahead of the rushing ship set to run you over). But I wouldn't get to experience that joy for several more years, as a civilian software developer bopping around the Gulf just before Desert Storm.

Back in May of '83, the aft of the plane opens and the noise and heat of an active carrier flight deck hits me like a freight train. I go into sensory overload as I'm led out past a plethera of roaring jets and bombs and fuel lines being carted and dragged haphazardly in all directions by what looks to be an army of kids my age decked out in a rainbow of different colored jerseys. I know what none of it means but I do know I want nothing to do with any of it.

As I pass through the hatch into the island structure and the noise muffles, some joker sneers, "We'll see you back out here soon." No, no, I think. I'm destined for other things. Down into the air conditioning of the carrier intelligence center (CVIC). Closed off from the great unwashed. Just a bunch of us eggheads sitting around gleaming computer displays, tracking Soviet naval activity, wired on caffeine and gray matter. I quickly learned that we chosen few were merely the lesser unwashed, a shit hole within a shit hole. And the AC competed with a choking cloud of nicotine-laced smoke hanging perpetually in the air. The work itself was often fascinating, if morally frustrating (at least for me, somewhat of a rare animal: a died in the wool liberal working in military intelligence).

How in the world did I end up here? After all, I was just a year removed from protesting the recent federal selective service registration requirement, and vowing to defeat the evil of a Reagan-based growing military-industrial complex. Well, it came down to money and opportunity: I had neither and needed a kick in the ass to get my life moving. The plan then morphed into the thought that I'd go into the Air Force or Navy as a journalist (it was good enough for Hunter Thompson, after all). That hit a snag when I learned about the minimum two year waiting list for journalism training. The recruiter noticed my shrinking interest in things once that came to light and quickly began to spin Navy Intelligence as a "perfect" alternative. It was journalism, after a fashion. Top secret journalism, but that makes the assignment all that more exciting! The recruiter laid it on thick. The aptitude tests were pretty stringent but I somehow managed to make the grade, so off I went.

I despised but survived boot camp and actually enjoyed intelligence training in Denver (it was more like college than the military). We could wear civilian clothes and had university-style dorm rooms. But that wasn't the real Navy, isolated as we were in the mountains of Colorado and the seemingly more relaxed style of the Air Force. Now, though, I was thrust amidst the "real" Navy with a vengeance. Hard to get more in your face than an aircraft carrier at the beginning stages of a six month deployment, especially in 1983, with Beirut nearly boiling over, Libyan wacky monster Muammar threatening to sink my new home down to the bottom of the Mediterranean, and all manner of Soviet muscle buzzing beside, above and below us on a constant basis. But it wasn't boring, that's for sure.

As a Navy Intelligence weenie, I was privy to a lot of the goings on that my fellow shipmates were not. It certainly helped to know exactly why our port visits were regularly cancelled. I was eventually assigned to the Tactical Analysis Plot (TAP), an intelligence center within the intelligence center on the ship. You needed a Secret clearance to gain access to CVIC but better than Top Secret to get into TAP: what they called (and still call) Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI). Typical government alphabet soup. This work center was subsequently moved to Flag (Admiral's) operations spaces and re-christened the Supplemental Plot (SUPPLOT). It might sound glamorous and the work was interesting but TAP was a hellish environment to exist in. It was a room about fifteen feet in length and barely three feet in width. Generally three people worked there per shift (twelve on, twelve off, seven days a week at sea). Everyone assigned there smoked but me and there was little ventilation. Large acrylic maps ran along the length of both walls, with little magnetic "pucks" marking various air, sea, and land-based entities (friendlies and adversaries). The particulars of these charts would vary depending on our current area of operation: sometimes it was the North Atlantic, sometimes the Caribbean, and often just off the coast of Norfolk, VA, but usually it was "the Med." I can still recite the names and characteristics of all the Soviet naval anchorages in that body of water, the manner in which their inhabitants communicated and what that chatter and their subsequent movements meant, though I have no particular desire to remember them (those memories are lodged permanently in my lizard brain, alongside every episode of the Brady Bunch, and certain tingle that's stimulated whenever I see somebody doing coke on TV or the silver screen).

We had a teletype machine in TAP that continuously printed out messages coming in from numerous sources on developments in the world, from strategic geo-political happenings to tactical operational force movements. The sound of its rat-a-tat-tat still reverberates through my subconscious some 27 years later. We'd analyze these reports and compare the data to historic behavior to predict actions, positioning and recommended reactions (or pro actions, if possible). I'd write up our findings and produce a daily briefing book for the Captain. I honed my typing skills, for sure. And learned a lot of stuff about shit that has since become obsolete, a master of early eighties operational intelligence trivia. No scandalous misuse of power or other egregious moral dilemmas of the type found at more strategic positions in "the community." What I remember most about all this was blasting Nina Hagen and Elvis Costello on the tape deck while writing up the Captain's briefing book on the nightshift, my eyes watering from the blinding ubiquitous smoke. Also the thrill of finding a link, a pattern, in the mountains of data, triggered by some obscure factoid I'd memorized. Like the kind of kick I still get running down an elusive bug in the software I develop today. The bugs were different but the process strikingly similar.

I spent many of my days (and many of my nights) in TAP through the summer and fall of '83, monitoring cat and mouse games with Libya, tracking the rag tag terrorist groups jockeying for position in Lebanon (we had a whole wall mapping out the dozens of shadowy organizations as they moved, shrank and grew, and switched alliances). And through it all, the ebb and flow of US/Soviet Navy's simulated war games against one another below, on and above the water. Mission planning for our airborne response to the October US Marines barracks bombing (well, really to a number of things) took up the final month of the ship's time in the Med, leaving it to the USS JFK and others to execute once they relieved us on station in November.

Sometime during all this, I spent a couple weeks cleaning our berthing and doing the division's laundry as most junior enlisted end up doing at some point, along with the constant sweeping and swabbing and buffing of passageways for the weekly inspections of same. We even got to visit a couple ports in our six and a half months of "club Med" that year (Taranto, Livorno, and the ubiquitous Naples, Italy and Athens, Greece). We made up for it next time we deployed to these waters in late '84/early '85, but the three straight months between port visits in '83 (mid-July to mid-October) was tough. To make matters worse, the Marine barracks was bombed just after we finally stepped foot on land again in Naples so they instituted an emergency recall and a few hours later we were booking through the very narrow and heavily trafficked Straits of Messina at 40+ nautical miles an hour on a beeline to Lebanon. That was an interesting sight (and navigational endevor).

Ah, good times. Somewhere in there, I turned a very sober 21.  It was well over a month on either side of a drink for me on the big day, but I'm pretty sure I've since made up for that deprivation.  And then some.

Pure as the Driven Snow

The sweat of my own futility drizzles down my back, cold. I'm lost in a weakness with no strength to shake it. Compelled back to familiar places as they continue to haunt my dreams, I unceasingly gnaw at this material like a nervous tic.

1990. I am heading down Providence in Delaware County, to where it intersects with Edgemont and I-95. The nexus of my pleasure, the gates of hell. Here, the Widener University campus on the western edge of the interstate represents safety and severe need. (Somewhat ironically, the rehab joint I ended up visiting to dry out from my wetter, more socially/legally acceptable proclivities some 15 years later also makes its home here, just up the street.) On this side of the highway I blend in as a milquetoast suburbanite, albeit one quaking with an endorphin thirst the likes of which only Bolivian withdrawal can induce. To the East, over the narrow bridges providing passage across the freeway's River Styx, lies Dante's Inferno.

For years those bridges represented a barrier I'd not dare cross, relying instead on an emissary in the form of my "pharmacist broker"/Sherpa to conduct these oh-so necessary transactions (for a hefty fee, naturally). Need and circumstance, though, eventually demanded that I show my face in person. It was a risky proposition, one that provided no guarantee of reward even if I didn't get robbed or arrested for my troubles (I narrowly averted both concerns on more than one occasion). These few blocks of misery and medicine did not compare to the North Philly badlands, but they were at least as scary to me because I was making the climb on my own. (I never visited the badlands without my Tenzing Norgay along for the ride to handle the currency/goods exchange.)

My dip into the underworld became routine, so much that I could navigate it round trip blind (on many occasions I effectively proved this out). Sometimes I had to make back-to-back runs in rapid succession, if I happened to get cheated the first time round. After all, there was little chance for taste tests on-scene to validate my purchase and the merchants weren't exactly registered with the better business bureau.

The premise was simple: hop into the Samurai and point it south down route 252 from my Media apartment, continuing on Providence as it became route 320 south and then the rest of the way to the Days Inn parking lot at the aforementioned nexus of pleasure. Six miles, ten minutes. Sometimes it seemed like a journey of days going down.

View Larger Map

The Days Inn lot is where I'd wait for my Sherpa during the early years as he scaled the mountain top on my behalf and (sometimes) returned with the reward. Occasionally, he'd return with nothing and sometimes he wouldn't return at all. Later it became the spot where I'd park briefly to muster my inner guile for the push to the summit alone. Sort of a base camp, as it were. I remember this clearly, though I was rarely clearheaded, even on the first run of the evening (several hours of consumed liquid courage coursing through my blood stream was the norm). There were a couple of roads running over the interstate and into the snake pit, the most obvious being Edgemont/352. I preferred the road less traveled, Upland (plus I enjoyed its double entendre-laced moniker).

View Larger Map

The boys would come running by the time my jeep crossed over Rose just east of the interstate. I'd ignore them and swing left onto 10th Street where I was assured of two or three entrepreneurs knocking on my windows on either side of the vehicle. This was where the risk of robbery was at its height: they could just as easily be shoving a gun into my face as a fistful of powdered pleasure. I never did see a weapon but often got a lot of pounding on the hood and shouts of "gimme your money, motherfucker." I never gave in until I had the goods. And then my window'd go up and I was off again, less than ten-seconds ticking by to complete the transaction. It certainly wasn't uncommon for the merchandise to be worthless (100% talcum powder or some other cutting agent). When that happened, I'd immediately make another run down. Sometimes I'd drive back to base camp and check it out to avoid having to traverse the whole way round from the apartment again but was usually too paranoid to risk prolonged exposure in public carrying what was presumably - hopefully - a controlled substance.

There were a few times when the boys would suddenly stop and move as one away from my car. Cops in the belfry. My mind would race, quickly running through a rehearsal of the "lost looking for the I-95 on-ramp" routine I'd planned to blurt out should I get pulled over. But it never happened. A patrol car even drove right by me on one occasion. I can't believe they didn't hit the lights and put me through the ringer. A white boy in a blue Suzuki Samurai on the east side of the freeway: I would have pulled me over. Perhaps they didn't want to deal with the paperwork (they knew I hadn't yet scored since they had to have seen the dealers scatter prior to reaching my window). The scariest moments for me were when I had my prize and was driving the four or five blocks to the I-95 north on-ramp, my passage to freedom. Not that I wasn't still filled with terror all the way back to Media, or that I wasn't nervous about the quality of my purchase and the thought of having to do it all over again. But the sickening feeling was concentrated with the spotlight shining on felonious Freddy here in the soft-top mini-Jeep cruising the wrong side of I-95. All these things reverberated through my mind seemingly at once. But never did I pause to ponder that the whole fucking trip (not to mention the addiction driving it) was plain madness. Which itself was crazy, especially for someone as prone to excessive introspection as I was and am.

This journey I made on a dozen or so occasions between 1990 and 1992 had its foundation in adrenaline and delusion, addiction and anticipation. Thoughtlessness in its most crystalized form. Instinct as pure as the driven snow I was driving toward but never found. Purity is an elusive state for most things in life and in particular when what you're hunting is pharmaceutical-based happiness. I stumbled closest to purity by happenstance, but it was inert: talcum, aspirin, or other like manner of subterfuge. Not the kind I had in mind.

I often think of the large circle I made driving from Media to Chester, surrounding the smaller, inner circle summiting the mountain from Days Inn to Upland. Vicious circles. Dante needs to up the ante a few notches. In some sense I'm still spinning 'round and 'round trying to break free.