The Blog

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.

Near where I grew up there’s a place where the Mississippi River is narrow enough for a ten-year-old boy to step across.

And I did so, as many times as I could, because it’s not often that a young boy gets to dominate something as huge and powerful as that river. I don’t know if I gave any thought to the city at the other end of the river’s 2500-mile run, but it’s a pretty thought now, looking back, that I might have pictured New Orleans, the French Quarter, Bourbon Street and the bawdy back alleys where so much American mythology was born.

I know that late at night, after all my brothers and sisters had gone to bed, and I should have, too, I would listen to the family’s old AM radio, a hefty wooden tabletop model, and the sound of those Louisiana musicians would come bouncing up from down there, ricocheting off – what? – clouds, or the ionosphere, I don’t know, but I knew then that in the night, AM radio traveled farther. Mysterious and riding waves of static, fading in and out, Allen Toussaint, Dr. John, Professor Longhair, Freddie Cannon, Fats Domino, Clarence “Frogman” Henry, Ernie K-Doe… Magical voices that sang in a strange tongue of village queens and gris-gris, and played with a wild laid-back freedom that thrilled the kid that I was, bent over the table with my ear to the speaker.

In the daytime I listened to the local rock stations, although they probably weren’t called that then: KDWB (Channel 63, went the jingle) and WDGY, known as “Weegee.” I fell in love with Patsy Cline on the school bus. I had no idea what she meant, but she was crazy for tryin’, crazy for cryin’, and when I heard her haunting voice, so was I. For some reason which I didn’t understand, kids had powerful loyalties to one station or the other. You were classified by which one you listened to. I just switched stations to the one that was playing the best music at any particular moment, which made both groups mistrust me. But I didn’t know, so I didn’t care.

Later as a teenager in Los Angeles, the stations were KRLA and KFWB. In ninth grade I had a tiny transistor radio and I carried it everywhere. “What’s Your Name?” by Don and Juan, “Surfin,” Gene McDaniels’ “Tower of Strength.” I was new in town, and for a while I had no human friends. All my friends were in my radio, and they carried me through that first lonely year.

Suddenly it was The English Invasion. Elvis disappeared for a while, returning later as a bloated caricature. Beatles, Stones, Animals, Zombies, Pacemakers, so much action on the airwaves, these guys practically grabbed me by the throat and forced me to pick up the guitar. It was then that I made the transition from listening to making music. I became a player, but I never stopped being a fan.

We are all into different kinds of music, different styles, different artists, but I think what we love, what we call our music can be traced back to what was the soundtrack of our lives during the formative years, the teens and twenties. We become citizens of the world during those precious years, and we are open to new sounds and sure that we are right about everything, and the music embeds itself and stays with us for the rest of our lives. Each new generation identifies with some particular strain, and all the rest of us call it noise, and go back to our favorites.

Listen to your kids’ music. Really. And listen to your parents’ music. I’m serious. We are all people, and in our music we have been saying the same things for millenia. We come at it in slightly different ways each generation, but only slightly, and in these songs we celebrate, we mourn, we teach and learn.

Right now it’s the middle of the night, and I think I can hear, somewhere way down the river, Little Willie John singing “Sleep, Sleep, Sleep.”

Warning: Distasteful subject ahead.

So the E! channel is going to hire actors to recreate actual scenes from the Trial of Michael Jackson. The scenes will be taken from court transcripts. They’ve got a Michael Jackson impersonator and people to play the judge, lawyers, etc., and they have a set designed to look just like the actual courtroom in Santa Maria. I don’t know if they’re planning to recreate the jury, or what the ethics of that would be. Ha – did I say “ethics?”

They have to do this because

1. There is nothing more important happening in the entire universe for the next six months than this child molestation trial, and
2. Cameras are not allowed in the courtroom.

But now that we’ve been conditioned for the past couple of years to accept “reality TV” as an acceptable “art” form (I’m sorry, I can’t stop using quotation marks in this post), who needs cameras in the courtroom? A reenactment could be better than the real thing.

Like, if the transcript indicates that the accused stood and said “Not guilty, Your Honor,” the reenactment could depict maybe a spin move and a hand to the crotch. Who’s to say it didn’t happen that way? Heck, even if somebody did say it didn’t happen that way, who cares? This could open up a whole new world of television. I’d like to see a reenactment of Bush’s closed door meeting with Putin. Does he call him Vladimir to his face? Or how about the Pope arguing in private with his doctors about the morality of pulling the plug on someone in a permanent vegetative state?

But can E! find actors who can memorize a script that fast? I mean, if they’re going to be timely about this, they are going to have to show courtroom drama on the day it happens. This means they’ll have to get those transcripts promptly when court adjourns, which probably means buttering up a court reporter at the very least, up to and including bribery, which I think is legal in this type of case. Then they have to convert them to some sort of working script, which will involve one or two rewrites (remember, this will be based on court transcripts. There may be some “artistic” license taken.) and finally the actors will have to shoot the show. They can’t be reading or stumbling over lines, and the “news” orientation will make it mandatory that things get done quickly, or at least before the next days’ proceedings begin. This could be the career challenge of a lifetime for them.

I don’t know if Jackson did anything criminal or immoral. I hope not. But I can’t help wondering if the Michael Jackson of today would molest that cute little Michael of 1970. Tune in to “witness” every exciting development.