bicentennial christmas

A stone drunk Santa

slow jams through our home,

his long white beard

reduced to patchy stubble,

rosy cheeks

gone yellow & hollow,

chubby physique

now stick figure thin.

Dad's lifelong passion for oblivion

once curtailed at Christmas

in deference to us kids

could no longer be,

such balance now beyond his grasp,

chased away by the ghosts of cirrhosis

gnawing at his liver.

This last Deck The Halls,

sipping Cream of Kentucky

libations through a straw,

when even prayers to the porcelain

or the rug or the sink

are unable in the end to stave off the slab

and a date with a toe tag

come the swelter of August.

goodwill sunflowers (van gogh on the cheap)

the pale green plaster walls crack

to a nicotine ceiling sadly

coughing up our acrid interior

hazy through their shroud of putrid.

--

a thrift store van gogh muses

from his living room perch on high,

they lie catty corner to one another

in fading upholstered coffins

numb to vincent's goodwill sunflowers.

--

sick, smokes, and delirium

and never ending bargain basement booze

flow by the hand-me-down television

tuned to unwatched watergate hearings

whose treachery can't be bothered

in this netherworld of ours.

Summer of '74

My hometown blooms

in twilight fading shades of grey

as the summer simmers

and then slips from my mind.

There remains only the house.

The room.

Them.

There, no sunlight penetrates

to disturb this tomb.

The dead don't notice.

But I do.

Pub crawl in Oz down the Yellow Brick Road

Dad was scarecrow stubble,

all jaundiced meandering mumbles.

He didn't look much at people

those last few years,

staring off into space

at scabbed tidbits

of pleasant small talk crippled,

slack jawed all wrong.

Watergate remembrances

of Colgate on the leaking sink

and Terry Jacks on the transistor

drowning out Mom and Dad in a fester

of afternoon numbing,

drunk and drained of the blister

that was morning father shaking

on the living room couch,

dry heaving over Barbara Walters

or sometimes J.P. Patches

but never Captain Kangaroo.

Pops, with his steaming wake up cup

of hair o' the dog that ate him whole,

barking up the pieces

of our fractured family photo album,

burying the remnants

of our torn and frayed lives.

A Moment Saturday in the Summer of '70

Mom is gardening

in the summer sun out back,

smoking and probing

at what might one day be lettuce, parsley.




Inside, Dad's head bleeds sweat

through the couch cushions,

sweet stained remnants

of endless bourbon daydreams.




I am manning a lemonade stand

in the yard out front,

earning some coin

from kindhearted strangers,

though I'm the one drinking the Kool-Aid.



Sis is away with friends

trying to blot out homestead time bombs,

a normal teenage girl

trapped in the body of familial dysfunction,

trapped in the bailiwick of parental decay.


We are all in our own place,

frozen in a fevered fear of fate

not yet written but already carved in stone.

Broken Bell Bottom Blues

She was perfect

in every flaw.

He was hopeless

but looking up.

Just your average

sad sack couple

born of hard shell

fecal magnificence

festering around a chicken shit

suburban core.

This early morning quiet

remembrance

waxes my ears, sears my mind

silly.

Through it all

the sun still she rises

and the crows collect payment,

mockingly.

The Walmart Empire

finds its footing

even as our sad sacks fade

into avocado

deep pile purgatory,

their dancing days short-lived

yet so sour sweet.

Radio Hour

My parents were

performance artists,

acting out a menagerie

of dysfunction

some called their lives.

Mom was Norma Desmond

without the showbiz pedigree.

Or a kind of Martha

Virginia Woolf fraidy cat

fortified juicing bookworm.

Dad was Don Birnam

without the suit

and writer repartee.

Or maybe he was Willy Loman

but with only the shaking

and his sick left to sell.

I had a front row seat

to shows played always,

the Sanislavski method

taken to extreme.

When my eyes tired

of this gray grotesque,

I'd listen to their broadcast

through my room heating duct.


I then languished in repose

from my poster plastered cell,

a coffee-stained typewriter

pecking dreams out of my nightmares.

My childhood pet beside me

growing old, confused, and heavy;

bestowing unconditional love

beset by uncompromising fleas.

My eight track

stereo punk soundtrack

cracking snide on the death dance below me,

harmonizing with the rain on the roof.


Finally I collapsed on my bed, out of life

and chanced to glance over at Joe Strummer

screaming from the wall and through the speaker wire,

never growing up

yet both old before we aged.

Twilight Twixt Time

My mother fights the British and swims the English Channel

drunk on jug wine, tipping off the love seat,

nose lost in the pages of the wonder of others.

I am not impressed.

----

My father grins on sour mash piss laughing gas

slick with sweat, writhing on the sofa,

staring dull eyed darkly up at our snot green shutters.

I am not amused.

----

I'm Schwinn spokes kicking down the neighborhood alleys,

banana seat running from cadavers still breathing,

buzzed on ten-cent candy bars and two-bit paper kites,

haunted by parental ghosts gone sour.

----

The half life of these remembrances

stretch to the end of me, fraying without decay;

blurry to begin with, those polyester yesteryears

nonetheless grip

a raw nerve end at the root of my mind,

tugging some ugly bygones

kicking and screaming into the now.

-----

An ice cream truck down the block is lost in song;

another Sunday in the twilight twixt time.

bowel obstructions (and other family roadwork)

I feel the weight of the weird

and the strength of sad weaklings

as I crawl through the alleys

of childhood dreams.

----


I arise to the noises

of garbagemen retching

and I yearn to be trashed

until numb to the numbskull I've been and become.

----

Yesterday's misery

is mailed to tomorrow

as time disappoints me

once and again.

----

I'm malaise bloomed incarnate

in Kafkaesque shit storms,

drenched in digestion

of booze battered lineage.

----

I'm swamped in the ethos

of failed adolescence,

bathed in the strychnine

of putting up appearances.

----

I'm the muck that I'm stuck in,

cut on shiny shards of family

through the deep shag of sick

and the avocado bygones

of disco sad psychosis,

shot past present tenses

that haunt all my tomorrows

like an out of style spectre

cursed with everlasting shame.

The Unbearable Lightness of Beefheart

Captain Beefheart

copped me the keys to an asylum wonderland,

noise akimbo staccato.

Bestowing rosy crows

of joyous madness

juxtaposing rhythms

just as weird and wired and right.

To ramshackle his aura

in full aural angst

is to play a game of twister

with porcupines and power lines.

Please buck your instincts

and appreciate this terrible beauty

through prisms askew

surrounding you on terms unnerving,

from your tongue to your toes

as the free range octaves

whisper down your blind side.

Shiny Boots of Leather

It's a shame that two of New York City's most historic rock and roll haunts now only exist in cyberspace - namely Max's Kansas City and CBGB.

I was too young to have made it to Max's but was lucky enough to see several shows at CBGB, albeit long after its hey day as home to the Ramones, Blondie, Television, New York Dolls, etc. in the mid-70s (just after Max's first closed).

Max's was a regular hangout of the Velvet Underground, along with Andy Warhol and crew and one of the places to play in the late 60s and early 70s. Jim Carroll practically made it his second home as he illustrates in his book, Forced Entries. It's a deli today, which is a crying shame.

Why mention this? I was re-reading the Lester Bangs 'bio book' Blondie. Lester was, at least in my opinion, the best rock and roll writer the world has known, and one of the best writers of any kind. Not enough people know of him, certainly not those under a particular age. Sadly, Lester passed on much too young in 1982 and though he left a rich body of work behind, much of it is maddeningly inaccessible, save for a couple of compilations. The best of the compilations, and most commercially successful, is Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, put together by a buddy of his and another pretty good rock writer, Greil Marcus - if you haven't read it, I highly encourage you to pick it up.

Lester worked for a number of magazines in the 70s, including Rolling Stone (where he was fired at least once) but his voice really took root in the pages of Creem Magazine (God, I wish I had saved my copies from that period). Creem was an irreverent rag out of Detroit, 'America's Only Rock and Roll Magazine' it proclaimed on each cover. Creem now sadly also only has a life online (of course, it certainly isn't alone in that equation). Lester did get some posthumous exposure when Phillip Seymour Hoffman played him in Cameron Crowe's Almost Famous but his work is largely incarcerated in those Creem back issues.

Anyway, I got off track again, as I'm wont to do.

What was I talking about?

Oh, yeah - Blondie.

Lester was was a subversive motherfucker by nature. The Blondie book he had been hired to write was supposed to be a typically shallow fan bio, published only to take advantage of their unexpected success in the wake of Heart of Glass. Lester, though, had other plans. He used this relatively high profile exposure as a bully pulpit in order to preach his special brand of punk religion. He confused and infuriated the publishers (not to mention Blondie) but it's a great read. He talks about the roots of punk and in particular the Velvets and Max's and Television, the Dolls, Patti Smith, Ramones and, yes, Blondie at CBGB.

Screw the boring ass Museums that dot NYC (with a sponsor's exemption for the Guggenheim, which is kinda rock'n'roll in its own right) - I would pay dearly to be able to visit this kind of history outside the pages of a book (no matter how well written it might be).

Ahh, but that's not right.

Rock and roll isn't like other art and maybe trying to fit it into that mold would be the worst thing that could happen: you become - well, you become the Hardrock Cafe.

Max's is better off as a deli. After all, what's more New York than that? Except for perhaps the fate befallen the CBGB building, once Patti gave the final concert there in October 2006 and the doors closed for good as a rock joint.

First CBGB was shuttered/abandoned and then it became a high-end fashion store. NYC is very well known for plenty of both. The fashionistos left the club graffiti and playbills in the bathroom intact as a shrine for the richies to marvel over when they need to take a piss while shopping for high priced John Varvatos clothes and fragrances.

Andy Warhol would smile. That's very NYC indeed.

Krofft cruft

Thoughts of the Land of the Lost on Saturday mornings past bring back memories of all my favorite like-minded shows in the early 70s:

• H.R. PufnStuf
• Sigmund and the Sea Monsters
• The Bugaloos
• Lidsville

All were the work of Sid and Marty Krofft.  Sort of the Joel and Ethan Cohen of the 70's children's fantasy puppet genre.  God bless those guys.

In keeping with Hollywood's complete lack of originality, I see that a movie version of H.R. Pufnstuf is coming out in 2011.  More interesting is a 2007 horror-spoof of the show, H.R. Puffnsnuf.  I'll have to hunt that one down (though it might fuck with some relatively rare positive memories of childhood in disturbing ways).

Looking on IMDB, I discovered that Mama Cass Eliott played Witch Hazel in a 1970 movie version of Pufnstuf, though she wasn't on the series.





No sign of Papas Denny or John or Mama Michelle.  John would have been picture perfect as the father of the protagonist, little Jimmie.  He could have shown him how to smoke black-tar heroin from his talking flute.

Speaking of Jimmie and his flute, Jack Wild (who played our young English lad among puppets in Pufnstuf land) died of Tongue and Throat cancer just a couple of years ago.  There was no mention as to whether his magical talking flute had anything to do with his demise, though that thing was no doubt filled with all sorts of toxic pixie dust (all the reason why Witchiepoo was forever trying to get her hands on it).  I wonder if Witchiepoo or Mayor Pufnstuf made it to the funeral.  That would be a great premise for a reunion show!

Finally, for no particular reason, I'm left with memories of the show Shazam.  It was on, I believe, in prime time rather than Saturday morning and had no relation to the Kroffts (it was a live action show).  But my jumbled up memories scoop this into the Krofft pile.  I distinctly recall 7-11 coming out with Shazam Plastic Specialty cups when you got a large Slurpie.  There were several to choose from and I was determined to get them all.  I think, in fact, that I did.

Toyz in da Hood

This time of year - which seems to begin earlier every autumn - puts me into a nostalgic frame of mind. Up with the birds this morning, I was able to catch a bit of Saturday morning TV fare with the very first flush of the upcoming holiday season's toy advertisements already breaking bread. Now to be sure, my toys of yore were a bit different. We're talking toys circa late 60s/early 70s. I think the most "high tech" item I ever owned was Hasbro's Lite-brite.

Hot Wheels were my longest running passion. I remember a few Christmases with them, and they're still alive-n-kicking in the 21st Century; in fact, they are one of Mattel's premiere brands to this day. Of course today Hot Wheels is all fancy and whatnot. Back in the olden times it was just a bunch of orange plastic strips of miniature road connected together in sundry ways (loops and ramps and so), with little metal cars you dropped onto said tracks. Gravity did the rest of the work, no electricity required. It didn't take long for the day-glo tangerine strips to outlive their usefulness as race tracks, but they went on to new lives as play weapons (whips, swords, etc.). I can still feel the sting those three foot hunks of rubbery plastic exacted when used in pretend anger.

Slot-cars. They were right up there in the pantheon of toy Christmas pleasures, along with Big Wheel and my black Sears Spyder five-speed "muscle" bike. I could be getting some of my Yuletide memories jumbled with birthdays here but I remember the slot-cars distinctly on Christmas, racing them all day long under the tree.

Looking back now, my favorite time of Christmas wasn't rushing out of bed to see what the unkempt fat man and his mangy venison chauffeurs had delivered but rather putting things together afterward. My parents - and later, sister - were often up until the wee hours stitching together my Kris Kringle loot but there were several items still wrapped come morning and many required assembly once opened. This was the shit "Santa" hadn't delivered (presents from people living south of the North Pole). Dad and I often set to work on this task together and it was one of the few father/son moments I remember fondly. The other was Sunday mornings with the paper and powered donuts. After that it drops off into the abyss.

Other items of note:

• Unicycle. Not sure why my friend Brian and I learned to maneuver these things but I can tell you it's not like a bike: you do in fact "forget" how to ride as I found out not too long ago in a painful display.
  
• Remote-controlled model car
• Rock'em Sock'em Robots
• Barrel full of Monkeys
  
• Electric Football Game. Electricity vibrated the little players around the "field" - perhaps this was my highest tech toy.
• Various Play-Doh toys (mainly used to carve up said play-doh into numerous shapes and sizes). My Mom used to make homemade "play-doh" as well, of wildly varying color and quality.

Man, reading all this now I see this kid was really spoiled as a child with all manner of crap. Somehow my parents came through with the goods come Christmas and birthdays, regardless of our financial straits. If only there were but two days in the year then things would have been golden all around. Damn Gregorians.

Oh yeah - I nearly forgot perhaps my favorite toy of all: Mattel's VaRoom! ...

Varoom by Mattel
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Darkness on the Edge of Life

My favorite album has remained constant since 1978 and likely will stay on top until I go down under (that doesn't mean a trip to Australia). Or perhaps not. One can only hope it'll change. Why hope for a change? Well, in a very real way this choice is a barometer of my growth as an individual. Or rather, in this case, a lack thereof.

I'm talking about my 'favorite album' and not 'favorite collections of songs,' so that counts out greatest hits and other compilations like The Jam's Snap!, Elvis Presley's Golden Records and Sun Sessions, Beach Boys' Endless Summer, Psychedelic Furs' All This and Nothing and Elvis Costello's Girls, Girls, Girls.

There are lots of #2s for me, many of which are #1 on a given day:

• Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, Nebraska, Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils and Dust
  
• The Clash's London Calling and Sandinista!
• Elvis Costello's Imperial Bedroom, Get Happy!!, Armed Forces, This Year's Model, Trust and My Aim is True, and Spike - Elvis wins the consistency prize - he has the most albums on my favorites list.
  
• Velvet Underground's Velvet Underground and Nico
• Ramones' Self-titled debut
• B-52's Self-titled debut
• Jim Carroll's Catholic Boy
• John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band
  
• Billy Joel's 52nd Street and Turnstiles
• The Beatles' Rubber Soul, Help!, With The Beatles and Revolver
• Beach Boy's Pet Sounds
  
• The Rolling Stones' Sticky Fingers, Let it Bleed and Exile on Main Street
• Elvis Presley's From Elvis in Memphis
  
• Bob Dylan's Bob Dylan, Highway 61 Revisited, Bringing it all Back Home, The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan  and Blood on the Tracks
• Patti Smith's Horses
  
• Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bollocks
• Gang of Four's Entertainment
  
• Kristin Hersh's Murder, Misery and then Goodnight
• X's Los Angeles
• U2's October and War
• Graham Parker's Squeezing out Sparks
• Nirvana's Nevermind and MTV Unplugged in New York
• Pearl Jam's Ten
  
• Green Day's American Idiot
• Steve Forbert's Alive on Arrival
• Throwing Muses' Red Heaven
• The Stooges' Raw Power
• Violent Femmes' Hallowed Ground
• Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate and Songs of Leonard Cohen
  

But my number #1 has always been Bruce Springsteen's Darkness on the Edge of Town.

It might seem a strange choice for me.

"Geez," you could say, "you seem to be a pretty cynical guy with a decidedly dark sense of humor. There nothing funny going on here. It's deadly, even stridently, serious. And no cynicism to be found. You don't seem to have any religious faith, something that seems to permeate each of these songs. What gives? Dylan, Costello, Stones, Green Day, and most of the others, they make sense. But Springsteen? Darkness?"

True, there's not a shred of humor on this record. It might be one of the most bleak albums ever made, unceasingly so. Yet it is filled with optimism and faith. There is plenty of religious imagery. It's core to the people whose stories are being told. In the end, though, that's just imagery and metaphor. This faith - these songs - are all about a fundamental belief in yourself. Faith in you. Faith held even in the most horrifying situations, and through the most numbingly mundane.

And there is not an ounce of sentiment on this album. Nothing to escape the dark heart of humanity. The words are basic, overly redundant, devoid of the purple prose Bruce was known for up to that point and fell back to again afterward. Some of the songs are almost unlistenable taken by themselves - they build on Lennon's Plastic Ono Band Primal Scream foundation, ratcheting it up several notches with blood curdling contortions - yet they fit into this world perfectly. Conversely, many of the tunes are my favorites even outside the context of the whole: Racing in the Street, Badlands, Adam Raised a Cane, Candy. All would be in my personal top forty.

Darkness is not a 'concept' album. Yet it is. A series of small moments, events that occur in small towns and cities across America. Rich and poor and middle class, they're all affected by the dissolution of hope and dreams and faith in yourself and in others. The bonds and chains of family.

It was released in the hey day of the first punk explosion and shares a lot with the best of that lot (especially the Clash, though they focused on the political element of faith perhaps more than they did the personal).

I look at Darkness as the first of a quartet of albums Springsteen recorded in this same vein, the others being Nebraska, Ghost of Tom Joad and Devils & Dust. These albums share a similar core, a common conceit, but it is not a musical one; rather, it is thematic, and it is attitude. Sure, it might be fair to say Bruce covers this same turf on everything he's recorded. There's at least some truth to that. But the hard, unflinching, bleak, bare, milk-all-the-sentimentality-out-of-it attitude exists for me only on these Springsteen records, and not many others, of any artist. It lives for me on Darkness most of all. (Leonard Cohen's Songs of Love and Hate and the Velvet Underground and Nico live in this world for me as well. There were seeds of it on Born to Run in Thunder Road and Backstreets but I love that album for wholly different reasons.)

In the end, all of what I've written here is just a big load of pretentious bullshit.

None of this explains why I've been coming back to this record time and time again since 1978. Why I invariably play the thing from beginning to end each time. Why it's never just background music when I do. The whole thing can be explained by two verses on the record. They come from different characters and different songs at wildly different tempos and moods. One from the point of view of the protagonist's loved one (in this case, his girlfriend) and the other describing the protagonist himself (first person). They perhaps sum up two different, warring, sides of my being better than anything else I've found in art. The first pokes at my core, borne of my upbringing, and the second is aspirational, what I've been striving to get to ever since:

1. Racing in the Street: She sits on the porch of her daddy's house, but all her pretty dreams are torn. She stares off alone into the night with the eyes of one who hates for just being born.
2. Badlands: For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside, that it ain't no sin to be glad you're alive, I wanna find one face that ain't looking through me, I want to find one place, I want to spit in the face of these badlands.

The protagonist of each song on Darkness is always striving to live life, not satisfied merely to exist. Even in the face of devastation. Even when all of the others around him have given up.

I want to identify with those protagonists but I know I can't, not really. In the same way Jules wants to believe he's the Shepherd at the end of Pulp Fiction but knows he's still the 'Tyranny of Evil Men.' But I'm trying, Ringo, real hard, to be the Shepherd. Maybe if and when I finally make it, this record will fall by the wayside.

Until then, "Lights out tonight, trouble in the heartland. Got a head-on collision smashing in my guts, man. I'm caught in a crossfire that I don't understand."

The Land of Endless Benderville

She didn't move much, having no patience for locomotion. He had no appetite for 'bon voyage' himself anymore, even if it simply meant stumbling to his precious toilet to "pray" (mixing bowls were now the exclusive receptacle for his reverence). A couple truly in harmony as they drifted into the third decade of marriage. Mom and Dad.

To be fair, each of these two frozen peas in their bath robed pods were crippled with disabilities by that point in their lives, he with the effects of prolonged alcoholism and she the aftermath of a stroke (followed by some sustained hard drinking of her own). As such, getting around was tricky for them, especially as the day wore on and their wheels got greasier. What's one to do when travel turns the stomach? Why take up camp in our living room, of course! Poised catty corner from one another on their respective sofa/caskets, they floated amidst a rich nicotine cloud while swilling their livers into banana cream pie.

Each day, the stench of death wrapped its gums further around those front room walls as I passed through, a kid just crawling into his teens made to play the proactive undertaker, prepping these cadavers perhaps a bit early. As it turns out, 35 years and counting too soon for her; only a handful of months for him. (His banana cream pie exploded relatively quickly thanks to the extreme temperatures of the distilled fuel cooking it; hers continues slower roasting on hops, barley and grape of the vine.) Of course, the difference between the two is just semantics to me: she's been dead nearly as long as he has, the body just hasn't played its part quickly enough for my liking. That reads harsher than it's meant to: I wish the woman no harm but simply yearn for the sort of closure I can only imagine her passing might bring. She's lived in Ireland pretty much since the early 80s and I've had no contact with her since that time. My sister keeps in touch and regularly sends her money even as Mom continues to needle her in ways she thinks are so sly yet are jackhammer brutal, about as subtle as a chainsaw to the chest. I can picture her smirk across 25 years apart as if I'd just seen it five minutes ago. Mother dearest is a hard person to like but challenging to forget.

I must admit I have a burning anger and resentment toward my mother that knows no bounds; that much is patently obvious to you, I'm sure. It goes well beyond the rational and as an adult I should be able to put it behind me. I know rationally that she did the best she thought she could and wasn't equipped emotionally or physically to do more. I'm aware factually that she had one helluva drunk for a husband and life certainly slipped her a mickey in the form of a debilitating stroke smack dab in the prime of her life. But the emotions I feel are nonetheless very real and rawly primal. I am trying to exorcise these demons in therapy - and on the pages of this blog - but they remain fresh as ever some 30 years after they first consciously surfaced (and some 48 years after they began to germinate in the recesses of my psyche).

Anyway, let's get back to the main stage: our living room circa 1975. I've illustrated the details of its ambience elsewhere on these pages so we'll focus instead on the corpses themselves; in particular, let's perform a sort of sociological autopsy, making our 'Y' incision back into time, circumstance, and personality. Of course, with my faulty memory full of mostly holes and well defended barriers, we won't be traveling all that far. Nor will I be reeling off facts like so many baseball box scores. The best I can hope for is "truthiness."

I've written elsewhere that my parents wanted more than anything for us to at least appear to be a successful family. You know the image for the time: Don and Betty Draper, before their divorce. Dad certainly drank like Don (and then some). Mom often dolled herself up Betty-style, if only in case she was seen by the neighbors. Of course, this was in the fifties and sixties when they were still mobile and made the occasional social call, back when they still had visitors over to the house who weren't necessarily also raging alcoholics stopping by for a taste of free booze.

My folks liked to fancy our brood a modern spin on Father Knows Best but internally we were more a precursor to Rodney Dangerfield's family in Natural Born Killers. And by the time the 70s boogied on in things were unraveling despite our best efforts at juggling shiny "we're normal" props to keep outsiders distracted from the spreading chaos. Mom was still socially active in the neighborhood at the dawn of 1972, going so far as to act the role of Den Mother for my Cub Scouts troop. But it was a taut-to-tearing tension-filled facade around a rotting core.

Then June of that year rolled around when the facade came crashing down and the rot permeated through to the surface, smothering us all.

June of 1972 rushed steaming into the Seattle area, unusual for early summer in the Pacific northwest. The first day of the month found my mother spending a number of hours out in the swelter, planting flowers or pruning shrubs; I clearly remember that she was pretty tuckered out that evening. Sometime in the pre-dawn hours of the next morning an errant clot which had formed broke free from its bonds and drifted up the blood stream until it lodged into a main artery neck-high, blocking off a good bit of oxygen to her brain as she slept. No one is sure exactly when this process began or how long her grey matter had been deprived of life's necessities but the condition wasn't noticed until my Dad awoke to her flailing about and turning blue. I remember the ambulance arriving and the subsequent panic I felt as they raced her away. It would be several weeks before she was back home again, after a lengthy stay at Northwest Hospital for physical therapy. She'd go back for several additional extended stays over the next couple of years.

The stroke took its toll on my mother physically (she was partially paralyzed down her right side and had to learn to speak and walk again). Had she stuck with physical therapy she'd probably have made a near complete recovery over time but she preferred to wallow in her misery. Certainly understandable initially, but she never made the swim back up to the surface again. The negative tendencies of her personality that had tinged the edges of her being - selfishness, vindictiveness, paranoia - were magnified by the stroke, making their way front and center. Her positive qualities - humor, streaks of generosity - seemingly disappeared, never to be seen again (well, her humor re-surfaced, curdled into viciously hateful jabs at whomever happened to wander into her sights). She always drank socially but that changed once she came back from the hospital: she took a nose dive into a gallon jug of table vino and has remained forever offshore in this noxious red sea. Well, that's likely not true; probably she's switched swimming pools out of necessity living in the land of the shamrock shakes, plunging instead into the black sea that is Guinness. She doesn't consider this drinking because beer and wine don't count (the mathematics of denial at work; I myself earned a Ph.D in the field). Mom eventually got somewhat better physically, though she seemingly fought any recovery tooth and nail and has herself refused to acknowledge progress. She can walk with a cane, but prefers - in fact, relishes - using a wheel chair. I liken her in this regard to a less funny variation on SCTV's Guy Caballero, who openly used a wheelchair "for respect!"

On the paternal side of the house, my mother's stroke could have sent Dad down one of two paths: 1.) toward the enlightened siren of sobriety so that he could deal with all the additional responsibilities something like this brings to bear on a family or 2.) down the tubes into the Land of Endless Benderville. Wanna guess which direction ol' Dad chose? Well, in the beginning he tried reaching for the summit of sobriety's semblance before very quickly slipping off the crevice into his own personal bottled abyss for good, putting the onus of family obligations on my sister's shoulders while I ran and hid in my head (a very dark cavern indeed but my mind's eye has since grown used to the perpetual twilight within).

My sister was 17 when Mom had her stroke and I was a few months shy of 10. Sis had just finished her junior year of high school and yet was thrust into very adult responsibilities, not that this type of thing was new to her: as soon as she got her driver's license on her sweet sixteenth, Mom started sending her off to go drag Dad out of the bar and drive his ass back home. She was just a kid but was nonetheless the only one in the family with a steady job (working the register after school at a local pharmacy). My sister did her best to live in two worlds, one where she could be a typical early 70's teenager spending as much time out of the house as she could and the other where she acted as a sort of caregiver to parents still in their forties and a nearly psychotic baby brother.

Some parental background:

Dad was born in 1924 to an English mother and Irish father. Like me, he was raised with an older sister. We visited my aunt quite a bit growing up and I both liked and feared her (she had a caustic personality that held nothing back). Dad's father died just six months after his birth, so he ended up being raised by his Mom and step father. Pop apparently had quite the contentious relationship with his "new dad" (so it seems did most everyone else from all I've heard about the SOB). I have vague memories of visiting with my paternal grandmother and her husband once or twice as a kid (we weren't allowed to call him grandfather, which gives you a clue to his makeup). This grandmother (we referred to her as "Seattle Grandma") died when I was fairly young, though I don't recall exactly when. Dad married very young and had twin daughters, a son and a third girl with his first wife. His heavy boozing was already well underway even as a teenager and it left deep scars through this family just as it would the sequel I was to be part of. Marriage take 1 ended in large part because of an affair my father had begun with the woman who would become my mother. Mom and Dad married in June of 1952 and my sister was born 3 years later, followed 7 years hence by yours truly. I wasn't to learn of my half brother and sisters from his first marriage until I was older because of the circumstances surrounding ... well everything.

Mom was born in 1929 to a Norwegian couple who had recently immigrated from off the fjords outside Bergen (in fact, I believe my mother was conceived in the 'old country' though she was born here). Mom had a brother nine years her senior and by all accounts as the baby of the family, she was spoiled by the folks and big bro. I got the feeling my mother was quite embarrassed by her foreign-born parents: she always had a burning need to fit in and they were "different." My maternal grandfather died before I was born and my uncle passed away from a heart attack when I was not yet 3, so I have no first hand memories of them, but word is that both were fun loving guys. I did have a chance to get to know my grandmother as a child and visited her often. She was a very old fashioned woman but very warm. She most definitely disapproved of my father and of my parents' lifestyle in general (drinking, smoking, etc.). She had definite ideas on the concepts of heaven and hell and made it clear to me as to the direction Mom and Dad were headed. This was sort of disconcerting to a seven year old kid and I really didn't know how to take it (I had started formulating my own opinions on matters of religion which didn't jive with grandma's but I wisely kept them to myself around her). She terrified my father on several levels, I think. I'm told that Dad was on a several days in the making bender at a local dive hotel when my mom went into labor with me, so Grandma marched down to this fine establishment and dragged him out and up to the hospital by his ear like a naughty schoolboy. Or at least something to that effect. Grandma died of bone cancer in 1971.

Mom converted to Catholicism not long after the stroke. Actually, this process might have started before then, probably around the time my grandmother died (she would have had a fit over such a thing, a staunch Norwegian Lutheran turned born-again Jehovah's Witness; Catholics were barely above Satan Worshippers in her "enlightened" worldview). My mother was obsessed with all things Irish and the stroke accentuated these compulsions. In the end, once Dad died, she went the rest of the route in this transformation: changing her last name to Finnegan and moving to the far western edges of the Emerald Isle, attempting to live out the stories in her favorite novels. More power to her. Her dream was to become a writer herself, and she did pound out a good chunk of a novel back in the 70s that I imagine is still "in progress." It was a pretty funny read from the pages I had a chance to see, though sadly that was not the intent. Mom had been a "homemaker" most of her life, with some minor bookkeeping work here and there - in fact, she'd never even learned to drive - so how did she/does she make ends meet? Between my father's social security, whatever she's managed to wring from the Irish government, the charity of the families she's "rented" rooms from over the years, and my sister's contribution to the cause, she makes do. The fact that she's still alive at 81 years of age given close to 40 years of chronic alcoholism and chain smoking is a minor medical miracle and demonstrates the sheer power of denial over physics and biology. I learned at the knee of the master.

I realize I've been going on and on here without much of a point. Which means the post fits in with the rest of my "stories." And so, dear reader, with that I bid you adieu.

Burnt Brown

On a bender of thought stumbling sidelong this evening

with tipsy discharges of imaginary sweetness

licking my illusions clean,

flashing back into blackened white still frames hung on breeze blown clotheslines

when we were neighborhood children at play.

One last nightcap of wondrous mind fucks gone walking

as I drink in this drunk of resplendent endorphins

braced for moonlight's burnt brown masquerade.

One last whisper of weakness that is my calling, my vocation

as I breathe in this bracing narcotic reaction

of life's burnt brown belief smoking cold.

This weekend, snakes melt into childhood driveway cement as I perspire into my past,

until fountains of fire and pinwheels of blinding luminescence fill my eyes swimming ...

... of joyful dancing, sparklers in hand;

trailing streams of light like a flaming bubble wand across our front lawn floating.

... of celebrating my independence from life's suffocation

at least until the morning as the holiday fades,

when evergreen hopes in the moment are revealed as everyday burnt brown once again.

Traces of Life in his Cognitive Dissonance

He lurches at me, yellowing eyes rolling in delirium, cane in hand as he rises from the couch, a distended disheveled shell in olive workman's slacks of fury staggering my way. I run through the kitchen down the back stairs, slamming the hallway door to the basement shut. 


"You goddamn sonuvabitch, you little shit!" 


Wham!  Dad falls against the door and throws it open, but I am already down the stairs and out the back into the yard. He is in no condition to follow - he couldn't even make it down the steps without collapsing; he knows that, even in his feverish state.  In the backyard, the rain soaking me through, I look up at our breakfast nook window and his face appears. "You stay out there, you bastard!" And then he's gone.  Back to the sofa and his bottle.


I don't remember what set Dad off in this particular instance. I might have turned the TV on or slammed a door or otherwise somehow disturbed his stupor.  He won't remember it in another hour.  It is the spring of 1977.  This cycle will repeat itself a couple more times over the next few months, the last of his life.

By the time my Dad lifted off this mortal coil in August of '77, he'd long since departed in all the ways that really matter.  A Francis Bacon painting congealed into jaunice-tinged whiskers, my Dad bled degenerate exhaustion onto the fabric of his couch.  The sheer energy of dying a slow death had finally caught up with him.  Only when whipped into confused fury directed my way did he perk up.  Perhaps I represented in too sharp a focus all those he'd disappointed.  Maybe in his feverish moments he foresaw my future and it reflected himself back like a mirror, unleashing his anger for the poisonous pieces of him that were to engulf me.

I look back fondly on those times Dad chased me enraged through the house, for at least in those moments he seemed coherent at some level, even if the cognition he displayed reeked of cognitive dissonance.  Still, he was awake, showing traces of life. After all, he didn't live much in 1977.  Not really. Until he wasn't alive at all.