Everett

I'm stained with the stench of my home town tearing,

from the Bel-Nes Cafe to the Sportscenter Lounge.

Viscous remembrances of paternal delrium,

dripping down Hewitt and Broadway and Hoyt.

I'm born from the edges of Herfy's and heartache,

from C. Van's, cirrhoses and China Doll strokes.

No cruising Colby, I'm merely Wetmore and walking,

eyes burning head down holes through the cracks.

His revelry on Hewitt dries to Strand Hotel sickness,

let loose of his feelings into porcelain streams.

I'm the sour-mash scion of a Foster Brooks plumber,

in the shadows of a pulp mill and a hangar and a hate.

Northwest of hell and straight into Patti

January, 1978.

My pace quickens to match my pulse. She hastens ahead into the darkness past the fading light while I follow at questionable distance down the alley, a block from home. Wracked with guilt and lost to the neighborhood, I'm now simply a strange shadow they catch occasionally from the corner of their eye. Where I was once a staple to the throng, straight forward and seemingly carefree, I'm now "complicated" and confounding, a sad mystery even to myself. Only fifteen and a half but exhausted by life, I feel more like a bitter, senile codger out of phase with time than I do a contemporary teen. Fear and self-loathing feed my dreams and rule my days.

I reach the end of the alley and stop cold, struck by a spiky-haired vision compelling me to paralysis: she has turned and is looking dead at me. I pray to the god I don't believe in that I might blend into the alley gravel. No dice. She calls out something enticing or insulting but I've already turned tail and miss the message. I'm halfway up the fence of the nearest backyard as her words echo behind me, falling onto the pebbles with an indecipherable rumble. I'm across the street and into my house before I realize I've moved, the flight instinct taking hold as it does so frequently these days.  I feel a strong kinship with the mouse running for the hole under the stove after an unexpected flick of the light switch catches him in the act of existence (for me, the kitchen is my town and the hole under the stove is my room).

Who is she? I'm not sure I know exactly. She's a contemporary, a "classmate" of sorts. But we know one another only vaguely. She seems a kindred spirit, but I'm psychotically shy and she's beyond aloof, so I can go only by her appearance, demeanor, and the books I've seen her read at the coffee/soda shop near the high school campus (Ginsberg, Kesey, Miller among her interests). She attracts and terrifies me: purple streaked raven-black hair matching her pre-goth ebony ensemble (nails, lipstick, outfit, shoes). Patti Smith meets Ari Up meets Edie Sedgwick. Or so I imagine. I do a lot of imagining but it rarely intersects with reality (fast forward to the present and it perhaps does so now only by happenstance).

And so goes a typical trip home from "school." In fact, I haven't been to class in a while. Instead, I spend my days in back of the second floor of the Everett Public Library. There I pour over back issues of Rolling Stone and read Hunter Thompson's entire catalog to that point, along with most of the 50's beat writers and more than a few of the classic rebels (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Chandler). I'd continue to do this into the spring before staff from Everett High come and get me. I'm not sure who clued them into my whereabouts. Likely it was the librarian. Maybe my sister. Certainly not my mom. In some ways it was a relief being nabbed. Truth be told, I love the education aspect of school (it's the people I can't stand). I don't fit into the social order (don't much fit into any order). I'd be sent off to Cascade High a few miles to the south to repeat my sophomore year come the fall (six months of my own "library schooling" apparently not enough to make up for lost credit). It would be my last year of high school, and not all that much more successful than the Everett High years. But all that is to come. Today, I'm back into the dank cavern that is my house, thinking about her.

Later that night, I'm shaking with cold though the heat is blasting, a stranger in my own home. I can't see my way clear to the door of my room so I crouch by the bed, next to my books. And I shake. Uncontrollably. I am listening to Horses on the 8-Track. "Jesus died for somebody's sins but not mine - my sins my own, they belong to me." Clearly not Them's Gloria. Or Shadows of Knight for that matter. Pure Patti. She lets me know I'm not alone in my madness. But it's an illusion. A mistake on my part. Songs and albums are heightened moments in time to strike a chord in the now or a remembrance of the past, not prolonged states of being or a way of life (unless you consider the musical a form of documentary).  But that fact of life never really sank in for me from then to now, though I knew it at some level even back sucking in the 70s.

And on the cycle droned, broken up for me by a singular "heightened moment in time" arriving in April of that year. As I said, I occasionally make it back to high school, or at least to the near-by kids hang-out just off-campus on 25th and Colby. I'd call it a coffee shop, but they don't really have such things in 1978; it is more a soda shop, I suppose. They do serve coffee, though, and I duck in just after school lets out once every couple of weeks to get my caffeine fix while I try to get a bead on teenage socializing (at least as an observer). She was often there and I admired her in silence in the corner, listening to the shitty top 40 usually rattling from the jukebox. Until April. I don't know what came over me that I'd approach her then. Perhaps I was hopped up on caffeine and Gonzo Journalism but it was mainly that she was reading Junky, which I'd just finished.

"I see you're reading Burroughs - can I ask you something?" She looked up, annoyed. "What?" She wasn't in a chatty mood, certainly not with me. "Do you prefer the realism of Junky to his more abstract work like Naked Lunch?" She looked at me for a what seemed like forever before breaking into a faint smile that for me lit up the room like an explosion. "They both have their uses. Now beat it, you're blocking my light." And that was it. I never talked to her again. But this was a moment, one I recall pretty vividly over 30 years later. For a brief shining sliver of life I was lifted out of doldrums of isolation into the warmth of a shared connection.  It was as though I'd fallen straight into Patti and I didn't want to get up again.

But the moment passes and my fears and weakness assert themselves once more, emphasizing that she did dismiss me in the end, the comment was fucking lame, and so on.  So in that sense, she and I have a lot in common after all: neither of us have much use for me.

easter

she dances across my dreams on occasion,

leaving footprints in the sandstorm my slumber has become.

unseen and unspoken, she led me last evening,

taking me to the nexus of my torn adolescence,

where countless rainy aprils melt into ceaseless dripping mays,

and cirrhosis stroked ghosts haunt cancer to my spirit.

but she's lost to me in the here and now somewhere this morning easter,

as i contemplate summer but linger back in autumn.

burning my brain 'til i'm sick to my stomach,

running from nothing and afraid of it all.

it's hard to pass softly when i'm swallowing empty,

too weak to keep up to a numbing neglect.

with florescent tinged eggshells cracking into chocolate madness,

of a spring born too late or not born at all.

Weekend Pity Party

She's draped in my doubts as I long to undress them,

from a wound never healing into halfhearted gestures.

I fall slowly forward and down into dirty,

with a mind left unleashed from the tether of passion.

I'm a parking lot sun drenched but empty and cracking,

and a foundation fallen from the weight of my weakness.

She's luminescence incarnate on the path toward redemption,

or maybe just a reflection of salvation's illusion.



Writhing in a poisonous lust of my making,

from dreams lit to lightning but lost at my leisure.

Friday to Sunday thinking one day turns to some day,

left to contemplate Monday with a life living death.

Jane into the Now

She walks past, tense; into the now, oblique.

Dressed darker than damaged

in winter's last vestige,

she refracts light bent back inward,

luminescent from within.

But I feel it, her radiance;

I sense it without perception,

a welcome change to be swayed

back out of my head.

She rains down reason on me without words,

laughing softer than sane

and warm to my weird.

Shot with a tremble and her world weary sigh,

she slays me spent

toward past feigned redemptions.

Still, clawing need and knotted nerves

tear me up when we touch,

only at long last dissipating through

into her pools of blackened blue

while the Velvets serenade

on a rage of New York cool,

reflecting back a fragment

of the essence of her smile.

The Breathing End of Oblivion

For Brooke and her other aliases circa 1993.

Disarming not discerning, she softly cracks me wise.

I open melting repose in the corner, rising.

Fallen among the throng in this Passyunk go-go dive,

I drink away the dank and the military industrial blood on my hands.

Drowning out the shipyard with a chaser, warming.

She tends bar usually, though sometimes she dances;

always wry with her musing (bloody hands of her own, stained merely by her presence).

And with all that, her jukebox selection is singular, defining.

Wondering around her reflection in Absolut refraction,

a wide eyed drive toward desolation foregone, yet not begun.

I order another round silently, flying.

We share unlikely sensibilities: musical, political, magical, destructible;

cynicism burning us alive, aspirations chilled to the bone.

 She slides me one on the house, smiling.

We find we're both hiding from who we are, what we do to get by;

our ideals beyond reach, beyond our reason.

Reasoning it's for the best, swallowing.

She's post-modern Center City mostly: college and Revival, Khyber hipster friends;

in fear her South Philly ballet weeknights will come to light to them:

grunge-lit on-high disapproval.

She locks up for the evening, transposing personalities; shifting.

I live in her vicinity, in trepidation;

my workaday hypocrisy spilling into the rest of me.

I found her in one masquerade, she led me to the other, city weekends both wondrous and fleeting.

We were taut to tearing from the get-go, nervously.

It can't, doesn't last; turns to sand in my fingers, into dust.

Across the divide from Darien back to Monroe alone, empty; shivering.

Compromises personified, potential anesthetized;

she's at long last transcended these things, living.

I still languish within, haunted;

balancing off a bar stool on the breathing end of oblivion, waiting.

Waiting.

Torn & Sewn on Fabric Row

July 11th, 1993.  I'm walking double-time toward the pay phone on 4th and Bainbridge, around the block from my hovel on Monroe.  This particular summer night finds the heat and humidity particularly oppressive, soaking my T-shirt with sweat just a few steps out the front door.   Emerging from the arctic climate of the apartment's central air, the swelter hits my body like a freight train and I buckle.  But I'm off to the races again after a curt pep talk. Holed up in my little 3rd floor walk up the past week, there's clearly a powerful need to replenish.  In fact, I thought it was Thursday afternoon until I stepped outside into the darkness.

I live in the heart of Philly's Fabric Row, just a few blocks off the busy strip of bars and restaurants on South Street, which means the roads are usually lined with cars looking for parking on a Saturday night.  Night?  Clearly.  Unless I'm losing my vision. Saturday?  That's what the ATM receipt says.  Where did the week go?  Where it always goes for me these days. A short reflexive pause to survey the landscape and then I'm back into tunnel vision mode: my mission, the score.

The roll of twenties in my pocket is slick with perspiration as I race to the rendezvous point around the corner past the Famous 4th Street Deli.  I don't recognize my connection but nevertheless make her out at once, not far from the pay phone.   Her expression - her demeanor - makes it clear she's no South Street reveler gearing up for the clubs; she's a courier, my Sherpa's intermediary, and her body language says as much.  Tonight, she's my lifeline and I love her more than she'll know.  (Random trivia note: Denzel Washington uses this very phone in one of the scenes from the movie Philadelphia.)

I walk up quickly but nervously to my new love, with an eye peeled always for the cops.  My paranoia unbounded, everyone smells like Five-0 out here tonight.  And there's a good chance they are, heightened fears aside.  So the exchange is made fast: currency for goods.  Two thumbnail plastic baggies chock full of lumpy white bliss pressed into my palm and my bank roll likewise into hers, passing the baton without acknowledgement in this felonious relay race.  She blinks, tucks it away, then picks up the pay phone and dials.

Having scored the primary supplies for the evening, a rush of relief radiates through my fingers.  A wordless au du to my new lost love in a rush, I quick-step across Bainbridge's double wide expanse to the north, veering left a bit in order to sneak through Leithgow, the side street that splits 4th from 5th.   Swinging into Phila Deli around the corner on South, a prescription is filled for several six packs of beer constituting the oh-so necessary brakes that'll slow my heart down to earth once I run out of blow.  I've long ago learned that waiting until the need arises to buy alcohol often leads to wild heart palpitations crawling out of your skin when you first glance at a clock and it reads 4am, long past closing time.  My connection's still glued to the pay phone gabbing obliviously as I pass her by again, this time lugging two large grocery bags of booze back to my humble abode.

How will this particular ride into heavenly oblivion distinguish itself from the countless journeys that came before?   Simply put, it was to be my last for 14 months.   I'd stumble thereafter just once again, in September of 1994, but this trip would effectively put to bed my particular cycle of addiction to cocaine.  What follows is a sketch of the events and my state of mind that finally put the kibosh on this slow motion suicide carnival ride.

I shove the key into the outside door and hurry up the two flights of stairs to my place, the "penthouse" of the three units in this converted multi-family house.  Back into the deep freeze, chilly sweat soaks my skin.  It was actually the nicest apartment I ever rented, narrow but deep with high ceilings, central air, and my own mini-washer/dryer unit to boot.  I also had a private staircase in the apartment itself that led up to the roof where I could sunbathe with a view of city hall and much of the rest of the city.  All for $525.00 a month from 1992 - 96 with no rent increase, two blocks from the heart of the South Street action.   The one downside?   It was so narrow that getting furniture of any size up the stairs and in through the door proved challenging (I ended up having to sell my larger couch prior to moving in).   Still, it deserved better than me, at least better than the me who inhabited the joint the first couple years.  In those days it was merely my cocoon, used to wall off the world for the drift into madness.   Other than being stumbling distance to a plethora of bars and restaurants with take-out beer and the fact that it served as a kind of midway point between the cocaine meccas of Chester and Kensington, I might as well have lived on the North Pole for all I availed myself of its vibrant surroundings and culture.

I rush into my place and toss the beer into the fridge.   That's just medicine, needed later to come down safely from the mountain.   But who wants to entertain such notions now?  It is time now to climb!  The cocaine experience started out socially for me with a dysfunctional sub-culture from which I learned much things I'd rather have never known.   As Jim Carroll would caution, they were a "constant warning to take the other direction."   In the end, it degenerated into isolation, much as it would later with alcohol.  Grabbing a CD jewel case already scratched/sticky from the counter, I get to work.  The door to my bedroom closed?  Check.  Blinds closed?  Check.  My body flailed out on the mattress?  Check.  Okay, we're ready.  Next, the contents of the first baggie are dumped out on REM's Reckoning (or some equally random case), the chopping begins, the separating, the lining up.  Finally, the snorting.  Eventually, the bleeding.  Rinse and repeat for the next 20 hours, with an occasional beer break mixed in to keep the blood pressure below bursting.

My highs are euphemistically described elsewhere in this blog as wired wakefulness and concentrated bliss.  They were certainly all that, but also something more.   It sounds so awful as recounted here (and believe me, I've held back the uglier details something fierce on these pages; my candor has its limits), but in the moment it was wonderful beyond description, all happening away from the horrors, up in the serenity of my head.   No other drug has ever come closer to bringing as much happiness to me.  It always arrived with a truckload of misery, to be sure; however, not nearly as much as alcohol eventually rained down on my life.   On balance, the happiness was artificial and short lived, the misery real and persistent.  Still, if that was all there was to this equation, I never would have stopped.   Happiness is happiness, who is to say what is artificial or real?  And long or short-lived, it was better than the alternative.  No, the kicker in the mixer that kept me clean was simple biology, chemistry.  I would be dead pretty quickly continuing down this path.  Cocaine isn't compatible with biological life, not for long, not for me. And of course, there were the finances.  You plunge into coke, you don't end up working a whole lot at a time when you need that income the most to keep the white stuff coming (well, you can work a shitload for long stretches at first, but not too effectively).  All that to say, it's expensive.   So coke didn't work for me chemically or financially.  But I digress, so back to that day ...

By the time the sun goes down on Sunday, the coke is history.  I'd licked the last of it off the jewel case, the baggies long since torn asunder in hopes of finding some long lost morsel hidden in microscopic crevasses within.  Without luck, of course.   It was then time to turn to the come-down beer in the kitchen fridge with gusto, slugging three in rapid succession just to slow the heart down to what I surmised was a safe jack hammer pace.  Thank you, Her Doktor!  That was an hour or so ago.

Two beers further into my come down routine now, bent over on my sofa in the living room.  Thinking about things.  Left my full time job back in March.  I'd been with that company for seven years but the consulting position I accepted paid a lot more and I could make my own hours, could choose when to work and when to "relax" (all dangerous things for someone with my proclivities).  Of course, I haven't been with a client for several weeks now, what with the marathon blow binges and all.  They really eat into one's productivity.  So, no real savings, no discernible cash inflow to help stem the outflow.  The result is that my phone will surely soon be shut off for non-payment in the coming days.  Next the cable.  Then the electric.  My credit's fucked.  I am almost 31 years old and have not yet begun to live life, afraid in fact of trying.  These ruminations reach a crescendo over my psyche and I stew.  The reason for this reflective mood?  I'd switched on the tube to kill time coming down and the movie Clean And Sober happened to be on HBO.

I tend to enjoy irony and often watch movies such as Lost Weekend or Days of Wine and Roses while drinking, fully understanding - even embracing - my condition and yet at the same time never giving thought to rectifying things.   I always figured heretofore that rectification for me would be death and death would be here soon enough.  This time, though, Clean And Sober is really getting its hooks into me. It's not a particularly wonderful flick.   You never get to see the protagonist on his slide (he's already pretty much bottoming out when we first meet him).  You do, however, see the consequences of his addiction pretty starkly.  And Michael Keaton is great in his first dramatic role.  All told, right movie, right time, right tone.   I don't believe in fate, or that I'm somehow special, an omnipotent being arranging this fortuitous chain of events just for me.  It is a happy coincidence.  In fact, the movie has been showing pretty regularly of late on cable and I'd caught pieces of it earlier in the week, coked up and drinking down just as I am this evening.  But it didn't strike me then like it's hammering me now.  An hour into watching, I feel light headed and look down to see a rapidly spreading little pool of blood on the carpet.  My hand goes up instinctively to my nose, warm sticky wet. I dash into the bathroom with my head tilted back.  Then I drop to my knees in the john and cry.

Cut to Monday late afternoon and I'm attending my first Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) meeting.  I have a sponsor before I leave.  Thus begins the first year of real sobriety for me as an adult (hell, the first month).  I re-join my old employer within a week and stay put there for another seven years.  I stabilize.  For a while, anyway.

I'd stick with AA for a few months but the spiritual aspect of the program eventually had me searching elsewhere, eventually reaching out to Secular Organizations for Sobriety (SOS). I've maintained my ties with SOS to this day, now with a successor organization, Lifering.   AA is great but there is never only one way to anything, including sobriety (if something works for you, keep at it).  My biggest misstep during this stab at sobriety was that I didn't get professional help for depression.  When I slipped in 1994, I quickly righted myself when it came to the coke (once and done, clean now for 15+ years).  Ironically, the only reason I drank again was to come down from that coke episode but the cork wouldn't fit back into the bottle.   No, the come-down booze that coke spurge necessitated was my full fledged plunge into the briny deep of chronic, progressive alcoholism over the next dozen years.  I think I've documented that swim and subsequent arrival back onshore sufficiently elsewhere on these pages.

This aspect of my experience has been exhausted here.  It's certainly exhausted me.  Perhaps it's time I attempt to dredge up some happy days for prosperity next.  It could happen.   But that'll take digging deep to find.  Until then, silence will reign on this blog.  With maybe just a bit of bad poetry to bridge the gulf.