Honk Part 1-3
if you’re honking
Honk if in the winter of ‘96 you were released from 28-day rehab to live in your parents’ laundry room. Honk if the only job you could find in the small town you grew up in was turtle cleaner. Literally a turtle cleaner. As in a local vet collected exotic turtles and he needed someone to syphon the turtle-shit-infused water with a pool pump attached to a garden hose. There were over 3,000 turtles in approximately 500 tanks. The smallest turtle was the size of a quarter, the largest was a snapper the size of a dining room table. The latter was kept in a pool covered in chicken wire. You and the goth kid, Dale, the only other employee, would toss full-sized trout into the gap in the wire.
It was also your duty to carry the corpses of dead dogs to the giant refrigerator behind the garage. Sometimes you had to prop the door open with a frozen lap dog, a poodle or chihuahua.
Honk if the vet had needles lying around in the basements he kept the turtles in. Basements that had more than a passing resemblance to the final scene in The Silence of the Lambs. Eventually those used needles worked their way into your veins, despite the high probability that they contained strange turtle diseases, and your time at the turtle place came to an end. Honk if the whole thing felt like the beginning or the end of something important, but in the end it was neither.
if you’re happier than you feel
In those days boredom was king. Most of the paper was damp but I managed to write lyrics now and then on scraps of it. There was often blood on this paper. Not turtle blood. There is such a thing as a snake-necked turtle, they are horrible to behold, and every now and then one managed to bite me. But that’s not where the blood came from either, nor did it come from the syringes.
I used to call her mother, Jennie’s, at odd times, from the filthy rotary phone under the stairs that led to the vet’s family’s home. The vet was older and either dyed his hair or wore a toupee or both. I’d call Jennie’s mom because Jennie lived there. We’d both been in the detox ward of the 28-day rehab together, but she was ejected for insurance reasons and couldn’t complete her stay. The entire time I had to pretend we weren’t married (we weren’t but that was the term Hector “if it ain’t rough it ain’t right” Rodriguez used, regardless of our protestations) because the rehab had a policy against couples receiving rehabilitation at the same time. They also had a policy against books, radio, television, sugar, and caffeine. It was a tortuous place. The worst part was the books. The only thing we were allowed to read was the ‘big book’ of Alcoholics Anonymous, which is like throwing dusty plastic living room grapes to a starving person. I read it cover to cover in the cold fluorescent light of the bathroom while my roommate slept. Hardcore opiate withdrawal ensures a minimum of four nights wide awake.
Strangely, the rehab didn’t prohibit smoking, and it was there that I developed a taste for Newports, arguably the thing in this story that is the most destructive. Newports were currency at Turning Point , and I found that if I helped your fellow patients, most of whom had come directly from prison to treatment, draw flowers or write letters to women, I’d earn Newports.
I used to joke that Newports were what you smoked if you didn't want people to bum all your smokes, or if you had a cold. If one had a cold. I had a crew, and it was comprised largely of the guys I’d detoxed with. A true bond. And when I arrived at the cafeteria, my place at their table was always set. Including the two large glasses of cranberry juice, sans ice, exactly how I liked it, placed just so. This was touching at first, and eventually oppressive. Every now and then I look back at that copy of the ‘big book’ just to see the notes they written me when treatment was over, like a yearbook, and I still marvel at the graffiti they drew. I used to call Jennie’s mom, Rita, because I was constantly trying to figure out if Jennie was using again.
Jennie: hair like a mushroom cloud, a year older, also Italian American. We’d both endured eight years of Saint Columbus Catholic school together. A school in which 90% of the students were Italian or Irish. The uniforms we wore were a deep kelly green (pants) and green plaid (skirts and ties). I went on to Catholic high school (she to public), also in uniform, but mercifully minus the green.
Our Lady of Lourdes high school deserves its own story, but the highlight reel will include Father Peter, a now-defrocked priest who wore old-fashioned monastic skirts, always chose the urinal next to me, and took (in retrospect) weirdly sensual black and white photos of me and my two brothers. I dodged having to see his penis, my brother did not. It was rumored to be photographed and hanging in his office. It was also rumored to fall out of his (presumably 90s voluminous, mom jeans blue and torn) denim shorts, during mentor sessions, causing him to exclaim “the mouse is out of the house!” Or so Justin told you. He lent me his car for my prom, and when I picked it up at the rectory, all the priests came out and fawned over me in my tux. Priests that had hitherto forced me to shave with a dull pink woman’s razor (beards not allowed), confiscated my earrings, angrily sentenced me to various penances and nearly succeeded in kicking me out for all sorts of infractions.
Honk if I’d fallen instantly in love with her, Jennie, as if it had always been so. Something compelled both of us, the power of Christ, or maybe the Holy Spirit. She laughed too loud, had large accessible veins, and looked like a young, more attractive Lou Reed. She was both incredibly smart and planet-stoppingly sad. She would burst out crying while asleep. I was driven to figure out if she was clean because her dirtiness didn’t stop with drugs, it involved prostitution of the sort that could only take place in Poughkeepsie, NY. The thought of which would make my knees buckle as I reached for things like knives, razors, and/or syringes. It’s incredibly good for the local community that the two of us were bent on self-harm and not the other way around. It would get to the point that I would pull my optical illusion-length station wagon up to her mom’s raised ranch just to feel the hood of her Honda to see if she’d been telling the truth about being home all day.
At this point I'm 24 years old, in good shape, clean a few months, legs still twitching from post acute withdrawals, but in capital T trauma. Prone to just sitting there while internally writhing, the shorthand for which, years later, a mental health professional and I would use my “worm on a hook” image. My “cowa-bunga-dude” from hell. A cut from a rusty razor (kept on hand to scrape fish tanks) made me feel better for a second. It wasn’t long before my entire body was entirely covered in scars. There was always the sound of water, plops of turtles, footsteps creeping overhead and TV. There were old televisions placed here and there and, because of the hours I worked, I became a giant fan of I Love Lucy and The View. Star Jones watched while I cut.
if god exists but we don’t
Nine months of turtles, Hondas, oil changes, Narcotic Anonymous, and various failed psych med trials found me long-sleeved and heading to the fried chicken place on the corner of South Cherry and Main Street, Poughkeepsie, NY. Deep in a torn section of the station wagon’s front seat I’ve got a half-cleaned syringe that had probably been used to give antibiotics to a turtle earlier that week. I'm drunk. Near the phone, under the stairs, was a bottle of whiskey. The owner of the whiskey probably saw the cellar stairs as an out-of-the-way place to keep it. From my perspective it was eye level. I can still smell the surgery in the room I had to walk through to get to the clock with which I’d punch my timesheets. There was always a sedated animal on the giant stainless steel table in the room with the smell. So much so that maybe the room didn’t have a smell, instead that sedated animals, in states of extreme undress, that is, with their skin and fur pinned back so the vet could remove whatever ailed it, had a smell.
Dale was a good guy, he'd showed me the ropes, we’d both smoke and watch the tortoise in the backyard slowly move around in the sun. Silence was fine for everyone at the turtle place. Not long after this, the band I played bass in went gold in England. Which was great, the previous album had interfered with my job at Sausage N’ Stuff, and now the turtles. There would be much degradation (from jobs mostly) to follow in my life and I were happy for the break. Jennie was stabilized on methadone and eventually the tables would turn and she’d be feeling the hood of the station wagon, but for the foreseeable future, my struggles were over. 260 gigs later I’d be kicking dope in the Garden Of Gethsemane while the rest of the band got a tour of Jerusalem, which is to say, my problems were getting better.
HONK Part 4
if you’re a slave to freedom
He’s got his gun out. It’s dawn. It’s hot. Did I bring up god? Was it an excuse for the monologue? Now we’re here? A muggy dawn, with Snorpy and Grasshopper watching, their coke smiles somewhere between laughter and a grimace. His New Orleans drawl is unnaturally sped up and definitely fake. He’s Irish. Which means Catholic. He’s got short hair, 50s style, a chain and tattoos. Which means he’s extremely sentimental. Like all tough guys. He either hates or loves his mom more than most. A type. Dangerous, but simple. It’s fun, this form of danger. Like death by cop but in the other direction. I don’t even like coke, or beer. Snorpy better not be holding. Where is Tomcat?
“God is real, god exists,” he explains, then racks a round into the chamber.
“I appreciate how you feel but I’m sorry, I can’t agree.” I grow perfectly still.
I know this is the part of the movie where I’m supposed to stand my ground. It’s important to show deference but not back down. I’m pretty sure he won’t shoot me. But also, it’s scarier than I thought it would be. It’s more him than the gun I’m scared of. His disapproval. And also, he’s in the palm of my hand. This part is necessary.
“God exists.”
He trains the gun on my head. Every molecule in my body stands at attention. Glock? It’s automatic. I could theoretically reach it. God, coke without dope sucks. God without love sucks. Beer sucks. Tomcat better find what’s her name. With the black teardrop. When did we even leave the Saturn Bar?
“No man, he doesn’t.”
if happiness isn’t a feeling
“I heard from TC.”
“No shit.”
“I called his mom.”
“Dude, it’s been 20 years.”
“He’s in an apartment that a job of some kind paid for. I think he said Alaska.”
“Was he in prison?”
“He didn’t say. Want his email?”
“Yeah, for sure.”
I didn’t. For some reason, I thought I did. It’s impossible to talk to someone after all that time. Best to keep them in amber, a story, a monologue. Every now and then I talk to Jennie and it feels weird. Good and bad. I always want to talk to her, but always in the near future. She calls me about once a year, the act of answering the phone is like diving into cold water. A new world, so many neurotransmitters flood the synaptic gaps it’s disorienting. Like all social interactions but real. Like it's the first time actually talking to another person. I remember him, Tomcat,
freshly showered, enduring jabs from the band about sleeping next to me in one of the two queen-sized beds in a Best Western.
“We’re separated by this cigarette! Rooster, tell them. It’s a Camel wide!”
I grabbed the cigarette and smoked it.
if your body is a time machine
I could hear her through the wall. Shrill. Tall. So tall she even sounded tall. The sound came from higher up. Was my ego so short that tall women scared me? Yes. She’d honed in on me, coke-taloned, despite my being far beneath her, league-wise and actually. Me: 5’ 7”, a strung out hobbit. She: dated the good-looking Oasis brother, socialite, excellent breeding, etc. I was always drunk or high when I’d flirted up at her. Now, on day four of full-blown methadone withdrawal, a two-month ordeal, alcohol didn’t work. It just added an instant hangover on top of the dope sickness. I’d rinsed the little tincture bottle I’d smuggled Jennie’s methadone in. I’d pumped water in and out of the dropper. I’d licked it. Israel’s pharmacies didn’t offer any codeine or benzos. I was in deep shit and I was terrified. I missed Jennie like a limb. And now, here, at the end of the world, the end of the line, the last tour for this album, in an exquisitely beautiful and incredibly ironic landscape, this giant woman bore down on me.
I fell out of the minivan. Somehow the band had talked the label into hiring a car to drive us from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. The Israeli pop star, spoken of first name only, Aviv, helped arrange it. He’d shown up at the hotel with his tomb sized bodyguard, driven us around, and gotten us stoned. We met his father, a well-known writer, at some point during that kaleidoscopic SUV ride. He (the father) was sitting in an outdoor cafe, at a white metal table, surrounded by books and coffee. Salt and pepper dominated the scene. I forget what we talked about, but it had political overtones. I remember wondering what it was like having a father who was a writer and not just nuts. I remember wondering what it was like having enough money to sit at a cafe all day. When we got to the hotel the wide-eyed ladies at the desk said, “Aviv left a message for you.” Which Justin and I pretended was typical. We pretended using a series of frowns, smiles, and hand gestures. The car stopped at Masada, the Dead Sea, and various falafel shops. I could still make jokes at that point. Calling falafel “feel awful” and muttering variations of “you’ve made your Bedouin now lie in it.” Making fun of the others was the only power I had. I wasn’t the singer, I wasn’t on the previous album. I was the guy to the left in the photos.
I was startled by what was the first of a series of increasingly shrill sounds. I had my back to the others because of the scarring and bloat. I was praying that the Dead Sea would take away my dope sickness, like the gift shop dude’s face seemed to promise. He sold mud from the bottom of the sea. It was hard to describe the sound Grasshopper made. Eventually it formed words that had something to do with shaving. He’d shaved the night before. The Dead Sea was so salinated that it made recently shaved spots sting like hell. It was impossible to sink in the dead sea, due to buoyancy, physics, etc. As I waded into the sting, I saw that Grasshopper had also shaved his chest. Probably in last night’s blackout. I still couldn’t lift my right arm above my shoulder because of our fight. I had either attacked or been assaulted by him back in London. I didn’t remember. The water stung, I hadn’t shaved in days but it still hurt. Justin and I floated and bobbed like we did when we were kids. It was fun to have a brother on tour. Every now and then, in front of 10,000 people I would lean over his keyboard and say things like “Remember Grandpa?” and we’d laugh while we played.
“I shaved everything,” Grasshopper screamed. “Ev-er-y-thing.”
if you’ll try anything way more than twice
“Poughkeepsie. Which is, basically, a place to leave if you can. With your hair on fire. I was pretty hapless, had no prospects other than I really liked to play guitar and worshipped rock bands. I moved in with a dude that was friends with an actual band. I had been homeless, my parents kicked me out. They kicked me out because I wouldn't go to mass or A.A. or agree to be celibate. This guy I moved in with was in his late thirties, in a regionally successful band, and roughly twenty years older than me. He introduced me to a band that was on a record label. They did things like put out albums, go on tour, and speak casually about how snarky British press could be. They had been convinced to move up to Poughkeepsie, because you could live there and still be within striking distance of New York City. I was keenly interested in this band. Because they were, and I can’t stress this enough, an actual band.
I came home one day to my little apartment, which was more or less a shooting gallery, to a note. There was a fair amount of crack cocaine use but one couldn't truly call a crack house because most of us were junkies that used crack. Not the other way around. I came home and there's a post-it note on my door that said so and so from such and such band wanted to talk, and to call them and there was a phone number. And I was like well here it is this, this is it, this is how these things happen.
I was probably coming home from my job at Sausage and Stuff. And I was like, well this is it, this is the beginning, I'm going to play music with this band and my fortunes are going to shift. I called so and so from such and such band and they picked up and they said “we heard you can get drugs.” So it turned out they didn't want me to play with them at all. They just heard that I could get drugs. So that's, you know, I didn't abandon my mission. I did that. I became sort of a drug mule, where I'd go back and forth to the city and I’d pick this or that up and sometimes get arrested twice in the same day, and I supplied them with drugs. It took about a year of loyal service, but I did end up playing bass for the band, which apparently is how these things work.
And what happened from then on was this crazy thing where I lived this duplicitous life. In my heart I was this sort of gnome that lived in Poughkeepsie and worked at Sausage and Stuff, but also I would go out on these tours. I went to Europe for the first time, I was on MTV, I bought a $25 suitcase from Kmart, I did all those things that you see in the movies that bands do. I sent my parents postcards from Barcelona. I collected hotel soap. What eventually happened was, I’d come back and work at Sausages and Stuff and people would come in for a meatball sub and say: “I thought you said you were famous?” and I would say, “It’s complicated.”
It went back and forth like that for a bunch of years and I guess my real story, the one I’m trying to tell here, is about the border. A border tale. Not quite like Cormac McCarthy's but sort of, in a way. Bands have to cross borders and we often did so, en route to Montreal, in our shitty van, the inside of which we had spray painted silver with the wrong kind of paint. The paint didn’t or couldn’t fully dry so all of our gear and clothes had random silver smudges on them. And, if you have ever been a band that has to go to Canada, you know, it's usually this grueling process. It’s degrading. Things happen.
I was the youngest, I had a kind of reputation as a wild card. Not in a cool way, but in a liability way. I knew that my currency in that band was if I acted sort of cavalier about what happened to me I was even cooler. I was about ten years younger than everybody so it was important for me to be perceived as cooler. I think I was still in my teens at that point, so, I remember vividly, we're sitting in our van, which is misfiring and freezing, heading to the border, but my bean bag faced backwards. I’m looking at the passengers. I didn’t know exactly how close the border was. I lived primarily, by day, on a bean bag in the front right hand passenger side, where the passenger seat would be if it hadn't been yanked out and replaced with this orange bean bag. It was also sorta where the band threw its trash. The singer liked to chuck McDonald’s garbage into the little well between the door and the van, like the foot step thingy. Presumably because the trash would fall out when the door was opened. He also blew his nose on magazines. We found a bean bag for me, god knows where, and I sort of lived under a blanket on this bean bag that was also a garbage pile. I was kind of this garbage pile. I tried but failed to figure out an Oscar The Grouch joke. Probably because even Oscar has more dignity, or at least an air of authority.
I remember a lot of times kind of huddling under my coat doing drugs that I couldn't let them know that I had. Only because they would take them for themselves. I’d snort dope, under my coat or blanket, during drives while seven band members and crew watched the road out of the windshield about a foot above my head. Anyway, we pulled up to the border like that. And there were Mounties. Which turned out to just look like cops, not on horses or with the hats or anything. They came out and they kind of like, you know, set the dogs on us and I remember sitting there, very very tense. The tension was mounting, so to speak. It was the kind of band that, if you did something wrong you were voted off the island, and you had to go back to Sausage and Stuff. Which was literally a fate worse than death, you know. I did not want to go back to meatball subs or 300 eggs on hard rolls with salt, pepper and ketchup before 8am, if you know what I mean.
I was sitting there, very tense, our tour manager got quickly taken aside because the dog sniffed something on him, and you know, everyone's kinda looking at each other and the lead singer is doing, is brooding, is muttering tense things. And the next thing I remember is one huge mountie guy, saying “MR. R____O. J__ R___O.” Which is me and I kind of, like, everything in my body filled with ice water. “Mr R___o, have you been drinking any short sodas lately?” And a full minute passed where we all stared at the guy, kind of like, what? He said it again, seeming pleased with his joke: “I said, are you drinking any little sodas lately?”“Short Sodas.”I just said“No.”Andhesaid“come with me”and he brought me into this little metal room in the back of the Mountie station, with all sorts of pictures of the queen on the wall and weird apparatus. I’m sweating and freezing at the same time trying to look cool with it and they told me to take my sunglasses off. I was fully one third the size of every person in that room. No less than five big beefy guys plus me filled the room with breath.
Head mountie said, “Mister R___o we found these short little straws in the little pocket of your jeans. Short straws that are encrusted with this powder. And we're going to test this powder. And we're gonna offer you a deal. You can either pay us five hundred dollars and say you're guilty for what is obviously drugs, or you can go and plead not guilty, and it will go to court, in which case we'll prove that this residue is cocaine and you'll have to pay a much larger fine and probably do time. So what do you choose?” I felt kind of on the spot, as you can imagine. So I said, “I don't do drugs, officer.” And they said, ”Well what is this powder in these cut up soda straws?” And I said “Well, these are, you know, they sell ephedrine over the counter to keep truckers awake and we have to drive long hours so I crush the pills and snort them. So it’s sort of kind of like drugs, I agree, but it's legal.” And they said “Mister R___o” and looked hard at me. “We're going to test these for drugs.” And then this is where the magic, y’know, the magic of real life, the most magical thing, happened.
The big mountie, lead mountie, alpha mountie, pulled out this can that said on it, in large clear blue letters: Cocaine test. And they looked at me like...? As if to say, “This is it. Five hundred or five thousand bucks,” which, needless to say, I didn't have. And also, if the band was denied entry because of little ol’ me, it was safe to assume my career in the rock and roll business was over. Back to Poughkeepsie, the future would never happen. So I said, “Officer, I don’t do drugs.” And then, in a way that surprised all of us, things got way way more tense. A thick cake of tension no knife could cut descended upon us. My eyebrows couldn't hold the sweat and one dripped. There was a lot of silence and breath.
“We're going to test this, these mini straws, for drugs and if you, if you're found guilty, it's going to be bad. You're never gonna be allowed in Canada again, your bandmates are all gonna have to go home and you can't play your shows. Things are not going to be good.” This last bit was practically hissed. “Not good.” And I was like, “Officer, I don't do drugs”. So they tested my little straws. And the test came back negative. And I walked out of the room and we played our show at Lee’s Palace in Montreal that night. Because the straws were caked with heroin not cocaine.”
if love can only be mutual
I sat there drinking my sleepy time tea. I’d managed to fit 6 tea bags in the mug. It was the only thing I drank other than the sugar free cranberry juice.
“If ain’t rough it ain’t right,” we said, cheersing.
I used to lay awake and listen to her breathing. For many reasons. Sometimes to make sure it was still happening, sometimes to figure out if she was actually asleep so I could crawl over her body and filch the methadone from her flimsy lock box behind the futon couch. It was a plastic teenage mutant ninja turtle lunch box with one of those high school locker locks threaded through the handle. Years later I’d need my own, for an as-yet-uninvented drug called Suboxone. If I bent the lunch box at the right angle, I could fish the methadone bottle out with my index and ring fingers. They would get sliced a little on the hard plastic’s sharp edge. In a pleasant way. I’d carefully open the little bottle, siphon the methadone out with an eye dropper, and twist the lid back on as tightly as I could. I hated stealing from her, I knew that I was messing with her PAWS, but those thoughts existed in a vault. In the account. The credit account. Justin and I figured out that there was only so much goodness, only so many good feelings. If you took more than is reasonable you eventually had to pay it back, with interest. Pain compounds. It was a cruel system. A few years later I learned that the exact opposite was also true, it only took small amounts of kindness, attention and action to stay well. And the longer you tended to these things, the better and easier you felt. There was, it eventually turned out, such a thing as an upward spiral.
I wondered for a sec if the hemp in my hemp jeans, stolen from the hot topic-style head shop my youngest brother worked in, was smokeable. Stolen or accepted, as he would just let anyone take whatever they wanted. I wondered why or how some of the molecules in my body decided we were us. Which molecules were me. Did the molecules that made up my brain have executive control over this? The talk of a higher power made me want to smash things. To flip tables and watch the pamphlets flutter. My vision was still blurry from withdrawal, something no one warns you about. My cells were suffering, all of us together, they’d leave if they could, but the executive cells were not having it. We were hell bent on staying us, alive and suffering, for as long as possible. Was to feel happiness to feel it slip away? Was goodness, the feeling, something else as it leaves?
& is hard for a reason
Honk if you literally didn’t recognize the back of your own hand. That’s something they don’t tell you if you’re that weird combination of unlucky and sad enough to become an intravenous drug addict. It’s a disease, sure, but there’s an element of stupidity involved. The kind of stupidity behind things like reckless driving. There’s a whiff of narcissism hovering around the whole thing too. Like a shitty, fabreezy vape cloud of self-centeredness. You can think these things,but when you trot such factoids out in gen pop, in conversation, at a birthday party or something, it adds to the vape cloud.
I didn’t recognize the back of my hands because I had permanently altered them. I couldn’t count the amount of times I went there, wrists, neck, feet or even fingers. There were dozens of 100 count .05 CC 28g 5/16th boxes of insulin needles scrolling through the Amazon Prime of recent memory. Buy it again. Recommended for you. I’d walked away from the needle exchange truck with two shopping bags full of them. Farmer style. Long gone. A rough estimate would be three to five thousand times that winter and spring, and about a third of those were either in the back of my hands, or the top of my thumb and index finger. Both sides. After a few times the vein would really open up, the combination of street dope and coke inflamed them, so they’d swell and make better targets. Until you missed enough, then they’d be gone forever. Causing neuropathy and restricted movement. Dangerous for a guitar player. Reckless. A few of them seemed permanently dyed a darker color. Likely because of the research chemicals floating around. Floating around the internet, my memory, my bloodstream. Each of these thoughts caused a little tsunami of a pulse. A quickening. I played the little movie over and over in my mind, that perfect little tree of blood, blooming. It was hard to imagine I’d never do it again, but only if I thought about it. Most bad things start with thinking, most good things just happen.
if not even the idea of god exists
He’s got his gun out. I’m either too high to notice I'm high or not high enough. Everything in my body wants to leave. Like bullets. Each molecule stepping away from the other. Like shots, like a shot. This smug kid, he thinks. Shit-eating wide-ass grin. Stupid fake-sounding New York accent. 21? 22? God exists and he’s here to prove it, which he kinda does. By being god, trying to intimidate god with more god. He’s worried I might steal something, and whether or not we’ll ever leave.
If you're something, anything, an accumulation of misremembered misperceptions, only you can’t know, which is to say: amateur fiction, a steady snowfall of bad ideas, decades of declarative statements and desperate to establish anything not defined by more powerful people.
Honk part 6
All of a sudden they were all looking at me. Time slowed down, everything felt the opposite of natural. What was I wearing? Why was I always in some sort of uniform? How the hell was I supposed to remember this complex series of movements and who was Mr. Shwartz?
Mr Schwartz. A well meaning, beefy middle aged man with a paunch in a heavy white set of pajamas. His black belt was positioned under his belly. He smelled different, in general, like food. Maybe there was beer involved, something I didn’t have much experience with, olfactorily. I knew Mr. Schwartz’ smell because as I graduated the levels of colored belts, white, yellow, green, purple etc., I came in physical contact with him fairly often. In those days you knew a person’s smell more, for some reason. I’d seen him fight at the tournament in Madison Square Garden where he seemed sloppy, frantic. He yelled a lot, that day, in the way of Karate. But he sounded a little scared. His wife was disabled, strict and complicated. She appeared older than him. It’s unclear what her condition was, but it caused her to move in slow motion. She would demonstrate the various forms and time would just lay down and give up. In those days, boredom ruled. Literally anything happening was precious. The Schwartz’ son was adopted. He was the star of the class, maybe a little older than me and not to be fucked with. He was prone to grandstanding, kind of frantic himself and genuinely good at Karate. Behind his eyes there was anger and a hint of cruelty. The general vibe of the family was complex, I could sense pain, compulsion and fear but I could also tell that Mr. Schwartz was good natured and probably trying like hell to keep the whole thing together.
I had smoked pot for the first time that day. Possibly filched from Andy’s uncle. I was in a sort of liminal zone, developmentally, unsure of whether or not to leave the world of J.R.R Tolkein and Karate in lieu of Led Zeppelin, marijuana and...something. I didn’t know where I was headed. I didn’t know that a person could head in a direction at all, in fact. But I was, in the manner of all living beings. And in this state, the first time being stoned, in front of a class, finally being noticed by my peers, the Schwarz family asked me to demonstrate Ku Mu Three. The most complicated form. Forms were a series of offensive and defensive movements meant to demonstrate levels of skill and I excelled at them. They contained zero value in the way of self defense. I possessed a natural grace that almost made up for my attention span and dissociative spells. A grace I had lost access to that day. It occurred to me, as I clumsily blocked and attacked invisible assailants in dead silence, how wrong everything was. I was sure the class could hear my thoughts. There was no way this life could have meaning, the math just didn’t add up. There were too many conflicting truths. They cancelled each other out. There, on the repurposed Knights of Columbus floor, barefoot in a ghee, I knew that I would never do anything like this again. Anything that was athletic or pro-social. I gave up.
My achievements, from that day forward, were always a triumph of neediness over shyness. Henceforth I would find myself on a series of stages under the influence of various intoxicants. My need for love had moxy, it turns out, it was the underdog. The war between my various needs was not unlike the battle of five armies in the final passages of The Hobbit. It had overlapping concentric circles of interests. The inverted narcissism of shame battled regular old narcissism. Most art is the result of this peculiar war, one way or another. What was, or is, art that was, or is, never made?
Up until that point my life had been spent entirely in rooms that had crosses in them. As awareness of a life outside of the walls grew, so did my keepers attempts at mitigating it. I was often baited with normalcy. ‘Do you want to see “The Breakfast Club”’? They’d ask. Which of course I did, I was desperate for any type of normal experience. The Breakfast Club was screened in the church gymnasium, with Father Fred sitting next to me, after which we were invited to talk about how we felt, on a spiritual level, about the frank sexuality displayed on screen. Father Fred would come over our house sometimes and my Mother would feed him ziti. He was enormous. He’d play chess with me in a t-shirt with yellow stained armpits after he fed. On the days myself and a couple other alter boys got to skip class and perform funeral mass, Father Fred would pick us up in his kaopectate colored Dodge Dart. After mass he’d give us a dollar or two and we’d buy candy from the deli. Father Fred’s excesses all centered around eating. Which was a mercy, in retrospect.
A few years prior, in the school attached to the church, my third grade teacher, Sr. Anne, announced that my mother was coming in to pray over the class. This was news to me. News involving my parents being anywhere near my peers was bad. My mother’s prayer life was extreme. No one else had a mom who prayed with her full body. She’d gesture and reach her arms out to the Lord during mass. Prayer in my house was talking to god. As every day as lunch or cars. When you grow up religious, there is no distinction between math, religion or grammar. They were facts being taught. Two plus two equals four, Germany invaded Poland, Jesus’ mother was assumed into heaven in a glorified virginal state. No big deal. France was as unimaginable as purgatory. Since Catholic School lasts for 12 years, the parsing of fact from fiction was touch and go at best. I remember the day the words “The Holy Spirit” revealed their absurdity to me. It was around the same age I realized nursery rhymes were gibberish. It’s safe to say I never actually Believed.
Definitions of god, faith and belief became a point of contention between my parents and I as the years grinded on. The afternoon my mother came in to pray, however, was on an entirely different level. My mom, accompanied by Regina Riley's mom, was there to Pray. I was gripped by a powerful need to run but by then the violence of the old nuns had trained us to stay put. It became extremely quiet in the classroom. My mom looked both nervous and terrifyingly all-in before they began. I slid as low as possible in my seat as sounds came out of my mother that I hadn’t heard before, anywhere. Years later there was an SNL character named Goat Boy that gave rise to strong and confusing feelings in me. I recognized those sounds. This person who I loved so deeply, who maybe 8 years prior I had actually been, my tiny zygote clinging to her uterine wall, our cells not yet admitting we were separate, was bleating like a goat in front of my class. Part of me has been embarrassed ever since.
There were two classes per grade in our school. Mine and Jennie’s. One class on either side of the hall. In between classes students walked in a circle, in this hall, in a line, filing past classrooms that they’d either graduated from or were headed to. I grew up hearing Jennie. She was a grade ahead of me, but her laugh was one of the loudest in the building. That’s eight years of walking the wheel together, I remember admiring her giant hair and her sophistication, and, like all people who weren't me, her apparent social ease. She had friends. She wouldn’t have heard my mom that day. If I was in third grade, she would have been in fourth, which places her either across the hall and one classroom up or behind the cinderblock wall that held the chalkboard.
Leaving her, decades later, was like sawing off a limb. Fifty one percent the right choice. I knew the back of her hands better than my own. To reach over in my sleep and not feel that giant mass of hair was unthinkable. We’d fought like hell to stay together. So many slogans and admonitions wagging their fingers, “don’t confuse love with pity”, “two sickies don’t make a wellie”, “give your light but not your oil”. There were two paths, and after we’d finally wriggled free of everything but normal problems, I chose the one I had never traveled. What followed, after a year of slow mourning, was joyful and necessary. I became a person. But there would always be forty nine percent of a life floating around out there, unlived, comfortable, cozy, and full of guilt.
“We’re going to have to live in the basement and eat the cat”
We were in a Family Meeting and my mother was speaking. One or both of my parents must have read about family meetings in the self help books that would tear through our house. They would arrive and lay waste to existing rules. This was the legacy of my Father’s psychology masters and my mother's twelve step work. A constant mulching of rules. Each new protocol was treated as if it had always been so, and the only way to salvation. It was dizzying. Eventually one set emerged as a dominant pattern however. There were ten commandments but there were also twelve steps. My mother was one of seven children. Her mother had two sets of twins and approximately eight or nine children, not all of whom survived. My grandfather was a classic Polish alcoholic from a long line of depression, poverty and despair. It was almost impossible to tell my mother and her twin appart. They were jaw droppingly beautiful. My Aunt P____ is an alcoholic, sober for many years. Every one of my aunts and uncles are in recovery. Whether it’s OA, DA, UA, NA, AA, ACA or Al-Anon. It’s either that or they are fanatically religious. My mother was both. I had both won and lost the spiritual lottery.
My mother had called the family meeting because of nuclear war. Which was imminent. She explained that Satan would be released from his chains and consume the world with fire. As it was foretold in the book of revelations. There were the usual hand gestures and a weird red blotch crept up her neck as she spoke. I’d see the red blotch every couple of years and it was generally not a good sign. God’s children would likely survive though, she explained, but since we were 70 miles from New York City, we would have to endure the most grueling form of radiation sickness. The way to survive was to live in the basement. My parents had joined a church group (eventually revealed to be a pyramid scheme) that sold food that was nearly non-perishable. We’d had the spaghetti already and it tasted like dust. She explained that we might have to eat Tom, our family cat, if we ran out of the long term storage food. I tried but could not imagine skinning him. It was all good news we were told because that meant that we would be with our lord and savior sooner rather than later. I spent several nights at a time awake. We must have lived under a flight path because a few times a night the mournful sound of a jet airliner cut through the cicadas and I would hold my breath after they passed.
...if guns should be legal but only for women
Honk if you spent your whole life being urged on by large men, urged on to do unthinkable things. Sex is best left to non catholics. As a band member and eventual bandleader who didn’t even drink you we’re always surrounded by men who couldn't get laid and really really wanted you to. Laid by proxy. Honk if people were always saying things to you that didn’t match how you felt. A kind of constant looking over of one’s shoulder assuming the person was talking to someone behind you. That CAN’T be meant for me. Honk if you were essentially a nun, an eunuch who preferred the asexuality of serial monogamy. If you preferred partners who were in between genders and also traumatized. If sexuality had as much appeal as comic books, after the appropriate age. In puberty a giant psychedelic force inhabited your body and it was confusing and horrifying. It mercifully leached out of your system over the years. Honk if you preferred thinking to sex. And talking. And honk if sometimes took years for friends and lovers to realize it was so.
...if you’re a single horse riding a tandem bike
I can remember the wooden blocks, once painted red, now worn almost back to wood by several childhoods worth of early development. Now, on the eve of my sister Teresa’s birth we were going for a ride. I watched my father tape the blocks to the back pedals of the brown tandem bike, first with masking tape then with black electrical tape. This was so I could reach them with my little dwarf-like legs. As my Father talked my apprehension molted into horror. The mask of general anxiety was lifted to reveal a crucible of shame hitherto unimaginable. The back handle bars, there were two, didn’t turn. They were for merely holding on. I was told I had a new bike, I didn’t or couldn't have imagined that it would have two seats.
Riding to school in the very early mornings that summer was hard on many levels. My feet kept slipping from the blocks, my Father kept up a steady patter of theology and fear of oncoming traffic. We’d pass row houses and raised ranches. The most embarrassing part was unpredictable, timing-wise. Guilt is for what you’d done, shame was for what you are, it had been explained to me. There was a hill, dubbed Heartbreak Hill by my father, that was the hardest part to physically endure. The ride to school was about five miles but a good portion of it was up hill. We’d pass Karl Ehmier’s Farm on the right and slowly wind our way up. When we’d reach the top my father would let out a bellow that reverberated down the valley. My Mother was right, he had no shame, in many ways. But she was also wrong, my Father carried an enormous amount of shame, but it was distributed autistically. It was mostly social. Neither he or my mother had friends, just large loud italian families. I learned early on that if I could make people laugh, if I performed and capered, I had a toe hold of power over him. I could protect my mother and I from his rage. I could ward off his mocking and impossible requests and occasionally I could ward off blows. My Father was cripplingly shy.
The final spear in the side of the whole ordeal was the bus. I could usually feel it coming from behind, always before Heartbreak Hill, it’s diesel engine projecting dub-like rumbles. On top of the cacophony was a thin layer of jeers. As the weeks wore on the driver learned to honk the horn, in case anyone would accidentally miss the spectacle of me in my green plaid uniform riding an absurdly long bike with my middle aged school psychologist father en route to hell. The whole thing would mount into a white light experience of anxiety and shame until they passed and faded into brake lights and butts or noses pressed against the back window. By then I was no longer in my little body.
...if you’re pictured
On his first day as a Trappist monk, just before a vow of poverty & silence my father let some unremembered brother shave his thick black woolen head. A gleaming pool cue atop a novice’s vestments. He said he turned his standard issue powder-blue Cadillac, bought with wages from his job as a butcher in the Bronx, in to the abbot. A vignette almost too on the Roman nose. He’d driven, on impulse, straight to Saint Joseph's Abbey in Massachusetts and promptly got stuck in a field. It required a team of monks, lead by Brother Joachim and a tractor, to pull him out.
His father spent two years wild in the woods outside of Palermo at age eight with his brother, my great uncle Al, age 10. It was hard to imagine Uncle Al other than bald and dressed in polyester. But they were once young and surviving on poached crops in the woods outside of Palermo. Their mother was murdered with an axe and tossed into their village well in Sicily. My grandfather talked of her brothers bringing bodies back, draped over mules. Some ancient beef welled up and murdered his mother, brutally and in cold blood. Many years later, I’d sit and smoke with him in his tiny camper, perched on the little hill in our backyard and he’d weep and shake his fist at god. The water damaged picture of his mom, a sturdy terrifying looking woman, hung over the little camper sink he used. He was the first person I smoked cigarettes with. He’d smoke cheap cigars, kept in coffee mugs in strategic places around the little camper, and I’d smoke whatever cigarettes I’d been able to steal from the local deli that employed me. We’d sit on folding chairs and he’d use dialect to lament old age and loss. He’d shake his fist at the sky and say he was going “punch god in the nose” for taking my grandmother, and we’d both mourn. They’d been fighting for decades when they separated. He moved further upstate and she stayed in their little cabin on Stormville mountain until she died. She’d taken me out to what was maybe my first restaurant experience, Red Lobster. My dominant memory from that day was being pulled over by the police and being utterly amazed at the transformation that overcame my tiny precious Grandmother. All of 4’ 7” of her. She berated the cop with language I had never heard before. Not dialect, word’s like “Fuck you” and “ You’re a piece of shit get back in your little car.” The word trauma gets thrown around a lot these days. There’s talk of ancestral anxiety. Capital T trauma and lowercase t trauma my patient shrink would later explain. Anxiety that you can one hundred percent tell is older than you. Violence can expand, as a concept, I would also learn. It could include things like money, shame, or cultural bias, but in Sicily these nuanced distinctions got no air time. My true inheritance can only go in one of two directions. Thousands of needles later the verdict was...in.
What is it with italian men? What is it with our ancestral imperative to burrow and shape the earth? To commit tree murder. They, we, are masons on a genetic level. Hobbits, essentially. At 5’ 1” my grandfather was close to the earth. I inherited his scrawny little legs. A low center of gravity. I still joke that I have four arms. It makes me decent at pull-ups but happy when large chunky heels are in fashion. It was as if from the waist down we lost ambition. My grandfather was ferocious. Ready to fight anyone at the drop of a hat. He cut down trees like each one was a prize fight. He had been a boxer in the Marines. All five feet of him. His famed upper cut the stuff of Bronx legend. Where he was known as Cheech. The most pronounced part of Francesco. Fran-CHE-sco. My youngest brother would follow in his footsteps and become a regionally renown MMA trainor. A white ex con who is great at carpentry and can wax casual about how many times his nose had been broken. He would also chuckle with our father about the pros and cons of shock therapy. A bond they shared. Once, after a family camping trip, we came home to a post-apocalyptic property. My grandfather had chopped down every single tree in our backyard. His method involved making a fire, tended daily for weeks, around the base of the tree. He was beaming through his dementia when we returned. I felt as if I were surveying the graves of graves of friends, each stump a headstone. There must have been hundreds. There were smouldering potholes everywhere. It was a blasted blackened waste land. Mordor. The ‘woods’ (read: tangled scrub brush) had been my three season sanctuary.
I grew up watching ‘The Fights’ on a black and white television with my father. Me on the floor. Him on his back with his recently deceased mother’s afgan under his head. He’d wince or reverse blow sharply and exclaim “Jase, what a shot. Any one of those punches would put you in the hospital.” my mother would chime in, christ like, from the kitchen, “why can’t they both win?” He was ejected from the Monastery because he had a ‘nervous breakdown’ and had to be hospitalised. It wasn’t the first time he had been a patient in Bellevue, but it may have been the last. He clung to his sanity after my mom conjured four children out of him, something we’re all grateful to him for. It was his grandest gesture of love. Part of him is still in that monsestary to this day though. His heart perhaps. We got his body, contemplative monasticism got his soul.