Two weeks to Christmas

Dec. 11, 1980

Two weeks to Christmas, and like a small boy believe in Santa Claus and Christ, I sit and wait for it to come.

This has not always been the case. Like the time I got caught hiding behind the living room couch when I should have been at mass, raising more than a few eye brows and voices when I told them I hadn’t gone to church in some time.

I usually hid out in the graveyard in a small mourner’s building just inside the gate. It had seats and windows, but no heat – which is why on that particular Christmas I decided not to hide out there.

The old stone building depressed me even in warm weather as I watched people drive through the gate, their faces as ashen as the grave stones, all of them desperate to find some consolation here, when I knew there was none.

I couldn’t take looking at the dark holes they had for eyes, their faces shrouded in self pity.

I remember sitting in the armed chair that Christmas staring at the large tree, drenched in tinsel and ornaments, and old style lights that that my grand parents brought their first year together, before my mother was born.

I even had presents there, although I didn’t deserve them, games and such, my uncle Harold had insisted on giving me, because it was something we could do together that didn’t involve his chasing me around the house trying to hit me in the head with a hammer.

I didn’t even need to open one to know what they were.

The ones puzzled me were the ones with my mother’s name on, presents we would later have to put in the back seat of my grandfather’s car for the long drive to the hospital, where she would open them so slowly with fingers shaking so badly, I always ached to snatch them out of her hands and open them myself.

Christmas started officially when my grandfather came down the stairs, and the family gathered to take everything in together, resisting the usual petty feuds only brothers and parents could maintain for so many years.

And here, my grandfather stood over me, glaring at me, asking me why I no longer went to church – eve on Christmas, his outrage slashing across me like strokes of a whip.

I could not tell him. I’m not sure I knew why myself, why I would spend that hour staring at graves and mourners rather than in the back pew of a warm church, why God no longer meant anything to me, and how sometimes, when I was most scared, I wanted Him to.

Each lash of my grandfather’s voice made me want to leave now, cold or not, dressed as I was, to seek refuge if not among the graves, then down in the empty, snow-covered fields of Nash Park where the old World War II air plane slowly rotted, where the fountains no longer worked, where the air felt even colder as it came off the surface of the river I loved so much in any season.

But I made no move, and after some heavy discussion with my uncles, my grandfather sent me to my room to wait until dinner, and when I came down later, my presents were gone.

I don’t know why I think of that time now, staring at the pile of poorly wrapped presents I had collected for my family and my friends, my mother’s among them, waiting for a trip to Toms River, not Graystone Mental Hospital. Maybe after all these years, I like Christmas again, and believe in it, and deep down, maybe I even believe in God again.

Out of my league

July 5, 1981

(recollection of an event from 1966-67)

Everybody laughed when the squint-eyed, blonde-haired busybody up in the front of the class said it, and I buried myself in a book trying to hide. Everybody that is but blue-eyed, dimple-faced Ellen that blushed so deep she might have died from shame.

I wanted to find comfort in my book, but the lines of text could not hold my attention even when I didn’t feel so small, and I peered over the top to see everybody whispering, chuckling at my expense.

I had suffered indignities before in grammar school from Leonard who’d made abusing me his personal project until I beat him up with his own shoe on the hill outside of church, making the school bully cry in front of everybody who had thought him so tough all those years.

This was different. I was the odd fish in junior high, that wild boy from the border of Paterson nobody really liked and tried to provoke, hurting me in ways their fists could not, beating me up with their laughter and scorn – with no way for me to fight back, tongue-tied with rage and humiliation.

Most times, I ignored them, staring out the window at the gray sky and the occasional flutter of a bird between the buildings or I cut classes where they out numbered me, those slick kids with clever tricks, who hid behind the teacher when I got angry enough to want to beat them up.

It’s hard to fight back like that, when it’s what they imply that hurts, not what they actually say.

And this time, they had said too much, and knew that they had hit me hard in a place I couldn’t get up from, Mrs. Bailey on the prowl in front of the class, waiting for me to do something stupid, to say something rash, so she could send me to the office again, and wouldn’t have to hear the snickering she knew was aimed at me, but wouldn’t stop, as if she had been one of their breed when she was their age, and hated me as much as they did, and wished she’d not inherited me as her student.

Her stare daring me to say something, and when I didn’t, she called on me anyway, as if to blame me for the snickering.

“What is it?” she demanded to know.

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“You must have done something to set off your classmates,” she said sternly. “What did you do this time?”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said, waving my hand towards the clutch of snobby kids who occupied the safety of the remote rear portion of the classroom, a clutch of giggling fools immune to anything I could do or say. “It was them.”

“And what did that do that made you set them off?” she asked, as I struggled to make sense of the question, and how she seemed to turn what they did into something that was my fault.

“They said I have a crush on Ellen,” I said, hurting even as the words came out of me, knowing how true it was, and how vulnerable I felt having it all hang out there, as if loving someone was a weakness they could use against me, knowing how little I could do about it, and how saying it allowed caused them to giggle more, and poor Ellen, to shrink down in her seat, wilting, dying under their gaze and mine, shrinking away to a place where I could never go, and me, thinking how I would wait outside – the way my uncle Ritchie once did for the gang that beat him up – for each and everyone of these snobs, and teach them respect the same way I had to reach Leonard long ago, because I couldn’t fight them the way they fought – but someday, maybe, when I got smarter, and didn’t feel outfoxed by other people’s words, I could fight them with words, too.

I should be famous -- some day

“In this world, it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich” – Fortune cookie 12/14/12

February 6, 1981

            I really should start trying to live within my means.

            I mean, my bank statement says I have $27.30 cents left in my account, when mere days ago, it said $500.

            What an illusion.

            In the last several days I have spent without real consideration to where it went or how fast. The relief of a job merely an addition to my usual poverty.

            I had books to buy, and old bills to pay, and I’m also in debt to my girl friend Susan, and now the rent is due – again.

            The professor we call “Dr. Chief” at school tells me I have a future in writing, and claims it is “tight and accurate,” and talks to me as a literary equal as uneducated a I am – a ninth grade drop out who faked my way through the GED so I could go to college to learn more about how to write.

            And I haven’t even shown him what I write for myself.

            I wonder what he would say and if he would like it?

            Yesterday, Andy, Mary Kay and Chief sat down together in the college cafeteria where Mary Kay – laughing – asked if I talked about anything else but writing.

            Maybe I’m just too enthusiastic, needing to know how to turn that enthusiasm into cash -- $27.30 doesn’t buy a lot in the way of futures, and unless I find a way to inflate my account, I might wither away from malnutrition.

            I guess I should eat less at taverns (and stuff fewer bills in the g-strings of go go dancers) and learn how to make more money.

            Sure, I just got a job making donuts. I hate the job, and I hate donuts. I much preferred working in rock and roll, but that paid peanuts, too, and left me picking up the pieces of potential suicide groupies who didn’t get to go home with the musician they wanted and got stuck with me.

            But even with a steady pay check, I tend to think I have more money than I really have, especially when I have to bust my ass to get it.

            I’ve just taken on too much.

            I write a lot and read out a lot, but don’t have enough on paper to save me from the grind of manual labor. Everything is school, work, school, work, school, work and in between a few hours of precious sleep.

            Maybe the poet Gray was write in his church yard elegy in that we spend our lives in constant struggle with the elements and in the end we only manage to get the rent paid, gas in the car with nearly no time left in which to create.

            I even dream donuts, even though this semester my writing has exploded, my forms have molded into something worth reading, and if I can find the time, I might even find a way to get myself published.

            This is quite a change from last year when nearly everything I wrote felt like crap.

            Yet isn’t that why I came to school, to find inspiration?

            Maybe I’ll end up okay after all. It is hard to tell.

            Don’t laugh. It’s hard to tell how far I’ve come or how far I still have to go. I’m pretty sure I’ve made progress. But how do I know when I get to the top, I won’t just fall down the other side?

            How do I know if I have the strength to climb up again?

            How do I know if I’ll end up anywhere or just become one of Gray’s gravestones of people who could have been?

            With $27.30 cents in my bank account, I know one thing for certain – I’m not there yet.

The passing of Tiny Tug

Tuesday, December 04, 2012

In those last moments all I could do was call his name; all he could do was purr – a ritual we’d engaged in since his birth in my yard in 1999, a call and response that has tied our lives together in a way only undying love could, and here, he was dying, and I had to let him go.

No animal or human has ever attached itself to me in the way this cat has – he needing me so utterly I could not help but reciprocate: love for love, need for need, call and response.

My fingers stroked his fur even as the vet eased the needle of death in the cat’s leg, the vet searching for a vet searching for a vein that would perform this one last insult life issued before expiring.

I still called him Tiny Tug, even though I knew Big Tug, his father, had expired years ago, laying down his life in the tumble of trees behind our house, pausing on his way to death to say farewell – he like Tiny Tug’s mother, Jelly, knowing we kept sacred the one offspring of earlier litters none thought would or could survive in the wild, Jelly nudging the accident prone and troubled-breathing Tiny Tug into our doorway for safe keeping, and he, Tiny Tug, latching onto me as mother, father and best of friends, sleeping with me at night, clinging to me during by day, as if the cat expected me to expire before he did, or leave him the way his parents had, comforted – I hope – by the my voice and touch as the tender mercy of the vet’s needle too him out of this world and its worries and into that other place beyond pain and sorrow.

I cried over Tiny Tug the way I had cried over my mother, knowing feel well that someone special had just departed from my life, someone the like of whom I would never meet again, and whose absence would generate a hole in my heart I could never fill until the last beat ceased and I like Big Tug, Jelly and Tiny Tug moved onto the mysterious other realm.

A day later, I still have the cat carrier in my car, and feel something contained in it, as if when leaving Tiny Tug’s body behind I carted away his soul, a spirit even now more firmly attached to me, clinging to my heard with all his claws.

Impeded perfection

June 18, 1982

Yes, I am hung up on perfection in a perfect soul and heart and fleeting feelings.

This has been a problem dating back to the early years of my life.

Perfection was drilled into me by clearly imperfect people, establishing a conflict I have yet to resolve.

I am not perfect, yet I expect others to be so.

Sometimes I fail to account for the effects of human emotions on reason, a barrage that affects even the staunchest of intellectuals, flipping reason on its head, prevent any accurate prediction.

Worse still, I do not see other people seeking perfection for themselves, and I get irritated when they seem to settle for mere comfort.

And so the search for perfection seems impeded by two obstacles: emotional disturbance and status quo.

Many people think it is safer to stay where they are than risk falling back.

And sometimes, I feel that way, too, although deep down, I hunger for something I can’t define, something beyond myself, something I might define as perfection, if I actually could ever figure out what perfection is.

The unattainable things -- June 15, 1982

June 15, 1982

I’ve become such a foolish soul these days, pinning my hopes on words instead of actions, setting myself up like a bowling pin to be knocked down again.

A person should learn wisdom from past mistakes. But I continue on, building a pyramid, brick by brick out of my foolish romantic ideals.

Anyone else would have by this time realized that a pyramid is just a marker for a grave, and it is folly to spend a life time building a marker for no one to remember but the maggots.

Still, I persist, building up my own tension, vibrating with melancholic airs in expectation like a man masturbating in preparation for sex.

Somehow I expect all of this to end up in a heightened experience.

The past, however, proves that such optimism breeds disaster.

Or does it?

Sometimes, it seems so – that hope which drives us on also drives us into the ground like a stake.

We hold up the tent to some evil intent, witnessing not great events, but sour things. The lost of love, of life, of liberty.

I wish  I was wise enough to see why.

But I think that Job is right. Good and bad in nature are beyond us, and fate is merely the karma of a three-dimensional being in a four-dimensional universe. We do things and have little control over the consequences, like a stone landing in water has no knowledge of the ripples it makes, then when the ripples lash back, we wonder why.

Well hope is a powerful force we then to use to foolish purpose, creating ripples that smack us later when the important issues come along. We ride the waves like helpless ships, condemning everything else but ourselves for the effect.

Maybe we should restrict our hopes to obtainable, worthwhile things – like love?

Hey, Pauly, I've joined the band Aug. 16, 1979

Aug. 16, 1979

            Pauly tells me I’m crazy when I call him up to say I joined the band.

            He calls it “a hair-brained scheme,” one I will soon regret the way he did.

            I know deep down I should listen.

            Pauly has quit the band so often it ought to pay him alimony.

            But I got this crazy idea that I can work at night while going to college.

            Pauly admits this is theoretically possible, yet tells me I’ll change and I’ll fall into the rock & roll head, just when I’ve made up my mind finally to get a career.
            He suggests I get a real job – something part time.

            I say part time won’t pay the rent where as the bucks the band pays will.

            I’m not like Pauly. I’m used to a regular pay check after a decade of breaking my back loading trust.

            He’s always lived on the fringe, spending so little he never needs to earn much.

            He also borrows and never pays back.

            I have a conscience.

            I’m also a little hooked on the idea of the rock & roll life, something he never loved, but put up with.

            He calls it a crock, an excuse to get laid, and claims I’ll get classier girls at college and won’t have to fill them up with booze first.

            I also like the idea of working with Garrick, a life-long friend who lately I haven’t seen much of.

            Pauly, who has lived most the last decade with Garrick, says I’ll get sick of that soon, too.

            All this leaves me a little confused after I hang up the phone, as if somewhere in the back of my head I know Pauly is right.

I           I just don’t want to admit it.

            I want a little taste of that dingy world before college changes me into someone who won’t find happiness in a drunken date and a heavy back beat. I know I’m going to regret it, but I’ll regret it more if I don’t.