Dance of Drunkards

The Wicked Witch of the West

was but a patsy

for the evil goody two shoes Gilda

perpetrates in perpetuity

on munchkins blissfully unaware.

"It's not easy being green"

is not Kermit's lament alone

and the companionship of flying monkeys

are a cold comfort indeed.

Thoughts of the shifting moralities

of these Ozraelites

haunt me needlessly,

like all good hauntings should.

Meanwhile, the cold rain

of February

bleeds wet upon the overcoat

as I remember Father

and his perpetual legs-akimbo

dance of drunkards,

steps as ageless as cirrhosis

scarring time

like the wizard that he was.

"Ignore the man behind the curtain throwing up onto his slacks.

The great and powerful Chuck has spoken."

The Dyed In the Dermis Statue of Inky Naked Liberty

My father always had a lady on his arm and she was unfailingly naked. No, he was not a galavanting playboy or strip club devotee; rather, this was a tattoo that ran down his inner arm from elbow to wrist. It was one of the more visible, persistent reminders of the innumerable mistakes Dad had made while in the throes of alcoholic bliss. It was perhaps the single biggest source of embarrassment for the old man, who took to wearing long sleeve shirts at all times, even in the midst of a particularly noxious mid-August swelter. I'm guessing it was just too large to consider removal, at least with the means available back in the fifties and sixties when he might have been in the position to weigh such an option.

I never thought much of The Lady, and frankly don't even remember the details all that clearly. I think it adorned his right arm but maybe he had one on each; my addled flashbacks have been edited for sanity's sake and these bits must have been left on the cutting room floor. I do vaguely recall asking him about it as a toddler but the only really clear memories I've retained relative to this matter are the incessant threats my parents made as to just what they'd do to me if I mentioned "her" in front of others. The folks lived in terror of outsiders discovering dents in what they viewed as a lovingly crafted model of Leave-It-To-Beaverism. The truth is that dents were the least of this model's concerns when all that remained were gaping holes by the time the late 1960s rolled around, the ghosts of June, Ward, Wally and the Beaver flying off into the night in horror at being associated with our unique spin of familial dysfunction.

I think The Lady is the primary reason I never desired a tattoo of any sort and have never understood the appeal of body art in others, whether it be ink or piercings or like forms of self mutilation. In fact, I don't see the difference between a person with piercings or tattoos and the ragged razor scars of a cutter. Sure, there's an obvious difference in intent and the former might be more aesthetically pleasing than the latter; however, the psychology of intent can be many layered and not at all obvious to the conscious mind while aesthetics are, by definition, subjective.

A news recap this morning showing a group of Independence Day weekend revelers included a dude with what looked to be a very familiar tat running down the length of his Flexor digitorum and the hazy memories of Dad's ink-drawn Elke just sort of washed over me like a fog.

The 4th of July is often the time when my childhood remembrances come to the fore: it was my father's favorite holiday after Christmas and it is my mother's birthday. She'll be 82 tomorrow. When Mom was celebrating her 41st birthday, my cousin Jennie (my Mom's niece) gave birth to her daughter, Lisa (who, if my highly advanced math skills have calculated accurately, will herself be 41 tomorrow). Dad loved to buy and light off fireworks on our country's birthday and we did so each year until my Mom had her stroke in June of '72 and Dad took his final plunge into the bottle shortly thereafter, never to return again until his body bobbed to the surface for a toe-tagged gurney ride to the morgue a little over 5 years later. But prior to this slide into oblivion, I had a giddy anticipation of each Independence Day that was only bested by Santa's annual sleigh ride.

Where I grew up, "Safe & Sane" fireworks stands started popping up in June all over the town and we'd peruse the season's "new" offerings with excitement. Really, there wasn't much new year to year (sparklers and snakes intermixed with various pinwheels, rockets, and fiery cannons). No firecrackers or bottle rockets or M80s and the like. They were certainly available on the sly but Dad mostly stuck with the legal stuff. After the fireworks were expended and we were done running across the lawn with fists full of sparklers, finished watching the "snakes" melt into the sidewalk where'd they leave a stain lasting the rest of the summer, sick of going 'ooh' and 'ahh' at the pinwheels and sparkle rockets as Dad ignites their glory; after all that, we'd go to bed and wake up again into the usual drama that defined our lives outside of the spell of the 4th and Christmas (and, perhaps, for a few hours on Halloween). Thanksgiving sometimes dampened our dysfunction, but just as often accelerated it (sort of like a gasoline-based fire extinguisher, if their were such a beast).

The Lady on the Arm and 4th of July seem inexorably intwined, even if the random news clip hadn't jousted the Freudian gnome living on the European continent of my subconscious to change the reel of my yesterday-dreams to Scenes of Dad's Ink-stained Other Woman. I guess it's because pop did wear short sleeves while orchestrating the fireworks, likely because the fear of polyester melting into his skin outweighed that of the neighbors eyeballing his epidermis artwork.

In the end, when Dad was cremated, The Lady on the Arm went the way of the fireworks that freed her for an annual night unveiled. I guess it was her destiny.

Ooh, Ahh.

Memorial Sap

Memorial tree sap pastes my car

until the garden hose and chamois sponge it clean.

If only memories could be vanquished

with a turn of the spicket, a touch of elbow grease.

Father bleeds into my mind's eye,

all indigo camel, jaundiced bottom shelf;

Mother's wheels grinding behind him,

all stink-eye pasty, acid tongued whiplash.

People say I have her nose and self pity;

I have his eyes and liver.

The spitting image, but it matters little.

Dissolving ghostly bygones

into the present tense,

I breath a sigh of relief half restrained

and go about my day,

these remembrances pasted still to my tomorrows.

A Toilet of Beauty

My father grows old in the toilet,

a desolate room

with the air thick as mold.

----

He works life there in perpetual sweat,

a captain of industry

building factories of sick.

----

Little bits of wonder found in claustrophobic vistas

often linger in his melancholy,

kissing the linoleum.

(even when repugnant to his hesitant eye -

even as the porcelain drains his dreams bone dry.)

----

The mirror blissfully out of reach,

my father hugs his friend,

wrapping his arms 'round the cold white wet.

----

Yes, my father grows old in the toilet

amidst his softly sour splatter,

the holy cracking plaster,

and half finished caulking consecrating his divine.

----

So many contemplations,

so many toilets of my own

since a childhood spent listening to my father pray.

The eternally pungent confessional,

with a compassion beyond religion,

kneeling, catharsis, release ...

Until a trembling tug of the handle

flushes the misery for a moment from his mind.

And from mine.

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.

33 revolutions ('round a middle aged son)

The night stands before me, sick.

Dawn has seemed absent for eons in this moment;

forgotten, abandoned, broken.

The day lies behind me, blessed.

An abscess to its optimism, the dusk drains me off along with the light;

put down, thrown up, sticky.

My dad reached bottom thirty-three years ago this week,

touching down into the morgue in the basement at Everett General.

Gastly, ghostly, jaundiced.

Everett General, the hospital of my birth, a stone's throw from our home.

His bottle from that point forever empty (just one more for the road, formaldehyde straight up).

Rotting, rigor, relief.

The worst hangover is, in the end, no hangover at all (in fact, is nothing whatsoever).

Not when you're staring up fish-eyed from a gurney at a "standard 'Y' incision"

slicing down to your belly revealing booze as your religion.

(the M.E. crosses herself: "we have a high priest among us today, my young interns.")

Not when you're cooking into ashes in the crematorium oven.

Not when your memories serve to brutalize the psyche of your children.

No. Soup. For. You. The bar is closed.

Dad

He lay on the couch with the worn gold pattern,

his head hanging off, a death grip on his bottle,

drooling on the rug braids with 100 proof spittle,

heaving into mixing bowls when drowning from withdrawal,

his beauty burning bitterly, corroding through our family.

His gentleness metabolized in ways his body couldn't,

gestating into madness simply hating for existing,

giving up the ghost at last in a joyless plunge to bottom,

looking past oblivion on the way to a toe-tag gurney.

But there was light mixed into darkness from a man who treasured Christmas,

sharing powdered donuts and the love of Sunday funnies.

Teaching me to ride my bike and breakfast made for dinner,

buying kites and Uno bars and Birch Bay beach trip summers.

Past a 52 year old cirrhoses crippled body

lived a joyous spirit trampled into viscous poison.

Maybe I can ferret out the diamonds in the dogshit,

shovel past the toxic bits and scrounge for fonder memories.

Fond remembrances, they clearly do exist:

it's just the smell of the rest that keeps me away.

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.

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.

A Thousand Innocuous Admonitions

A child's eye view of life's possibilities is expansive beyond boundaries at first, a vision bright enough to blind an adult's perspective long since relegated to the shadows.

But then slowly the light dims, the vibrant colors grow flat and muted; the edges sanding smooth, blending in.  A thousand innocuous admonitions handed down through generations combine to form an unseen family heirloom of dysfunction we all carry inside to greater or lesser degree.  Growing.  And choking.  Sewing a web around your dreams in translucent chains, hiding hideous across the expanse of your life.

Young childhood.  The unfettered joy washing over me with my hands on a new book, or a hot water heater cardboard box, or a kite.  The exhilaration in flying my bike up a plywood ramp over an overturned garbage can.  Happiness that trumps the best high I ever had as a grown up.  But it was a drug in itself, the flame we chase our whole adult lives, whether through workaholism, or alcoholism, or religion, or sex.

It's ironic we're so absorbed on tasting the pleasure again for ourselves that we end up unwittingly extinguishing this very ability in our children, our own chase futile thanks to our parents' rendition of the same sad song a generation ago.  The gift that keeps on giving.  Adam raised a Cain.  It's as old as history's introduction of the first vestiges of neuroses upon us in the form of predators, famine, drought, whatever.

The genesis of this particularly self indulgent screed was a mother standing in line at the supermarket today, yakking about some sort of marketing campaign on her cell phone out of one side of her mouth and telling her kid to shut up out the other side.  Maybe the child will emulate type-A obsessions the likes of dear ol' Mom one day, or perhaps he'll cultivate a drug habit instead, before he kicks that in favor of a fundamentalist bent aimed at beating down some target demographic vulnerable enough to curry his misdirected rage.  Now maybe Ma's just having a bad day and the kid'll emerge relatively intact from his youth.  Or it could be the brat's a born sociopath who deserves whatever tongue lashing he gets, though I'm not sure Mom even knew what she was yelling at him about.  In the end, I gotta bad feeling about this particular mother and child (re)union:  I think she's into herself pretty intently, he's mostly left on the outside looking in, and the prognosis for him isn't on the sunny side of life.

This parental watershed flashed me back to my childhood days.  My folks liked to try and put on a stylish face to outsiders, even when their world was obviously collapsing around them.  They remind me now of the Bouvier-Beale gals of Grey Gardens fame, all consumed with manners and close-ups and seemingly oblivious to the death, filth and smell that surrounded them.

Mom and Dad's plastered-on-smiles paranoia in mind, I was always told to shut up whenever we had company over.  In case I might point out to strangers the fact that Dad just finished his usual morning dry-heaves into the family vomit bowl an hour before their arrival. Or, "hey, didya know that isn't coffee Mom's sipping from her mug!?!"  In fact, when one of my friends spoke up out of turn in this setting, I would be the one who would be told to shut up even though I hadn't said anything.  It was comical in retrospect.  As though I'd developed expert ventriloquism skills and was throwing my voice.  Consequently, I've rarely spoken up in casual conversation from then to now.  I have a lot to say but am compelled to keep it to myself.  I make up for it with the written word, I guess, but my verbosity here does not translate to other forms of communication in my life.

If I had kids, would I have visited an innate shame of one's own opinion upon them?  Probably not.  My particular dysfunctions would likely have resulted in some other psychological damage, as unique as a snowflake up close and as depressingly similar from afar.  Some things aren't meant to happen, thankfully.  If Shirley McLaine is right, I guess there is some lucky soul out there who was spared my particular brand of self-absorbed parental neglect.

Or maybe I'd be a great parent.  It could happen.  And might happen still.   It's this last possibility that really gives me the chills.

The Mark of Catharsis

September, 1975. Dad lies stupefied on the couch, the foam padding exposed from rips in the cushions absorbing his sweat and bourbon-laced run-off spittle. The television in the corner talks to no one, some random game show host babbling on about the wonderful parting gifts. Mom is likely engrossed in her wine and a book on the love seat at the other end, but then occasionally and persistently calling to the dog for no particular reason. I feel bad for our mutt. Leave Snooks in peace, Mom; she's just trying to block this all out like me. I can hear these sounds faintly but still irritatingly clear, arriving with the smoke through the heating duct upstairs into my room. My Dad's wheezing under the game show noise is oddly comforting in its disturbance, letting me know that all is "normal" in my world. My world, where the horrific is soothing simply because anything else would imply abandonment. I aspire to Brady Bunch and Leave It To Beaver familial bliss only in the abstract, with the dysfunction I've come to depend on always bleeding through to balance my equilibrium (hence Leave It To Bitcher).

I'm lying on my bed, staring up at the ceiling. Trying to write smooth my barbed feelings with a number 2 pencil. It doesn't help. Bad poetry. Awkward imagery missing the mark of catharsis. Maybe I'll move to the desk and my typewriter; things always flow more easily for me from the keystrokes than they do by hand. I slug down the last of the cold coffee on the nightstand, jump up to flip over Meet The Beatles! and drop the needle on side two. George Harrison drowns out the sounds of slow death downstairs with his lead on the first track, Don't Bother Me. How appropriate, I think. And I smile.

I found Meet The Beatles at the Salvation Army Thrift Store two days ago and have pretty much been playing it non-stop ever since. I have memorized the liner notes (35 years later, I can still recite most of them from a usually faulty memory). It's as though they are a brand new band with a wholly new sound, exposing to me the doldrums that otherwise constitute the mid-70's music scene, at least as I was aware of it through Seattle radio up to that point.

I stumbled upon the Fab Four quite by accident, so in a very real way I am just now meeting the Beatles, though they broke up almost six years ago (and Capital first released this album to US consumers nearly seven years prior to that). It is a bit scratchy in spots but is a revelation to me nonetheless. And it will soon lead to the rest of their catalog, then to Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Ramones, Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, The Clash and Elvis Costello (the crew that would collectively constitute my pantheon of rock and roll).

My rock and roll pantheon would later lead me to a promised land of musical magic, filled with thousands of artists coming from bluegrass to hip-hop and everywhere in between. But right now, in September of 1975, at perhaps the lowest point emotionally of my childhood, it is the Beatles alone who have saved me from bubblegum purgatory and early 70's "classic rock" hell. And in some ways helped to save me from myself.

George and Arlene

George and Arlene Warfield were the Burns and Allen of our block growing up, but unwitting and without the humor. Their kitchen seemed to swallow the rest of the house whole, the action in their hovel centering on their breakfast nook at all times. Mom and Dad visited often back in my formative years.  My sister and I occasionally in tow, they lubricated their friendship with the Warfields around the table there with the aid of strong drink interrupted only by muttered mundane conversation (much of it forgotten before it was uttered).  I spent many an hour observing this ritual from my vantage point as a toddler in the corner, soda pop in hand and their cigarette smoke swirling around my head.

George was both deliberate and reserved with a working man's gait to match his garb while Arlene loomed loquacious, her cartoonish features drifting somewhere between Eve Arden, Lucille Ball and melting candle wax.  I remember with horror the times she bent down to kiss me on the cheek, the gobs of excess lipstick smearing across my face and the stink of her perfume burning my sinuses.  I can think back across forty years and smell it still.

In my earlier years our family made the trek down the block three houses to George and Arlene's place for New Year's Eve.  My sister and I watched the tube in the living room while the adults boozed it up in that kitchen, then we'd all rendezvous at midnight to bang pots and pans on the front porch.

George wore his blue collar like a priest's vestment, central to his being.  That being said, I wasn't exactly sure where he worked or what he did.  If George was reserved, Arlene was aggressively kind and this quality frightened me no end. I stayed over at their home for several days on one occasion when my folks went out of town and it was a surreal experience, much of that owed to this smothering affection, very different from my home life in ways even now I couldn't qualify.  It wasn't that my parents weren't affectionate (that wasn't one of their failings); rather, it was that the folks were specifically affectionate while Arlene (and George) did it as a general part of who they were.  They seemed alien to me, the Warfields; consequently, I felt ill at ease around them.

My parents grew apart from George and Arlene after my Mom's stroke immobilized her and my Dad's alcoholism spiked, his body abandoning him to the couch and the bathroom and stumbling distance between the two.  The Warfields liked to drink just fine but they weren't part of my Dad's bourbon brotherhood, weren't fellow travelers on his bullet train to Cirrhosisville (though maybe they occasionally rowed a slow boat on the journey in that general direction).

One of the things I found odd in this relationship was that I don't recall a single time the Warfields made the trek up to our house.  I'm sure they did, but the relationship didn't flourish in this setting. They were merely background fodder in our domain; others took center stage here.  No, the relationship was rooted in a single direction - south, down the block, their place.  And my folks just couldn't make the journey anymore.

George and Arlene have surely since gone on to their great reward but are forever frozen in time for me, suspended in the animation that was our neighborhood in early 1970's North Everett.   They represent that time and place in my mind along with a select few others, as surely as 8-track tapes and Lincoln Logs.

I might have been closer (in aspiration) to the Dwyers but they were practically another species on the evolutionary scale of families.  Foreign yet familiar, the Warfields were more within striking distance. The missing link up from our prehistoric depths of dysfunction.

Family Guy

Family Christmas Party. Washington St. 12/12/2009.

I had a fascinating time with more of my relatives than I think I've been under one roof with before, discounting 1970s funerals. Dozens. Perhaps appropriately, those disco days included more than one close relation slipping off this mortal coil, including dear ol' Dad. My father is the reason most of us under said roof are alive. He's the memory that binds us together, and at least indirectly the reason some like me are damaged.

Most of those in attendance I'd never met before; of those I had, the previous get-togethers had been brief, mainly at funerals - there's that word again - one/two/three decades removed.

Everyone last night was very nice and down-to-earth, approachable. Kids of every personality, inclination and age abounded. Oh, and those kids brought their children too. :-). You can glean a lot about people through the behavior of their offspring and the young ones last night were each one terrific, many wise beyond their years and all filled with joyful life.

I had some great conversations with nieces and nephews and their families. I also talked at length with siblings I'd never gotten the chance to know growing up. That was fantastic and illuminating. Perhaps "talked at length" is a bit strong; however, I did a lot of gabbing for me. I'm generally pretty quiet at the parties I've attended sober, having never mastered the art of small talk.

Mostly I watched and listened, soaking everyone in. As the evening wore on, the holiday cheer took hold maybe just a bit, and conversations grew more animated, certainly the subject matter was eclectic and ran the gamut from the routine to the revelatory. Details of such things shall always remain out of bounds here (I spill my guts all across these pages but will leave it to others to do likewise in their own forums or to do it not at all, which is probably the smart move). Suffice to say this slice of my bloodline is as pleasantly screwed up in the ways all us human beings are (I would have been pretty suspicious if they weren't; I've been around "perfect" people putting on airs and for some reason that never fails to turn my stomach). Through all that, though, this crew seems to share a basic normalcy I've heretofore only seen en masse from people outside my family tree.

The fruits of the labor that forged that normalcy can be seen in the faces and body language of the next generation happily coloring and playing hide 'n seek last night in the back bedrooms, seemingly carefree from the entanglements I remember as a kid. And make no mistake: it is labor, real work put in over the long haul. That's a force multiplier across time as sure as dysfunction snowballs in the other direction.

This lively group is rooted by the children of my Dad's first marriage. I've been lucky enough to have gotten to know the youngest child of Dad's first family over the past few years as she lives in the Phoenix area where the sister I grew up with also resides (she and I represent the offspring of marriage #2, if you're keeping score). So I visit there often. But until last night, I hadn't really got the chance to catch up with my other two sisters and my brother, and certainly none of the children they've subsequently raised (now I've got great nieces and nephews to boot).

The stigma and pain of a crumbling marriage, infidelity and divorce in the early fifties with the subsequent bad blood between our father and their mother led to the circumstances of our unintended estrangement. I'm sure there were feelings of abandonment on their part. That's unfortunately a part of any breakup to some degree but here it was further fueled by the rancor of parents spilling over onto the kids and the manner in which it occurred. This too, unfortunately, is all too common but no less painful or affecting. I don't pretend to understand the depths of their pain related to this.

From my vantage point as the youngest of Dad's second family, born over a decade past the aftermath, I simply didn't know much about them. My "other" siblings (I hate the term "half sister" or "half brother") weren't talked about often in my presence and when they were, it was always using indirect, coded language meant to shield me from the confusion and unpleasantness of divorce (or so I surmise). I only wish my parents had chosen instead one of the litany of 800 pound gorillas squatting in our living room if they'd had a hankering for forging protective parental guardrails. "Shielding" a kid from the circumstances of a previous marriage with all the far larger gorillas hanging out in our particularly dysfunctional mist is like bringing your kid to a porno film shoot and covering his ears because one of the actors utters an expletive.

So I digress once again but what else is new?

Anyway, this has run on too long. In short, I had a great time and plan to make it back to the Seattle area again for the sibling get together next year, if possible. I've never been a real strong family guy but it's gotten its hooks into me just a tad as I get older. It would be nice to have (grand) nieces and nephews to buy Christmas and birthday presents for, absent any of my own (kids, not presents; the prospect of offspring grows dimmer each year). I do have my maternal cousins, who I love dearly, and little Leila, the newest addition there (she's adorable). Still, it never hurts to have too much family, they say. Of course, that's not a universal truism. Sometimes just a single family member can turn your life into turmoil in ways that friends just can't. I hope for me such turmoil remains in the past where it belongs.

Bob and Ruth

Bob Douglas was all chest high plaid pants, wild eyes and eager ears, working the police-fire scanner knobs and his telephone dial with savage efficiency in the darkened room at the back of his house. This was his war room, his command center. The Information Station.

Hey, down there at 1310 Hoyt! Get ready for the fire truck! You, up there at 706 Grand! The police cruiser's coming your way! Yo, over there at 925 Rockefeller! Domestic Squabble just down your alley at 918 Wetmore!

He was wired into it all, hooked into the information grid of nineteen hundred and seventy. Everett, Washington's emergency dispatch signals surfing across his brainwaves, his thoughts tuned into their frequencies. Forever clearing his throat of the perpetual phlegm of ignorance, he thirsted for the knowledge that these crises and misdemeanors washed down into him. But it wasn't enough to obtain the wisdom, he was compelled to impart it onto others. And not gently either - no, this education was delivered to his friends and neighbors with a vicious ruthlessness. Mr. Douglas, you see, was a man both supremely impatient and utterly mad. He suffered neither fools nor the rational gladly.

A call would come over the scanner and his shock of curly hair shot straight up, his hairy ears throbbing with the details of this latest catastrophe. Incessantly tuning the signal to clear the noise from the necessary, Bob would focus, waiting - until, Bam! He'd catch wind of a juicy one through the static and hone in on the location. A picture would form in his mind's eye as he zoomed in for a close up. His gnarled fingers would then start clawing down the phone book white pages, mapping the dispatch address to a neighborhood and the 'hood to his acquaintances, however vague the connection. Match! Yes! Now he would make with the telephone dial.

Ring, ring.

Ignorant Acquaintance: Hello?

Bob: Ummmrrgghhh. Hey, down there at 1215 Colby, you got a heart attack one block down, 1314 Wetmore. Ummmeegghh.

Click.

With that said, Bob would abruptly hang up. He needed no reply from his pupils and had no time for idle chit-chat. They didn't even have names to him, his friends; he referred to them only by their addresses.  There was serious work to do, removing the blinders from the beleaguered citizens of this jerk-water town. How little they knew of these moments of consequence taking place right under their noses! But Bob, he knew. Strokes, heart attacks, burglaries, peeping toms. Bob had total coverage. He was the master of this knowledge. The great and powerful Oz!

This man was a god to me growing up, a giant. Fueled by Antabuse and aggravation, he was nothing so much as a raw nerve personified. All work and no play was not in Bob's vocabulary, though the definition of 'play' is subjective. For instance, he 'played' his long-suffering dog Wolfy into a quivering nervous wreck until the poor thing could take no more, finally succumbing to a fatal heart attack. Not satisfied with simply schooling his own pet, he worked the neighborhood animals into frenetic basket cases as well (they were unable to sleep for days after one of his visits). But unlike Wolfy, at least the neighbor doggies had times of relief when 'uncle' Bob went home. None of these unfortunate side effects were intentional, of course. Mr. Douglas was simply being Mr. Douglas. Wass a gooodd dooggg?!? yessyouare, yessyouare, wass a good dog!?!?! eh? eh?!?!? Was a good dog!?!?! Ehh, ehh, ehh!! On and on and on, he'd go. Bob would have them chase their tails, tug on rags, run down Frisbees, play chop sticks on the piano, clean his garage, mainline meth, and tear their own tongues out. And that was for starters. Waasss a goood doogggie!?!? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Errrmmmdddhh!!

This was simply Bob's way.

His bright plaid pants weaving to and fro, manic voice booming and the constant gurgling of phlegm in his throat, Bob just couldn't stop, had no sense of boundaries or limits. Luckily he was clearing his throat so much of the time that you couldn't make out most of his psycho-babble. His affliction was Turrets Syndrome melded with an obsessive-compulsive disorder and manic tendencies all rolled into one fifty-something package. Or was he sixty-something? It doesn't matter: he was ageless, beyond time.

Bob would also visit upon children what he inflicted on the town's canine population. I cowered in terror upon his arrival at our doorstep. As I said, he was a god to me. Sort of like Loki, the Norse God of Mischief. Or Satan.

Bob stopped drinking years before I knew him, though it took a few trips through treatment before the "cure" took hold. His regiment of Antabuse and terminal psychosis remained the only vestige of a drunkard's past. I have no idea why as a child I was cognizant of his pharmaceutical intake, probably because my parents kept no secrets, as long as they weren't theirs. As though taking Antabuse was a scandalous thing, especially when compared to the unrestrained active alcoholism my folks reveled in.

I had always assumed that Bob and my Dad had been drinking buddies and that was how our families became friends. Those two may well have been boozing pals at some point; however, Mr. Douglas sold insurance back in the day - before he retired to his role as town crier - and that was how our families originally came together. (We had insurance?!?) A television commercial come to life with your broker as best buddy and trusted adviser. His friendship, though, was more akin to Jim Carey's Chip Douglas in The Cable Guy: you'd have to pry your relationship with him from his cold, dead hands. He mated for life in this regard.

Speaking of mating, Bob was not alone. He came as a package deal, wrapped up in a bow with his stubby chubby swinging 60s red headed whack job misses, Ruth. Ruth had the unfortunate habit of wearing skirts sans undergarments on occasion, but was not blessed with the body of Sharon Stone, nor was she of an age - she was somewhere north of fifty - when that behavior might have been viewed in a different light (a black light was too luminous for her particular horrors).

Mrs. D would readily cross and uncross her legs with a silly, knowing smirk as she visited with our folks making gabby small talk, always sounding and acting to me like Sue Ann Nivens from the Mary Tyler Moore show come to life with a dye job. I'd see red and go blind. The carpet matched the drapes, though neither of any shade nature could have conjured up. What nightmares these visuals would give me! ("Join me for a crimson bath! Red-dye #5 mixes well with Mr. Bubbles! Come on in, the water is fine!")

Errhhhhhh.

My Mom - also a Ruth - cut Mrs. Douglas's hair regularly, though she had no training or 'natural' talent in the tonsorial arts that I'm aware of (certainly the results bared that out). This ritual would take place in our kitchen, the two ladies enjoying a beer or two while my Mom took the scissors to that red fright wig atop Mrs. D's head. I had my first taste of the suds in this setting, though I'm not sure why I was offered (I couldn't place my age, maybe 10?). A first initiation into the alcoholic profession my parents saw as the family calling. I was strangely drawn to watching this beauty parlor ballet unfold, my Mom hacking at Ruth D's head while they both got toasted. I shutter when I think about this today. Now that I am thinking of it, my Mom's services to Ruth also included regular dye jobs (though they were, to my knowledge, all on the "up and up").

Bob and Ruth spawned one child, Lee. An odd kid who became a cop, he was by some accounts a sexual deviant. The girls in the neighborhood all dreaded Lee's approaching swagger, as he put his moves on them in his best 70s Disco Stu style.

Nature, nurture - Lee had both going against him and probably didn't stand much of a chance. But at least Father Douglas could follow his son's adventures from the comfort of his back room courtesy of the trusty police scanner. Sometimes his son would be dispatched, and sometimes his son would be dispatched upon. Sort of a one-man game of cops and robbers (or cops and flashers, to be more precise). Who would Bob call during these episodes? Himself? But the line's forever busy! I imagine that after episodes such as this, a confusion of sorts must have hung for a time over Bob's Rear Window lifestyle.

So these are my slanderous memories of just a couple of characters from my childhood. An introduction. They will return. They were central to my upbringing in many ways.

It takes a village. Indeed.

[Postscript: my sister recalls once, back in the days when Bob had been drinking, he accidentally flushed his false teeth down the toilet. The mental picture of that event and the subsequent dental panic - Did they result in a clog? My dad was a handyman, did he break into the sewage pipes to retrieve the choppers? - was strong enough to me that I felt I needed to share.

My sister also recalled for me Bob's love of the pornographic (which explains his wife Ruth). For example, Bob liked to keep his extensive collection of Playboys piled high in plain view on top of his living room coffee table, in order to give all visitors the chance to pursue the interesting articles. He often left the mags open turned to the "article" spread. He went so far as to send my then teenage sister a fold out of a playmate pic because he thought it looked like her. He ratcheted up creepiness several notches in his day, claiming the word as his own. ]