Category: Life

I bit my tongue at lunch today.

And I mean I got the back part of it caught between the molars, back there where the jaw has the most possible leverage, in the area I usually use for crushing diamonds, and chomped down on it good and hard. I was eating at my desk, like a pig. Worse than a pig, actually. I was eating fast, stuffing food in faster than I could swallow, getting it on my face, on my desk, on the floor, everywhere. Luckily I was alone in my office. I was doing something on the computer and answering the phone, and I just got that big ol’ piece of tongue-meat caught in my teeth and before I could stop pigging I had bitten it so hard that I almost cried. I had to stop all activity for about a minute. This is not a pretty picture, folks, me sitting there trying not to weep or drool, my mouth filled with half-masticated salad, unable to close it.

I was able to finish my lunch, because I am a pig, but much more slowly, and within the hour the pain started to spread downward so it felt like a sore throat (it still does, eight hours later). For several hours the pain radiated as far south as my sternum. Just a moment earlier I had been pain-free and lovin’ life. Now I was crippled in the mouthal area. Like a toothache, it was all I could think of, and I know it will be with me at least all through tomorrow, when I have meetings.

I didn’t want to bite my tongue.

I wanted to bite your tongue.

I wanted to put my hand on your shoulder and begin slowly to draw you toward me. Trying in vain to look you in the eyes, I’d be seeing only your mouth. When your face came close to mine, I’d brush my lips on yours, just a whisper of a brush, then I’d use my lips – only my lips – to gently push yours apart. I’d slip my hand around to the back of your neck, the better to hold you still, and I’d use my tongue to tickle just the very corner of your kissy mouth, that edge where the top and bottom lips dissolve into one another, first the left side, then the right, then back, two times, maybe three, my tongue starting to stroke your luscious lips with each pass across them.

I wanted to make love to your wanton mouth with mine, softly bite and tug that pouty smile right off your face, taste that space just behind those lips, run my eager tongue along your teeth, meet your own soft and sexual tongue in the wet darkness there. I wanted to devour you, be inside you and all around you, starting with your beautiful, hungry, lascivious mouth, the only part of all your gorgeous parts I can think of tonight.

And all I want from you, all I will need tonight, all I ask, is your hot breath, your pliant lips, your open mouth, your searching tongue and your dirty desire.

Can you give me that?

Ma, send me money now, I’m gonna make it somehow…

I convinced myself at an early age that I had no artistic ability. I don’t remember doing this, but somehow it must have happened, because there exists no evidence of me ever trying anything creative as a child. I didn’t fingerpaint on the walls or go out in outlandish costumes on Halloween. I choked in the sixth-grade Christmas pageant. I was Joseph, and I screwed up my lines.

Maybe it was an incident in first grade that closed the book on my creative efforts. We were “working with clay” one day. The teacher handed out lumps of brown clay. Everybody got a lump, and we all messed around with our lumps for a while. The teacher was going around the room, making sure everybody had a lump, and, it seemed to me, making sure that we were all comfortable and enjoying ourselves with our lumps of clay. After a tough hour of “See Dick run” I was ready for a little R&R, even though reading came naturally to me.

So I was bashing my lump of clay around on my desk, or maybe we were sitting at a table, I can’t recall, rolling it into a ball, flattening it, shaping it into a cube, when the teacher finally got everyone settled and went back to the front of the classroom and made the announcement that she wanted each of us to make an animal with our clay.

I was stricken with horror. An animal? I couldn’t make an animal. How do you make an animal? I had no clue. I stared at my pancake of clay in front of me on the desk, trying to think what to do first, my stomach in a knot and my heart sinking fast. I tried to complain about the assignment, tried to explain that this was just too difficult, that there was no way, but the teacher smiled in that bitchy, patronizing way they have and told me to get to it, of course you can make an animal. Just go ahead and make one, any animal will be fine, we’re not here to judge.

Perfect. She couldn’t see the panic I was feeling, and she was going to force me to perform for her. This is probably why to this day I look for tall, dominant women to tie me up and – wait, that’s another story.

Anyway, I made a snake.

While the rest of the class was shaping legs and ears and tails and antlers, the little bastards, I took my clay and rolled it into a thin tube about a foot long. I tapered it a little at the back end, but I doubt if I had the herpetological expertise to make a hood, the characteristic mark of the cobra, or even a mouth. So I probably didn’t. This is all a little blurry to me, as I am just recovering this memory now after all these years.

I had found a loophole. Legally, a snake was an animal. She didn’t say “mammal,” or “any animal except a snake.” She had said “…any animal will be fine.” So I had her, and I was off the hook.

Of course you know what happened. The snake didn’t fly. I remember clearly when it was my turn to show what I had made, I held it up and said “I made a snake.” Even though I knew I was in compliance with the letter of the assignment, I had a lump in my throat, because I knew the snake wasn’t going to cut it. And it didn’t.

Her smile turned into a sneer, then a small, derisive snicker escaped as she told me that a snake wasn’t good enough. Oh, she didn’t use those words, of course, but her meaning was clear enough: “You are a rotten kid. You have tried to slide by on this assignment, using a technicality. And you are not getting away with it!” In sympathy, the rest of the class laughed uproariously at me and my snake. My face burned, my vision blurred, my heart palpitated. If we could have found a hole, we would have crawled into it, me and the snake.

She forced me to make something else, and I think I made a cow, taking care to make the worst cow ever sculpted, to prove to her that I had no aptitude for this, that I was right and she was wrong, and she should never have tried to make a sculptor out of me. As soon as she saw it and half-heartedly approved, I destroyed it violently. And I never tried to make anything out of clay again.

In fact, for many years my nickname was Snake, because I always tried to slide by on technicalities, hoping some strong woman would take me in hand and – no, no. Other story. I remained The Snake until I played in a softball league with a guy named Ed who weighed about 130 pounds but whose amazing sinuous swing was good for a home run about every third time he batted. He actually wanted to be called The Snake, and by that time I was glad to shed that skin, so to speak.

I carried the trauma of that horrible first-grade play-time humiliation into adulthood, although it was effectively repressed and I seemed normal. Until one night on the living room floor at the home of some friends with young children. We were playing with some of the thousands of toys that kids seem to accumulate these days, when somebody brought out a couple of cans of Play-Doh.

And handed me a lump.

The memory of that horrible first-grade embarrassment came flooding back. The kids were making animals. Handily shaping their lumps into whatever the hell they chose. And I made the decision that I had to stand up and fight my demon, or it would torment me forever. I determined that I was going to make an animal, or die trying.

Here is what I made:
There’s a bigger version up at the top of this post, for those of you who are stunned by the artistry and want a closer look, and who missed it while you were up there the first time. I made it completely from scratch, without a picture or a model to work from. I just closed my eyes and saw elephant. Don’t tell me you didn’t know it was an elephant. That would make you no better than the kids in my first grade class, who laughed at me and my snake.

Since I made this elephant my self-esteem has been sky high, and women frequently tie me up and have their way with me. Yes, I have learned an important lesson. And that lesson is this: Play-Doh smells real good, but it tastes like shit.

My back yard, in fact my entire neighborhood, is alive with springtime.

Trees which have been bare for months are undergoing their annual rebirth, sprouting the sweetest bright green leaves. Feral tomcats are feeling amorous and serenading the domestic females up and down the block. The asphalt skateboarders are out in force, methodically practicing the same tricks over and over, pressing daylight hours to the very limit and daring passing motorists to run them down. These surly boys were just toddlers last fall, weren’t they?

Now that Daylight Time has gone into effect, I hear the many nesting birds outside my bedroom window, chattering excitedly while I am trying to stretch my all-too-short nights’ sleep a few more minutes. This morning I heard a couple of starlings going at it over location, location, location.

She: There’s a cat in this yard. I just don’t feel good about building here.

He: I’m telling you, honey, I’ve checked it out, and the lady across the alley throws birdseed out every day. We’ll build the nest in a tree. No cat can catch us, and we’ll have free food. What could be better?

She: That’s what you said last year about the eaves of that Mexican restaurant. Free tortilla chips, you said! But you didn’t think about the busboy with the BB gun, did you? I still have a pellet in my butt!

He: Nag, nag, nag. I’m the one who has to go get the twigs and the grass and the gum wrappers to bulid this thing, while you just sit here and complain.

She: Complain?! That’s a good one, Mister I-don’t-want-to-sit-on-those-eggs! I ask one little favor and you act like you can’t be bothered.

He: You have no idea how hard it is to find worms in this town. You’d think grass seed would be good enough for you, and the occasional crust of bread, but no, not for The Princess. I fry my feathers flying all over the place looking for extra special treats for you, and all I want when I come back to the nest is a little appreciation —

She: — Appreciate THIS, Mr. Big Shot! YOU stay here all day guarding the eggs and watching for that damned cat, and I’ll cruise around town, wasting time with my NO-GOOD FRIENDS!

He: You leave my friends out of this.

She: I’d like to. If you spent half the time here taking care of things as you do out on the telephone wire by the pool hall — get away from me!

He: Aw, c’mon, baby. You want me to “take care of things,” don’t you?

She: Mmmm, yeah, Big Boy…

So goes the circle of life in the trees. But a more alarming conversation seems to be getting underway in the back yard – that between Molly the Cat and a couple of mockingbirds who may be moving in.

Last spring, mockingbirds built a nest somewhere in our vicinity – we never found the damned thing – and proceeded to claim as their own the entire region in the name of the Mockingbird King and all of Mockingbirdland. They perched on various trees, on wires, on rooftops and weathervanes, and every time they saw Molly the Cat they attacked.

At first, the attacks were verbal. Scurrilous they were, but as I told Molly the Cat, words will never hurt you. Upon spotting the cat, one of the birds would fly down from God knows where to the nearest perch that was out of reach and issue the first warning, a one-syllable epithet that sounded an awful lot like the word “SHIT!” all the while giving M the C the old mockingbird stinkeye. “SHIT!” they would shout, followed by a low-pitched, scary call reminiscent of an angry old man saying “crap,” but drawing it out real long for effect: “Craaaaaaaaap. Cra-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-a-p!”

The verbal attacks went on for several weeks. Molly the Cat started to develop a nervous tick, and she would never go outside without standing in the doorway for a minute or so, staring out in fear.

I did some pissed-off bird research, and I discovered that mockingbirds are known not only as beautiful singers, but they have an uncanny ability to learn the songs of other birds, that they seem to have an abiding love for music, often staying up late, drinking and singing as many as fifty songs that they have learned, just for the pure joy of learning. And drinking and singing, I assume.

But, ominously, I also learned that mockingbirds are highly territorial, and will go up against almost any animal who ventures near the area they have claimed as their own.

Sure enough, one day I walked out the back door with M. (she had gotten so she wouldn’t go outside without an escort), and I heard a sharp “SHIT!” from the garage roof. Then from next door the other mockingbird came swooping in, while the first one said “Craaaaaaaaap” in that threatening way. While I was distracted by that, the second bird came buzzing down at me, flapping and squawking and missing me by about an arm’s length. Then they both went up to a nearby overhead wire and glared down at us, cursing “SHIT!” and “Cra-a-a-a-a-a-a-p….” Molly the Cat bolted for some bushes, and got buzzed by both birds before she made it to shelter.

This went on for SIX WEEKS, while the mockingbabies were incubated, then hatched, then weaned, making the back yard pretty miserable for me, and totally uninhabitable for Molly the Cat. I don’t mind saying that I was getting pretty exasperated. I went back to my internet research, to see if there was some humane way I could get rid of these little bullies, and that’s when I discovered to my horror that mockingbirds will sometimes raise TWO BROODS IN A ROW in the same location in one season. Sometimes.

OK, you know what happened, right? Right. A second brood. More squacking, cursing, swooping and pecking. Six more weeks, effectively ruining the whole summer before they finally left, sometime in September, although they didn’t say goodbye, so I don’t remember exactly.

Who the fuck do these mockingbirds think they are, anyway? We were here first. We are PAYING for this land, these trees, this house, the very garbage they eat. It got to the point where they would spot Molly the Cat when she was just looking out the window, and yell “SHIT!” at her. She was in counseling until January.

And now it looks like they are back. They must have liked it last year. Maybe I was too gentle. Maybe I was a sucker. Yeah, that’s it. I was a chump. Well, this year – No more Mr. Nice Guy! If they yell “SHIT!” at me…

Who am I kidding? I couldn’t even find their nest last year, and even if I could, I’m probably too soft to take any irrevocable action.

Besides, those little bastrds are badass. SHIT!

It was wrong of me, I know, to think I could know you, any part of you that you did not reveal.

Foolish to think I could tell what you were telling, to feel any real friendship, to sense any camaraderie. Not your fault that I tried, probably not my fault, either. I’m just wired that way. A little pseudo soul-baring, and certain synapses fire. The feeling is as real as a dream. I carry it along from sleeping to waking, and it is part of me, like I know my phone number, like I know what drawer contains the knives. For a little while it is scribbled on a scrap of paper and pulled out when needed; for a little while I have to pull out all the drawers, looking for the knives. But then it is second nature, my fingers know the number, I go instinctively for the correct drawer, and the knife is in my hand.

It’s like that, but it’s not that.

We never knew each other. We never were friends. The whole thing is – not a sham, exactly. Just… not anything. Like Los Angeles, there is no there there. I can’t blame you, because in a way you weren’t in on it. It all happened inside me, flecks of matter flying through my empty universe, pieces falling into other pieces, exploding apart and coming back together again under the spell of gravity, circling each other until something began to take shape. I should have known it wasn’t real, because it never settled down, kept changing shape in a way that real things do not. Real things come into focus and let you get a good look at them, let you return to them and find them essentially unchanged.

Evolving, but the same inside.

And you said from the start it wasn’t real, that it was all imagined. I just didn’t know how much of the imagining was mine.

I’m a good driver and I drive all over Southern California. Contrary to what the rest of the nation might surmise from other evidence, we are mostly good drivers here. We’re not as aggressive and feisty as those in New York or Iowa – you know who you are. When arriving at a traffic jam, we are aware that leaning on the horn will not make the problem go away. We are familiar with the concept of “joining the queue,” and we do so, not happily, but with a resignation born of experience, and the knowledge that, what the fuck, we’re on the freeway and we can’t get off and go around the mess.

Oh, sure, there were a few bizarre incidents in the early nineties, road rage things where people would pull over to discuss some real or imagined slight, and wind up throwing down on each other with automatic pistols and sawed-off shotguns. There was a bumper sticker going around in those days that said “Don’t shoot! I’ll pull over.” But that craziness notwithstanding (and yes, that is the first time I’ve ever used that word, and I’m not really sure what it means), we are a pretty sane, stay-in-the-lane bunch of motorists here.

We have to be, because there is no public transportaion to speak of — no buses, streetcars, subways, monorails, taxis or trains. And walking is just… weird. Plus, everything is twenty miles away. So if you want to go anywhere, you have to drive. And we have embraced this concept since Day One and with such gusto that now there’s like three cars for every person in Los Angeles. If you have a party and invite forty people, you’d better hire valet parkers because your guests will bring a hundred cars. You can see what a mess L.A. would be if we weren’t patient, courteous and skilled behind the wheel.

But I live on a quiet residential street in an old part of town, old meaning the houses were built in the 1940’s. (Hey, this ain’t Europe.) In my neighborhood we don’t have driveways along the sides of our houses, leading into our spacious three-car garages. We don’t have driveways anywhere, and we don’t have three-car garages. What we have is alleys, behind the backyards, and clunky old one-car garages that open onto the alleys.

Alleys are cool. You can find neat stuff out there. If you want to scavenge aluminum cans to sell to the recycler, the alley’s your hangout. You can find old broken-down office furniture, corrugated fiberglass deck awnings, brushed aluminum Melitta coffeemakers that might work, if you can find the matching stainless steel carafe. And the fronts of the houses have a cleaner look, having virtually disavowed all knowledge of the automobile culture of Southern California. Lawn transitions gently into lawn and the sidewalks are unbroken by driveway entrances. Very upper class. (One drawback is that if you’re a beginning extreme skateboarder, there are no driveway entrances on which to practice your jumps. Personally I don’t see this as a drawback.)

My neighborhood can be described as “sleepy.” My street is only wide enough for one car to pass if there are cars parked on either side, and no one complains. We are not trying to get the city to widen our street. We are happy with our street. We look way down the block as we’re driving, and if we see a neighbor approaching in the opposite direction, we find a place to pull over, or they do, and we inch past each other, waving and smiling like the good, happy neighbors we are. And mind you, this vehicular face-off hardly ever happens, in our sleepy neighborhood.

The alley, however, is another story. By now you’re wishing it’s a story I would tell some other time, and you are thinking of clicking that “Next Blog” button, aren’t you? Well, go ahead. I’ll just tell it to myself, like I do so many things.

In the alley, people forget that they live in a sleepy neighborhood. Instead, they think they are in the chase scene from “The French Connection.” Or maybe “Bullitt.” They careen down the alleys, swerving left and right around the trash cans and scaring the living daylights out of the pigeons that my neighbor-across-the-alley feeds. The alleys, they think, are deserted. The alleys are made for speed. There is, to be fair, almost no traffic in my alley. But what there is goes by mighty quickly.

I am one of the few people in California (maybe anywhere, can I get some feedback on this?) who uses his garage for his car. The garages up and down my back alley are used variously as storage units, workshops, home gyms, rumpus rooms and guest houses. My garage has my car in it, and it sports almost completely blind access to the alley, due to the high brick walls that form the boundaries of my back yard. When backing out of my garage, I can’t see what’s going on in the alley until I am well out into it.

And here is where I have to ask, “What are the fucking odds?”

I inch glacially back out of the garage once or twice every day, so let’s call it 45 times a month. I haven’t done the math on this, but from the number of cars in my town, and the amount of alley traffic I have observed, it seems to me that maybe once every million times I leave my garage, another vehicle would be driving – careening – down the alley and arrive at the point in space where the back of my car is at the same time that I do.

And yet, despite the overwhelming odds against this happening, it happens at least once a month. The garage door opens, I start to back out, and just as I do, someone comes blasting down the alley at about fifty miles per hour. Because I have been inching slowly, they have seen me and somehow manage to miss me, much as they manage to miss the pigeons and the trash cans. But they don’t slow down (maybe because Popeye Doyle is in hot pursuit). I know I could sit on the wall back there all day and not see a single car go by. So really, what are the odds of a near-miss like this happening even once in my life? And yet it happens all the time.

So I have resigned myself to the belief that I am going to be in an accident. Due to it’s inevitability I’m not sure I can actually call it an accident. I mean, if you know something is going to happen, can it be accidental? And now that I know it’s going to happen, will I unconsciously do things to make it happen, like back out faster? Maybe I should just panel the garage and put a refrigerator and a television out there, park on the street and save myself the insurance deductible, not to mention the uncomfortable deposition and three years of legal wrangling, all the while wearing a huge neck brace that makes me the object of derision at restaurants.

What are the odds of that happening?

My heart has an endless capacity to break.

With apologies to Robbie Robertson and THE BAND, farewell to the Wacky Wild Woman:

Just the title of this post makes me a square, coming as it does from the lyrics of Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs’ 1965 frat-rock classic “Woolly Bully.” Let’s don’t be L7, come and learn to dance. What kind of a dork would quote that barnacle-covered old relic?

I guess the term comes from the Beatniks, and it might not have meant literally “square,” but rather it might have been meant to describe someone who is squared away in life, all neat edges and perfect alignments, no disarray, no eccentricity, thus no creativity. Of course, there’s a good chance the Beats stole it from the blacks, who have always had better slang than white people in this country, often incubating entire sublanguages for months or years before white kids find out about it and “mainstream” it, which means “bring it to the attention of marketers.”

Wherever it came from, it evolved to mean dull, old fashioned and out of it. Square.

I used to be painfully shy. Now I’m just shy. There was a time when social situations caused terror to well up in my stomach and chest, and almost come out my mouth. I was insecure and unworthy, and I thought everyone knew it, could read it on me. I thought it made them look away and try not to let me know that they knew. But I knew, and their kindness added to my humiliation. I looked with longing at the ease with which the normal people would laugh and talk and touch each other, making plans for after school, after the game, after the dance, and I had no way in. I was isolated and afraid, a perfect candidate to join a gang. Little boys walkin’ away from it all, so cold.

I retreated into music. Huddled over the old kitchen radio after everyone had gone to bed, listening to whatever came through the static. Walking the city, the tiny six-transistor radio pressed to my ear, decades before Sony gave us the Walkman, in splendid, rockin’ isolation. Touching no one, no one touching me.

In ninth grade, as if my pain and alienation had been judged not horrible enough, I got my first pair of glasses. Black plastic frames. The stems hooked over and around my ears, like my Uncle Dick’s glasses. I wore them only when my parents or the optometrist were there watching. Fuck them. I never knew Buddy Holly, until it was too late. It would be years before John Lennon would come along and make them a hip fashion accessory, and make it cool to read books and write poetry and know about Neitzche and Buddha and painting, before I could say it right out loud: “Fuck them.” That’s when you fall. When you fall into a trance, sitting on a sofa playing games of chance.

In my shyness I learned to play guitar, by myself in my bedroom, until I dared to come out and show myself. Shielded by my guitar I could join all those people, the ones who were better than me, who pitied me and ignored me. I still couldn’t be of them, but I could be with them. And I found that if you don’t act shy, it is as if you are not shy. No one knows. No one cares.

You’re not hip. You’re not square. You are merely the word made flesh. That’s the thing to do. Get you someone really to pull the wool with you.

Thanks and apologies to Van Morrison, Paul Simon and Domingo Samudio (Sam the Sham).

On my third night in Ketchikan I was drinking J&B.

It was expensive, because everything is expensive in Ketchikan. You’d think it was Manhattan, or Paris, if you looked at your bar tab. If you looked at the bar, on the other hand, you’d think you were in Ketchikan. The place was decorated with totems, wagon wheels and stuffed animal trophies, heads with frozen angry faces bursting out of the walls here and there. Sawdust on the floor. The owner of the joint says it’s last night’s furniture, like no one’s ever heard that one before.

The owner’s name was Jeff, and he wasn’t from around those parts. He was a good-looking guy in his thirties, five-ten, 175, sandy hair, hazel eyes behind wire-rimmed specs, two shades too pale for the neighborhood. He was trying to go native with a plaid flannel shirt and a patchy beard, but it wasn’t working. I never got it straight exactly what he was doing running a bar in Alaska, but he’d been there a couple of years, and he seemed to be doing all right.

Right around last call Debbie the waitress brought a tray of six drinks to my table, where I was sitting alone, recovering from five sets of rock’n’roll. J&B neat, water back. I asked if she was planning to join me. She told me no, that I’d been six-packed.

If Alaska had been a separate country, which a lot of the residents think it is anyway, drinking would be the National Pastime. It’s a young, rough place. A lot of rugged individuals, also known as misfits, a lot of folks who have run away from something or somebody, losers who think they’ve got nothing left to lose. The days are short, the nights are long and the loneliness blows through your coat like the north wind. So you drink. First to get warm, then to stay warm. Then to loosen up, then to keep up. All the usual reasons, only faster and bigger, Alaska-style, until the whole room is buzzed and buzzing, everyone a little stiff, a little loose, ready for anything, prepared for nothing.

Six-packing, as it was explained to me, was the practice of finding out what someone is drinking, and buying him six rounds of it. If you don’t kill them all before the ice melts, Debbie told me, you don’t have a hair on your ass. I guessed that if you do finish them, you get to be an honorary Alaskan, drunk like everyone else. I had a little extra time to complete the challenge, since there was no ice, but I was young and stupid, and I wouldn’t let my benefactor down.

She was a fortyish babe with impossibly black hair, sparkling dangly earrings and full lips. They were painted red, to go with the minidress. I’d seen her there the night before, in jeans, stalking the room. Tonight she was with a girlfriend, drinking, smoking and getting braver.

To show I was thankful she’d picked me, I downed two shots of whiskey fast, then held the third one up toward her table before hammering that one, too. After a minute the girlfriend got up and went to the bar, and I went over to talk.

I put both hands on her table and leaned down. “Are you trying to get me drunk?” My tongue was numb.

“Is it working?” She gave me a nervous smile and shrugged one full, ripe shoulder. She was wearing Ciara. I suddenly felt warm.

“Something is.”

We danced. The jukebox played Solomon Burke, “Cry to Me.” Grown-up heartbroke R&B. When your baby leaves you all alone... She put both arms up around my neck. …and nobody calls you on the phone… I bent a knee and she let it get between her thighs, the minidress riding up. …Dontcha feel like cryin’? She clung tight and pushed herself against me. Here I am, honey. Cry to me.

We were strangers, but we had always known each other, the way strangers at last call always know each other. I didn’t need her name, she didn’t want my promise.

Later, at the door, getting into our heavy coats, I remembered my three remaining drinks. “Never mind,” she whispered. “I’ve got something at home.”

The old man drank himself to death, finishing the job on my nineteenth birthday.

I was in another city, having left home for good just two months before. I thought I was finally on my own, and now I was on a jet, called back.

He’d been drinking heavily all of my life and most of his own, and he was a loud, obnoxious, scary, threatening drunk. He left school after fifth grade, caroused through his teenage years and become a man just in time for the Great Depression. Watched as the life was drained out of people like him, second- or third-generation Americans, not stockholders, working people who had so little to lose, and lost all of it. I don’t know what he did during those dark years. It might have been then that he turned bitter and hopeless. He may have tried to tell me at one time or another. I don’t remember. If he did, I wasn’t listening. Now I can never find out. From what I know now, he was a bum, in the finest depression-era sense.

But I just don’t know.

On the night I was born, in 1947, he was out. Maybe he was with friends, or maybe everybody was his friend that night. He had a new wife, a new life, a new life on the way, a bundle of joy, impossible burden. Husbands didn’t hang out in delivery rooms. They hung out in waiting rooms, or bars. He would have been the bar type, buying drinks, talking loud, a pocket full of cigars and a belly full of whiskey.

At some point during the 1930’s, he joined the Army Reserve, and that’s what he was doing when his country entered World War 2. He was sent to Europe, with the Signal Corps. The Germans jammed the short-wave radio, so the Signal Corps switched to FM, but it only had a range of 30 miles. Our guys had to lay wire between the radio relay stations, to ensure clear communications. You can’t jam telephone lines.

I heard the story several times, starting when I was about twelve years old. I don’t know if it’s true, or even if it’s possible. He would tell it softly, and it’s a confused narrative, because, of course, he was drunk when he told it. 1944. Two German soldiers, driving some kind of military vehicle, probably an armored car. The war is lost to them. Still, they won’t halt when the American sergeant orders them to, They won’t comply. Maybe they don’t understand, maybe they are scared, they are young and don’t know the protocol of surrender. And maybe the sergeant overreacts. He has been crawling through the mud, laying wire, for six months, he is tired and angry, the war should be over, hell, it is over, why don’t these assholes stop? So he shoots his M-1, which makes it OK for his guys to fire their rifles, too, and in a few seconds the two German soldiers lay dead. It turns out they are boys, barely sixteen. The first time I hear of this, the sergeant has two boys of his own. He weeps, for the boys he killed, for himself, the blood he can’t wash off, for me and my brother and the world we will inherit, the world he has saved for us.

I hated him for a while. Then I pitied him. I’m sorry now. I was young and didn’t know. Some things you’re never old enough to understand. By the time I left, all the hatred and pity were gone. I don’t know if he knew that.

Coming back home on that jet I tried to picture his life. I tried to see what could have made him so angry and fearful. But all I could think of was the electric train, the big Lionel freight that I had found under the tree on my sixth Christmas. The one he had bought for me on the night I was born. The one that he had been hiding for six years, waiting for the right time to give it to his oldest boy, his pride and joy.

They decided they liked the look of the chapel on Broadway.

They had scouted around the town for several months, no hurry, no plans, just looking, wherever they happened to be. Neither of them were particularly religious, but they wanted to have the ceremony — if indeed they were even going to have a ceremony — in a church, just for the tradition of it. They had peeked in the windows of various quaint and magnificent churches, but until now, nothing was working for them. This place on Broadway just felt right somehow, not Catholic or Lutheran or Baptist or any of the major superstitions. A non-sectarian church on a busy downtown street, not a storefront bible-studying kind of place, but a solid old building with a steeple, definitely built as a church, made out of stone, no less, as if somehow it had been transported whole from some New England village.

Once the place was picked it was a matter of time. When they could get time off their jobs, mainly. When they could get the legal documents taken care of. A few guests would be mandatory, so that would have to be timed as well. But there were no big plans, as there often are for these kinds of events. They didn’t want anyone to make a big deal out of it. They were young, but too old for an official Big Deal, or maybe they thought it might not work out, and they’d be embarrassed later about all the hoopla.

When the day finally came, neither of them knew it for sure until the night before. They were that tentative, leaving each other every chance to back out, until there was no time left, a Best Man had been drafted, and a Maid of Honor, and the few mandatory guests had been notified.

In the days before, the girl had decided that she needed a hat, one just for the occasion, one that would never be worn again. So she and a girlfriend had gone shopping. Then there was something borrowed, something blue, and in the magical way that women have, the girl got herself ready.

Even though it was only the first week in March, Spring was in the air, and the boy decided to wear his white linen suit, but with a festive new necktie, light blue polyester with little strawberries on it. A silk tie would have blown the honeymoon budget.

They drove to the chapel together, in the little car they had bought together just a couple of months earlier. It wasn’t until they were on the way that they realized that the bride had no flowers. They laughed and laughed at their foolishness, but they stopped at a flower shop along the way, where they got a great deal on a bouquet that another bride had ordered, but had never come to claim. Seeing this young couple in love, the lady at the counter found herself in the mood to make someone happy, and they ended up with an armload of some other bride’s flowers.

And then, in the stone chapel with the incongruous New England steeple, the boy and the girl stood before their friends and family and said the ancient words, made the ancient promises. Good times, bad times, ready or not, here we come…

Their little, almost impromptu, ceremony was exactly twenty-five years ago today. The few guests wished them well, but nobody gave the marriage much of a chance. Maybe it was good that there was no hoopla.

When they got in the little car and headed up the coast that bright winter morning, they were starting a long ride. To their surprise and delight, the ride still isn’t over. It’s been bumpy at times, and they are still not sure where they are going, but I guess that doesn’t matter all that much. It’s the journey that matters.

To my beautiful, smart, funny, sexy wife: I love you.