Homeward Bound

Soaked through my own lather nearly half a century in the making, I slither down the block I grew up on, a bottle of Tanqueray in one hand and jug of Minute Maid OJ in the other.  I take a deep slug from each beverage and march on, my stomach blending the brew. Claustrophobia clouds my thoughts, though I'm not physically confined (it's more an emotional enclosure pressing in, clamping tighter).

The night has caught up with me on this particular stroll and I see a light flickering through the window of what used to be my upstairs bedroom, though the rest of the place remains bathed in darkness. I stand there transfixed near the driveway, drinking and dizzy: I haven't known the inhabitants of this hovel since my mother sold it almost 30 years ago.  The same is true of the neighborhood at large.  I have no reason to believe any of the former residents are still around, certainly their kids have since grown up with rug rats of their own now (some of my contemporaries may even have grandchildren).  Still, I have an overwhelming desire to run and hide, feeling the unseen eyes of those disco days following me from their perches all around.  I'm as nervous out in the open as I was when I lived here those last years (from Cuckoo's Nest to Raging Bull measured in cinematic time).

Terrified of ... what?  Or is it 'who?'  Anyone, everyone.  All those who see through me, past my calm facade into the madness within.  Who see my family and how we live(d).  I was taught well the power of shame, with a strength equalled by few other things in life, at least in my experience.  Mom was the headmaster for this lesson, Dad her fine example.

I reflect on this briefly before tossing the half empty gin bottle straight through that bedroom window where it explodes into a shower of glass and dull screams of confusion and shock from within.  Fuck 'em.  I'm the one out half a liter of booze.  You're welcome for the housewarming gift.  Drink hearty.

I resume my stroll on down the block, taking with me my orange juice still to enjoy.

And then the bottle strikes me squarely in the back of the head.  I turn passing out but there is no one there, no sounds of scuffling feet or other indication of life.  I see my bottle lying a few yards away as my knees buckle.

Fade to black.

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.

Cement Dreams

Cement dreams of a drippy cold faucet and filthy back alley keep me up at night.

Jittery flat on the ground staring skyward, cheek to gravel in the alley behind my childhood garage, a black boot heel lodged in my left temple. The assailant remains cloaked in my subconscious, gray as the sky and just as abstract.

The leaky faucet is connected to our hose, soaking down the elongated sheet of clear plastic that serves as a homemade slip 'n slide. But it's me who's doing the soaking and the sliding as a kid in our backyard. Though sunny there, a hard sleet rain beats down on the alley where "I" lay a mere twenty feet away. And the garage separating us is translucent (or at least becomes so when I strain my neck to see through it).

So who is this person lying bloodied in the alley, the one through whose eyes I now see? And the gray ghost with the foot upside this person's head? I strongly suspect they're both me at different points in life, just as the slip 'n slide boy is me as a child. All of me out of phase with time, location, and state of mind.  I open my mouth to speak but nothing comes out.  Who was it really that opened their mouth (me, me, or me)?

The slip 'n slides we'd construct as a kid invoke joyful memories of childhood. On par with flying kites, "poppin' wheelies" on my bike, and building fortified compounds in the foliage around the neighborhood. There is no dysfunction marring these happy times in my memory, so why do I introduce it in my dreams now? Why pollute that which has no subtext of angst when I have boatloads of memories that do? I'm by no means a Freudian and rarely have what one would call "symbolic" dreams but these certainly seem to qualify. What exactly they might symbolize remains to be seen.

The alley on our block served as a kind of social nexus for my friends and I growing up.  It was our "motocross" race track, the thoroughfare around which we'd construct our forts in the bushes that lined it, and the front line in snowball and squirt gun fights.  After watching Evil Knievel on TV, we'd run out to the alley and fashion makeshift "motorcycle ramps" from sheets of plywood and cement bricks.  Sort of like the picture on the left, except we were in the alley, didn't have helmets and our bikes were far more groovy (see above).  More than a few times I found myself on my ass with the bike on top of me in that alley; that I broke no bones is a testament to dumb luck.

But I'm not a kid and have no bike in this dream.  Well, I am a kid in my backyard, but he's me in third person. I'm pretty sure this is true of my ghostly oppressor as well, the being who has me pinned to the ground with his boot.  Sigmund would have a field day here.  Fuck Freud.  He might have had some keen insights into the human psyche but he also thought cocaine was a panacea with the potential to cure any number of neuroses.  Then again, so did I!  Neither of us struck gold in that vein.  Anyway, back to the dream.  My unholy trinity of selves aside, the neighborhood is eerily silent.  No family and no friends.  Just sundry manifestations of me.

Not much happens in this dream.  It starts with me pinned and bleeding, my kid-self hosing down the slip 'n slide for a minute, going for a slide and then repeating this over and over. My oppressor stands silently over me, digging his heel into my head but remaining otherwise obscured from view.  And I watch from my vantage point in the gravel.  The end of the dream is always the same and is perhaps the most bazaar: the backyard melds into the back of a curtain, which then rises to reveal an audience of elementary school kids and parents.  I'm dressed as a monkey in the play that we students wrote and staged at Whittier in the 4th or 5th grade (I wrote the lines for my character, Mickey Monkey).  The play is over, the audience applauds and I wake up.

I've had this dream several times in the past two weeks and can't for the life of me figure out why.  I'm hoping that articulating it here will help purge it from my system.  It's tops on my list for discussion when I next see my shrink Monday ....