It is personally very gratifying to know that the Houston Astros won 100+ games this season, and won their division handily (while the Rangers finished almost last.) From afar, the team seems to be a good mix of young stars and veteran contributors. That is a good combination to have, I think, especially in the post-season. As the Red Sox just found out. Hah!

The good feeling around the team and its fans and, particularly, in the OWA forums I intermittently glance through, is a beautiful thing to see and, I am sure, a beautiful thing to experience. And remember, it wasn’t all that long ago that things around the old Enron, BUS, Minute Maid, whatever, weren’t quite so wonderful.

Here is the opening from a Series Preview I wrote before the last series of the 2012 regular season, in Chicago against the FTCubs. One of the last Series Previews I ever wrote, actually. 2012 was, you will recall, right in the middle of nuclear winter, in the dark, dark days at the close of the McLanezoic Era. The hapless Astros ended up losing 107 games that year.

“CHICAGO (SnS) – If there has ever been a less meaningful season-ending series than this one, you’ll have to tell me about it. Two 100+ loss teams – two pretty unlikeable teams – going absolutely nowhere. Facing off against each other, with lineups full of unknowns, of wannabes and never-wases, of has-beens. In a shit-pile stadium, full of – collectively – some of the dumbfuck-est, most imbecilic and moronic specimens of humanity ever produced in human history, most of them stupid drunk on shitty-tasting beer by the fifth inning … Who the fuck wants to watch that?

Well, I probably will. Just because it will be my last chance to do so, if nothing else. I have been a passionate Houston Astros fan for most of my life, and I think of my emotional break from the team now as something akin to breaking up with a long-time girlfriend. You put her out of your mind immediately afterward, and try to avoid her. Then a good while after the split, you get the news she is moving away from your town for good, and she’d like you to come by and see her, just one last time. For the memories.

And you know you are being used, in a way; being manipulated by her once again, just like you always were when you were together.  But you go, anyway. You don’t love her anymore, your emotions for her no longer run hot, but down there in the pile of cold ashes in your heart where your love for her used to be, down at the very bottom of the pile, there are one or two coals that haven’t quite gone completely cold yet. You get out some old pictures of her you kept, some old pictures of the two of you, and it feels so weird to look at them now. You don’t feel love, or longing, but there is some shadow of an emotion, still lingering. There is something still there, flickering. It is not nearly enough for a flame to re-ignite, and it will die out soon enough, and those coals will go cold and dead, just like the rest of those in the pile. But for the moment, you cannot deny there is some little something, still there. And then you look away from your collection of photos, and gaze out the window; at the branches of a tree just starting to drop a few leaves. Fall is just around the corner, and then winter after that. You involuntarily shiver a bit, just at the thought of it.

And so you go. You go to see her off. The meeting is pleasant, and light. You discern none of the old feeling for you in your old girlfriend, and you feel none in yourself for her. Just some small sympathy, a bit of favor, for one you once loved so much, and spent so much of your time with.

And then after some little time of exchanging pleasantries, she tells you it is time for her to be going, and she kisses you lightly and emotionlessly on the cheek. And she tells you goodbye, for the last time. And so you walk away from her; and you discern no urge in yourself, as you go, to turn and look back.

She is gone now.

She is gone now, and you are gone now, too.”

I am really looking forward to the upcoming American League Championship Series vs. the Yankees. I think it will be a good one, hard fought. And of course, I will be pulling for the Astros to prevail and go on to the World Series, and then to prevail there against either the Dodgers or FTCubs.

I am pulling for them to do it, but I must admit, I don’t really care all that much. Something has been lost, something has changed. It would be natural enough to assume the old disgruntled fans would come back, once the team was successful again. Especially with such a genuine, and genuinely likable collection of players to pull for. And I am sure many of those old fans have come back. I am happy for them, to be able to have their love for the team reignited. What a tremendous feeling it must be.

Of course, I am especially happy for my old friends here at OWA, the die hard fans who never left or gave up to begin with, who endured all the 100-loss seasons and sub-mediocrity and stuck with it, in (mostly) good humor and bonhomie. I am very happy about that; for, while my emotional connection to the Astros may have been severed, I have never lost my affection for or gratitude to the odd collection of individuals who have made up the AC/SnS/OWA over the years. I am genuinely happy for you guys (and girls.)

I guess some part of me hoped this banner year would bring me back, too. I wasn’t against it, I was very open to it. The is a fervent part of me, who started following the Astros in 1966, when I was 7 years old … all through my teenage years in the groovy 1970s … through young adulthood, getting married and starting a family in the 1980s … all the way up to the late 2000s, with my middle age approaching … that part of me wanted to belong again, to care, no, I mean to really care about the fortunes of this team again, and to talk about it and fight about it and laugh about it with the best Astros fans there are anywhere, right here at Orangewhoopass.com.

Alas, it didn’t happen for me. That is wholly on me, and no one or nothing else. Again, from that bittersweet Series Preview written seemingly so long ago, now:

“Lastly, I do not wish for anyone to follow me on this, in this winter of my discontent. I believe I have seen the direction of the commentary at SnS take a subtle turn over the last month or so, as we contemplate the end of the Astros final season in the NL. While at first, after the news of the league change became public, the overwhelming sentiment here seemed to be entirely negative, now I see hard-core fans saying, well, let’s wait and see. And I am glad to see it. I hope the team moves into the AL West and at some point gets itself back together and starts kicking asses and taking names, particularly where the Rangers are concerned. And I hope the SnSers are right there with them, balls to the wall, heart and soul, just like we always have been with the Astros.

It’s just that I won’t be along for that ride, is all. My heart is black, and my lips are cold, and I don’t love the Houston Astros anymore. And I know, deep down, that I never will again.

I am truly, truly gone. Gone for good.”

Good luck to the Houston Astros, and the best to all of you. Somewhere out there, in some parallel universe, is the old me, the crazy-ass fan I used to be, watching, waiting, and hoping fervently for the Astros to win it all.

Then we can all celebrate. Hallelujah!

For years and years, these stories I tell weren’t stories at all. They were a part of my life. It wasn’t until I got older and began to look back a little and reflect, that they kind of disengaged from myself. They became separate from me; they became something to think about and mull over and perhaps ascribe some deeper meaning to. Whereas before, they were just one part of a busy, emerging life story.

Telling and retelling these stories has some value for me, but it is a bit melancholy, too. These stories, and the people in them, are long gone from me now, mostly. And I get the feeling that while I retell them and perhaps embellish them a bit and try to make them more literary than real, I am the only one doing it. I get the feeling the people in these stories, who are (or were) real, more or less, don’t think about them at all, or even remember them.

Does that make them fucked up? Or is it me, the one who cannot and will not let them go? Maybe I am the one who is fucked up here. Wouldn’t be the first time.

I have not seen or talked to Jennifer in more than 35 years now. I ran across one of her sisters on social media once, and she told me Jen was living in the Metroplex somewhere and was a lawyer for a large company up there. She had never married or had children, and she lived alone. I don’t know how I feel about that, or if I even care. I don’t know what to think.

Joseph Conrad wrote that we live as we dream. Alone. I don’t usually feel alone, but I suppose if I really think about it, ultimately I am. As we all are. Jennifer is just more honest with herself about it than I am, apparently. And, bless her for that, and much more.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

LITTLE JENNY ON THE HIGH WIRE

 “Jesus Fuck! What am I gonna do?!” I was in the men’s room of the bar inside the Gallagher’s restaurant, fronting up a urinal. Leaning into it, actually. My joint was resting in my right hand, and my left forearm was resting against the wall above the urinal. I couldn’t stop thinking about how I needed $20, like, right away; and I had no idea where I was going to get the money from. But I had to have it before I left that restroom, for sure.  And even though I was full of bourbon and really, really needed to go, there was no way I could whiz long enough to save myself from my fate. Unless I could somehow manage to piss out twenty bills, that is.

******************

By then, I had been a clerk at one of the larger law firms in town for a couple of years. I had initially got the job through family connections, and I liked it because it was easy, and there were always a lot of gorgeous women around – legal secretaries, court reporters, all the babes working in the county clerk’s office, etc. Also, the law clerk job paid way better than the menial jobs most of my college friends had. I was able to go to school full time, pay rent and utilities for a small, austere apartment, and pay a new truck note and insurance, and still have enough left over to party a little bit, and wine and dine some of those attractive women I was always seeing, as I perambulated around in my job. All solely on the income from an after school job at the law firm.

I had even managed to get my employment classified as an internship; and since I was technically a pre-law major, it earned me three credit hours a semester, just for going to work. I had to write a 2-3 page paper at the end of each term about an interesting case I’d done work on, and I would get an A.

One summer, I had the assignment to get up early one morning and drive one of our partners, and an attorney co-consul from another local firm, and his assistant, to Houston Intercontinental so they could catch a plane to New York.  It was basically just a chauffeur’s job, but I did all kinds of stuff like that for my firm. I figured it was a blow off day – drive our partner Paul’s LTD Brougham and everyone on board over to the airport, dump them off, then tool around Houston for a while before heading back to Beaumont, taking the long, roundabout way back; down I-45 South through Galveston and then the Bolivar Peninsula, then back up FM 124 to IH 10. I figured I’d stop along the way at one of the places along the seawall in Galveston, for fresh oysters on the half shell and a few beers, before catching the ferry across to Port Bolivar. Just an easy, pleasant day was what I had planned, and all on the law firm’s dime.

That is what I did, too. It was a nice, sunny, uneventful but fun day, mostly. The only thing that made it remarkable, and kept it in my memory, was the co-consul’s assistant. She was a year or two older than me, a not necessarily striking but decent-looking blonde. Her name was Jennifer, and the other firm’s attorney I was chauffeuring, the one she worked for, was her dad. His name was Dave, and he was some big deal partner in the most prestigious firm in town. He and Paul (and Jennifer) were off to New York to take or sit in on depositions, in a deceptive trade practices suit I never really understood the details of.

It turns out what I had imagined would be a quiet, mundane trip over to Intercontinental that morning was anything but. For one thing, Dave turned out to be the loud, garrulous sort, used to holding the floor, and he jabbered non-stop from Beaumont to Humble, while meanwhile filling the passenger compartment of the LTD with thick cigar smoke, from the fat heater he kept jammed into one corner of his mouth. And Paul, who was normally diffident, and quiet as a monk around our offices, apparently had another side to him. The whole way over, he was in the front seat with me, telling me stories about his days of smoking weed and dropping acid at Stanford in the late 1960s, and about how he and his wife Lettie – who was quite attractive, actually, in a middle-aged kind of way – used to practice “free love” and all this stuff, before they settled down to the straight-laced upwardly mobile genteel life, with three kids and a big fancy house in the tree-lined West End. Meanwhile, he was changing tapes in the 8-track player after every song.

The cacophony from Dave in the back and Paul in the front, the loud music, and the cigar smoke – sometimes so thick I could barely see out of the windshield – were distracting and a bit off-putting, actually.  Several times along the way I stole a glance in the rear-view mirror at Jennifer in the back seat, to see how she was taking it all. She seemed to be doing all right, and she caught me looking a few times, too. When she did, she would just roll her eyes in her dad’s direction. I felt like we formed sort of a silent bond that morning, drawn into kinship through our mutual suffering.

When we finally got to the airport and I let everyone off at the terminal, there was a minute or two while all the luggage was being taken care of, etc., and I went over to Jennifer and we laughed for a minute about Dave and Paul. Then she told me they’d be back from NYC by the end of the week, and would I call her then? And I told her that, yes, I surely would, as soon as she got back.

***************

We were naked on the sectional sofa in Jennifer’s parents’ living room, in each other’s arms and panting a bit; after having made love for quite a while, it seemed like. Right there on the sectional. The thing was, Jennifer’s parents’ house was two stories, and the living room was situated in the middle of the downstairs area. The upstairs was all bedrooms, and the upstairs hallway had a railing all around on the inside, where one could stand and look down on the living room, which was sort of a two-story atrium, I guess. When Jennifer had suggested we do it right there, in the living room, I had balked. I liked sex as much as anyone, but I was not really a sexual thrill-seeker, or risk-taker. I didn’t need the chance of being caught in the act to get me off. Still, when she insisted on us doing it right there, I found I was not really distracted by the risk factor once we got going. I will admit the thought of her dad or mom or one of her siblings getting up in the middle of the night to go whiz and looking over the railing and seeing naked Jen and I down there, going at it hammer and tongs, so to speak … it may have actually added a little to the arousal factor for me. I am not saying it did, but I am not saying it did not.

That was on our first date, by the way, after Jen had got back from her New York trip.  I had picked her up from her house and we’d gone straight to a bar, and what I found out right away was that my date liked to drink, a lot. Of course, that only endeared her to me more, and before long we were both three sheets to the wind and headed back to her house, for some sloppy, high-risk sex on her parents’ living room sectional. Most of our dates that summer followed a similar pattern.

We lay there in each other’s arms that first night, post flagrante delicto I guess you could’ve called it, on that sectional; and as Jennifer buried her face into my shoulder, I gently traced my fingertips across her naked back, all along the lines of the multiple scars that were there. As I did, my mind drifted back in time …

We had gone to the same elementary school, way back when, though Jen was a few grades ahead of me, and I don’t think we really knew each other then. One day I was sitting in class, maybe in second grade, looking out the windows at the street that ran past the north side of our school, and I noticed there was a lot of commotion down at the corner, cars stopped and stuff. The next thing I knew there were a couple of ambulances screaming by down that street, and then they stopped at the corner, too. It turns out the fourth graders had been at recess or something, and Jennifer had wandered out into that street and had been run completely over by a car.

I didn’t remember everything about the accident, but I had heard that the girl who was hit had broken her back in several places and had lost a lot of blood, spilled right out onto that street in front of our school. I heard she nearly died – it was touch-and-go for several days. But she hung in there and, remarkably, endured a series of surgeries on her back that eventually made her more-or-less whole again. If you didn’t know her history, you might not even have realized something traumatic had once happened to her. I knew, because I was there, as a barely-conscious-of-it 9 year old; and because 10 years later I held her naked in my arms, and traced the ridges of scars along her back (which she seemed to enjoy, by the way.) Other than that, she was left with an almost imperceptible limp, the result of one leg being slightly shorter than the other (after the accident.)

She was also left with, I thought, a bit of sadness in her, a bit world-weariness. I cannot really explain it, and I never talked to Jennifer about it. I just felt like there was some darkness in her; and I was attuned to that, being the bearer of so much darkness, myself. And I guess it was a good thing in the long run that Jen and I were only together for part of one summer, while she was home from school (Vanderbilt, I think.)  Her darkness, and her serious devotion to John Barleycorn, fit perfectly into my fucked up view of the world at the time, and I was quickly enthralled with her, and I could easily see us falling in love; or more likely into a terminal embrace that might not have eventually killed one or the other of us, but surely would have left us both worse for the wear. As clueless and lost as I was back in those days, I still had the sense that someone dark and fucked up like me should not be seeking out a woman with the same traits; though I almost always did, anyway. I’ll admit, I still find that sort of thing attractive; even though I know now and knew then that what I need is someone bright and good, to offset my own darkness. But I guess part of me was always looking to do the worst thing for myself, to jump off into the deep end with someone like-minded, not caring one fucking bit where we ended up.

I still have some of that in me, too.

That is really too heavy to be putting off on Jennifer, though. I really liked dating her for that summer. It was so … easy. Go out somewhere, get loaded, then go home and make love, risky love, for hours.

******************

Once during that time I had gone down to the beach for the day with friends. We sat down there all day drinking beer and getting seriously fucked up. We finally headed back to town at dark. On the way back it suddenly struck me that it was Jennifer’s birthday, and I hadn’t got her anything, even a card. What to do? What to do?

When I got home I took a quick shower and then, still smelling of the coconut oil that had apparently seeped down into my skin, I hauled ass to the liquor store. I got there about ten minutes before they closed, and bought a fifth of Jack Daniels Black Label. The liquor store guy fished around in a drawer behind the counter and found a slightly disheveled red stick-on bow for me, and I put it on top of the bottle of Jack. Then I headed for Jen’s house. When she opened the front door, I handed her the fifth without saying anything, except for a sheepish and mumbled, “Happy Birthday”. She took the bottle and looked at me, blinking; and then she started to cry, it looked like. She was so happy that I remembered her birthday, and had given her a fifth of a gallon of her most favorite thing in the whole world. I couldn’t believe how smoothly I’d managed it, how easy it was. Neither could I believe the supremely positive effect my perfunctory gesture had on Jen. That night, she started taking off her clothes almost as soon as we got in my Jeep, almost before I could get off of her street, even.

Jennifer was a Jack Daniels aficionado, for sure. She told me later, half-jokingly I think, that one of the main reasons she chose Vanderbilt for college was because it was only 70 miles or so from Lynchburg, TN, where the Jack Daniels distillery was. When she first got up there, she and her friends made the pilgrimage to Lynchburg every weekend, for the distillery tour, and especially for the hospitality room afterward. I mean, I loved whiskey and all, but she really, really loved it.

That’s how we ended up in the bar at Gallagher’s one night. Back then, Gallagher’s was a chain, some kind of franchise operation. It was supposed to be an Irish steak house or something, although I don’t recall ever having eaten there. And the bar in the restaurant was about what you’d expect. Not much, no décor or atmosphere or anything. No business to speak of. It was briefly popular only because they’d instituted a 5 p.m. to 8 p.m., 3-for-1 happy hour on Thursday nights. That gave them instant atmosphere, and suddenly brought them plenty of business.

We were meeting friends there that evening, and I figured a 3-for-1 deal would save me some money, especially the way Jennifer put away the whiskey. Once we’d got there and settled in, I started ordering 3-for-1 call drinks, JD and water, and before long I was getting blitzed. What I didn’t realize was that Jen was bypassing the 3-for-1 deal, and ordering two fingers of Jack on the rocks, neat. Those were expensive drinks, and she was steadily putting them away, one after another.

That night sort of went like most of them did back in those days – it started off fun and coherent, and then somewhere along the way veered off into mild chaos. It ran off the road and got stuck in a mud hole full of drunken craziness. And, I loved that so much. I loved chaos in my life back then. I think it was how I got away from some of the stuff going on that I didn’t really want to deal with.  There was a song on Ric Ocasek’s solo LP, which came out a few years later … “Keep It Out Of Control”. That was my modus operandi then. The more fucked up and crazy and dissonant and chaotic my life was the better.

Of course, even then, reality would pop up here and there. Like at the end of the night at Gallagher’s, when the waiter brought the tab for me to settle up, and I realized it was $15 more than what I had in my pocket. I excused myself for a moment to go to the men’s room to take a piss, and to try and get myself together.

After having moped at the urinal for a while, I was at the nadir of my despair, and I realized I would just have to go back out there and face the music, and admit to the waiter (and my date) that I could not cover my bar tab. I was about to gather myself up and go do it when a friend of mine named Gary came staggering into the restroom to take a piss. “Hey, man,” he said.

“Hey, Gary, do you want to save my life?” I said.

“Yeah, man, sure” he said. “What can I do?”

“Loan me twenty dollars.”

“Sure, no problem,” he said, as he reached into his wallet and pulled out $20 and handed it over.

“Dude, really. You just saved me, “ I said, and then I went on to thank him profusely.

Then I marched back out into the bar and settled up my tab and even left a smallish tip. My girl was impressed with me, I imagined; though in reality she was barely coherent by that point. No matter.

I called Gary the next day and thanked him again, and promised to pay him back on my next payday. Twenty bucks was no small change to a poor college student back in those days.

But Gary said to forget it, that he owed me at least that much for the night I’d saved him. I could not recall what he might have been referring to, and so he reminded me.

One night a few years prior, when we were high school juniors, Gary had simultaneously got hold of the new Rush LP, 2112, and also a quarter-lid of Oaxacan weed that was supposed to be really kick-ass. His parents were out of town that weekend, so several of us gathered at Gary’s house, along with his little sister, who Gary was supposed to be baby-sitting, to smoke cheeba-cheeba and listen to this new album everybody thought was so great. (I thought it sucked; but I figured kick-ass weed could make almost any record sound good, even Rush.) Then Gary realized he did not have any papers to roll with, and no pipe or anything else to employ as a smoking apparatus. Party plans ruined, except I had wandered out into his garage to his dad’s work bench, and found a piece of pipe, called the J-pipe I think; a pre-fab piece used for putting together a P-trap under a sink. I took that back into the house and got some aluminum foil out of a kitchen drawer to cover the opening on the short end of the “J”, and then I poked holes in the foil. Then we put a clump of weed onto our impromptu foil screen, and lit it. I sucked on the long end of the “J” and, voila! We had a pipe to smoke weed with.

It worked pretty well, too, except for at first, when you would suck and get smoke from the Oaxacan mixed with dust that had accumulated inside the pipe over however long the time was it had sat on Gary’s dad’s work bench. After a few pulls, though, the dust was pretty much cleaned out, and everything was copacetic. It was agreed by all, in the easy hyperbole that often characterizes the conversations of dedicated pot-smokers, that my MacGyver-like inventiveness had truly saved the day.

And Gary said it was easily worth $20 to him, what I had done; and that he had been waiting for the occasion to pay me back.

You know, the Lord works in mysterious ways. He put Gary in that Gallagher’s restroom one night at just the right time to take a piss and give me the twenty dollars I so desperately needed to pay off my bar tab, while simultaneously giving Gary the opportunity to pay me back for piecing together a means to smoke ganja at a party at his house one night, several years before.

Yes, mysterious ways. One day, I’d like to sit down with Him and talk about that a little.

******************

Jenny and I went our separate ways at the end of that summer. There wasn’t anything really sad or even melancholy about it. I think we both understood the string had run out for us. She went back to Vanderbilt and whatever was there for her, and got her undergraduate degree  and then law degree. I went back to Lamar, to sex and drugs and darkness and all that, and eventually I earned an undergrad degree myself. And that was that.

I cannot speak for her, but I enjoyed that whole summer, going out and getting messed up, knowing no matter what condition I showed up at her house in, Jen was ready to jump into the car with me and go do something, anything. To go do something we both enjoyed – drinking and reckless sex, mostly. There was never any consternation on her part. She never made me feel ashamed or guilty about how fucked up I was back then. I don’t know if it was because of the trauma that came to her early in her life or not – we never talked about it – but Jen was the definition of a person who took things as they came, who did not try to change things around to exactly fit her preferences, whatever they were. Whatever came along her way, she just rolled with it. I loved that.

Up to the point we met, on that early morning drive over to the airport in Houston, if you had mentioned her name to me and I remembered who she was at all, the only mental impression I would have had of Jennifer was her lying in her own blood on the street out in front of our elementary school all those years ago, 10 years old, broken and shattered. Instead of what I think of now, which is both of us grown up and whole and naked together, and Jennifer allowing me to hold her tightly to me, while I gently traced the scars that crisscrossed her back.

Thinking back, she was exactly the sort of girl I needed that summer. I will always be grateful we got together, and that we were able to spend some time together, fleetingly, now seemingly so long ago.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

We still speak occasionally, but our lives have taken us separately where they will. Fred lives alone now, in a small apartment in Angleton, League City, one of those. Spends his days and evenings, I gather, mostly drinking beer and playing on the computer. He doesn’t even get out anymore, much at all.

He was so vibrant in his prime. With the heart and soul of a lion. One of the reasons I liked being around him so much, back then, was it sort of made me feel that way, too. We were so fucking awesome when we were young. When I think of Fred now, it mostly makes me sad.

Of course, I am writing this having just had one hip replaced and getting ready to have the same done to the other. My future is brighter than Fred’s, but I am not getting any younger, either. The days of leonine glory are long gone, and they are not coming back, ever. I know that.

Still, I can feel the lion, way down inside of me. The body isn’t what it once was, but the soul is still there. The spirit still flickers. Perhaps with effort, it can be made to burn brightly, once again.

I hope so. And I hope Fred feels this, too. I hope we can both do what Van Morrison once sang about. Just listen to that lion, way down inside.

“And I shall search my very soul
I shall search my very soul
For the lion, for the lion
Inside of me”

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

FRED THE HAMMERHEAD

My cousin Fred is pretty big.

He is not overly tall, 6′ 0″ or 6′ 1″, around there.  And while he weighs over 200 lbs., the weight is stretched over a large-boned frame, so he doesn’t look fat at all.  He is just one of those people who exude bigness.  When you are around him, you think of this big person you have with you.

Fred really is just plain big, in some ways.  His feet are size 16, and he has most of his footwear custom-made, which he says is expensive.  According to his first wife, a clinical psychologist who was crazy as hell, there is something to the foot size/member size corollary; although I don’t remember anyone asking her about it at the time.  Fred shipped her off to the loony bin years ago, and good riddance.

Fred and I grew up in different towns, but we saw each other fairly often, and we were pretty close, as kids.  Not as close as brothers, maybe; but I would imagine we were closer than most first cousins, and we still are.  Fred is one of those people who, whenever his name comes up, this warm feeling comes over me.  He is my age, he is a good guy, he thinks like me, and we have had lots of fun together over the years.

One time we were staying down at the beach for several days, in a rented cabin.  Me, several of my school friends, one of my brothers, and Fred.  It was probably college Spring Break. I know we were around 18 or 19 or so.  One night we were having this big party at our cabin, mostly friends of ours who were staying at the beach, too.  Along the way, Fred had OD’d on beer, and passed out on the floor in the middle of the cabin.  No problem, people just stepped over him, or around him, and the party carried on.  At one point three or four guys were standing there drinking beer, looking over Fred, and dispassionately discussing his present state.  “I wonder if he’ll come to before the end of the party.”  “How many beers do you think he had?”  “I hope he wakes up before he pisses himself. That would be kind of nasty.”  Then one of the guys, wholly unintentionally, dropped an almost full can of Natural Light, right on Fred’s head.  It made a sound I heard clearly, over the music and conversation, all the way across the room.  But Fred hardly stirred.  A halo of beer and foam formed around his head on the rug, and someone said he would probably wake up and wonder if he’d gone to heaven.  Up to then, I’d pretty much always called him Fredrick, or sometimes Freddie if I was in a rush.  But from that night on, my cousin was universally known as Fred the Hammerhead, or just Hammerhead.  He seemed to like the nickname all right.  Not that it mattered; we would’ve called him that anyway.

Fred was with us the night of the phosphorous ocean.  That was an early spring night around the same time as the beach cabin party, when a bunch of us were drinking at night down on the beach on Bolivar Peninsula. That night, a rare incursion of phosphorous caused the whitecaps of the breaking waves to glow greenish-white in the moonlight, shooting right to left across the horizon each time a wave broke.  If you dragged your foot across the sand, the track where you’d dragged it would glow.  At the time, none of us had ever seen that before, plus we’d been drinking for hours.  The night, especially in retrospect, took on an almost surreal quality.  Later, I sometimes wondered if it had really happened at all.  People who were there still talk about it, wistfully.

Most of us ran around like idiots, screaming and playing in the glowing water and sand.  Meanwhile, Fred went to his Silverado and reached behind the seat and pulled out one of those folding shovels like you’d buy in an army surplus store.  I’m not sure why he carried it, but it did not really surprise me that he did.  Anyway, while the rest of us were acting like retarded fools, Fred calmly shoveled several hundred pounds of the glowing sand into the bed of his truck.  He figured he’d take some home, spread it around his flower beds and such.  It would be a conversation starter.  Fred was always thinking ahead like that.

I was with him the day his sister died.  She was killed on the beach highway, on her way home.  She wasn’t driving, it was her and three of her friends, and they were all pretty drunk, I heard; as was the guy who crossed the center line and hit them head on.  Probably a majority of everyone else on that highway was drunk that day, too.  Everybody involved in the wreck died at the scene, basically.  We had been down at the beach for the day, and Fred and I headed back to town 45 minutes to an hour after his sister and her friends did.  When we came up on the wreck, we didn’t know what it was at first.  We were freaking out because there were cops everywhere.  We were both pretty loaded, and we thought we’d come up on a DPS sobriety check roadblock.  But it wasn’t; and when we saw what was left of the light blue Cutlass 442 her friend had been driving, we figured out pretty quickly what had happened.  I don’t know what my immediate reaction was. I just remember that my emotions at the time were dulled by being intoxicated.  So were Fred’s; I distinctly remember him being almost stoic when he found out his sister had been somewhere in the tangled mess of that Cutlass.  Even though they were essentially mortally injured, Fred’s sister and another girl in the car were life-flighted to UTMB.  So we jumped back in his truck and turned around and hauled ass to Galveston.  By the time we got there, his sis was long gone.  I remember sitting in the hospital while Fred called his parents and let them know what had happened.  We were sobered up by then, and I felt myself getting emotional; but Fred’s voice never broke.  I admired him a lot for that.  His little sister has been gone 31 years now, but I can still remember parts of that day very clearly.  Too much, too soon.

Fred lives in South Carolina now, in Georgetown, near the ocean.  He’s a civil engineer.  We don’t see each other much anymore, but we keep in touch by e-mail and the occasional phone call.  Fred is a big Astros fan, always has been, and he tries to follow the team as best he can; but he says even with his MLB package and the internet, it is not the same as living close by.  I called him last week, on his birthday, and at one point he asked me, “Are things as bad as they seem?”  Yes, I told him, maybe worse.  That’s what he thought, he said, but he’d hoped he was wrong.  But, he can see it clearly, all the way from fucking South Carolina.  Damn.

While talking last week, we remembered the night of the phosphorous ocean for some reason, and I asked him what he ever did with all that sand he’d loaded in his truck that night.  He laughed and said some of it is in the pitcher’s mound on the AAA field at the Little League park in his hometown.  The sand had never glowed at all after that night on the beach, and I was glad to hear that.  What happened that night, if it happened, was fleeting.  Only the people who were there are left to tell the story.

Fred’s sister didn’t make it past age 15, and so I will always remember her as young and pretty and a little bit wild and really funny; and not as what she might have become, good or bad.  I sometimes wonder if she was ever even here at all, if I didn’t dream her up like I sometimes think I dreamed up that glowing night on the beach, so many years ago.

But I didn’t dream her up, of course; and I feel like I will see her again someday.  On a night when the phosphorescent ocean is glowing in the background, the gleam of the whitecaps shooting like lightning across the horizon, as the endless waves keep breaking and breaking, out beyond the first sandbar, before rolling up and washing over our bare feet and toes; as we stand together there on the beach.  I will be with her there on the beach that night, and I will put my arm around her when she shivers in the wind, and I will say something clever, and then I will listen to her terrific laugh.  Fred will be there, too, of course; sitting in his lawn chair next to his truck, drinking a beer and listening to the Astros game on the radio.  I’ll be able to hear the broadcast in the background, over the sound of the breaking waves.  The team will have pulled out another stellar win that night, moving decisively into first place.

Yes … from my dreams to God’s ears.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

RUN THROUGH THE JUNGLE

I had taken two spansules of synthetic amphetamine salts two hours earlier, or thereabouts … about 40 milligrams each, as near as I could figure.  I was really starting to feel them when Fred asked me if it was time to open another bottle of Popov vodka, the kind that came in a 1.75 liter plastic container, for $8.99. It was probably the cheapest drunk out there, good old Popov. I have a lot of Russian in me, on my mother’s side, but I always fucking hated vodka, even the expensive kind. So I figured if I was going to have to drink the shit, anyway, it might as well be ‘Comrade Popov’, as we called it. Didn’t taste any better/worse than Stoly to me, and I’d save a little money.

To Fred’s query, I answered in the affirmative. “Fuck, yes!” I said. “Open that motherfucker up! I need another shot of the Comrade right now, goddammit! And what the fuck happened to the sangrita, jagov!?”

Fred and I had been riding along, drinking and laughing and telling stories and yelling at each other, for about an hour. At a snail’s pace, it seemed like. We were slogging through the mud and slop and occasional relatively dry ground, deep in a large palmetto swamp somewhere southeast of Georgetown, SC. We were in a vintage Land Rover some engineer friend of Fred’s had loaned us. The kind of rig Englishmen used to tool around the African bush in; the kind you could entirely dismantle (and reassemble, supposedly) with a slotted screwdriver.

That guy was nice enough to loan his vehicle to us, although I don’t know if he would have done it, had he known exactly what we had in mind.

I looked over at Fred, in the driver’s seat, just in time to see him take another long pull off of the vodka. He was as much Russian as I was – we were first cousins on my mother’s side – and I don’t know what his excuse was for tolerating this rotgut version of the national drink of the motherland, fermented and brewed from leftover crap in a trailer house in Missouri somewhere. But he took a big hit off of it, then reached back into the game bag of his camouflage jacket and pulled out the bottle of sangrita.

“You son of a bitch!” I cried. “You’ve been hiding the fucking sangrita! Hand it over, and the ‘Comrade’.”

Fred had eccentricities. One of them was hanging around with me, since we were little kids. Another was chasing his cheap-ass vodka with a tomato-based concoction originally formulated for chasing pricey tequila. But Fred’s lifelong credo had always been something like, “What the fuck?!” And in this case, I had to agree. The sangrita just after the Comrade Popov made the latter seem, well, not quite so bad.

Fred lived in Georgetown, a nice little city close to the ocean. He was a civil engineer at a large firm there. I was spending a week vacation with him.

Right after college I had been recruited by a company that ran these large catalogue showroom retail stores. This was the early 1980s, and that type of thing was really popular then. Anyway, I guess they were going by some of my work experience, and not so much my Political Science degree, when they hired me, as part of their regional warehouse office, based in Birmingham, AL.

But, you know what? They were right. I was a natural at that job. About half of the time, I fucked around with not much to do at the regional office – testing out new products, working on ways to modify our warehousing setup to make it more efficient. Shit like that.

But I was also part of a “crisis team” that would be flown in when a warehouse operation at one of the retail outlets had failed. The company I worked for had been a large regional retailer in the South, mostly, but they had recently acquired another retailer that was more spread out around the country. They were in the process of converting a lot of the just acquired stores over to their system, which caused problems. In addition, their prototype outlet had a wrap-around ‘warehouse’ (a large stock room, really), and they hired managers locally at just above minimum wage, and helpers at minimum wage. So fairly often the whole staff would just say, “Fuck it,” and the whole setup would go to hell, and it might be a week before the regional office caught on. At that point a crisis team of young-ish regional warehousing types from all over the country would be flown in to take over operations, clean up the mess, and hire and install newer and supposedly better staff. I was on one of the crisis teams.

Most of the team members, men and women, were in their early 20s, like me. We had to fly all over the country, at a moment’s notice. Go in, work twelve hour days at whatever location required us, then go out and drink and raise hell and try to hook up with the local talent, or (less often) someone else on the team. Then get up early the next morning, tired and hung over, and do it all again.

An average operation lasted a week or so; then we’d all return to whatever office we’d come from, and try to recuperate before the next call came. This particular time I’d been flown out to a giant-sized clusterfuck in a north Georgia store, and after my team had completed its task, I asked for and got a week’s vacation I had coming. So I rented a car in Athens, and drove up to see Fred in South Carolina.

By chance, Fred was off that week, as well. It was mid-April. When I got there Fred told me we were going “hog-hunting.” I’d never done it, but it sounded fun, so I told him I as all in.

I found out we weren’t going hunting in the sense of shooting something and killing it, though. Fred’s firm had a big company barbecue every year just after Memorial Day, and the tradition was that Fred and some of his engineer buddies would go out into the marshes outside of Georgetown, in two-man teams, and track down and capture feral hogs; which were then brought to a couple of locals out there, who had heavy steel corrals set up on their properties. The captured hogs were put in the corrals, and then spent about a month being fattened up on corn. Apparently the combination of lean feral pork and a month of domestic feeding made for really good barbecue.

We splashed through two or three or ten more deep-ass mud holes in that Land Rover, and over several more hummocks of dead marsh vegetation, causing the vodka to slosh around violently inside its plastic receptacle, and inside of me, as well. Finally, we came to a stop, and Fred killed the engine.

We were in a clearing that looked pretty much like the last ten or twelve clearings we’d been through. But Fred pointed out to me something I hadn’t seen at first. In the heavy undergrowth across the way, if one looked hard enough, one could see a kind of tunnel bored through it. Made by a feral hog, my cousin insisted.

The idea of our quarry being nearby, and the sudden relative quiet that came when we shut off the Land Rover, just made all the other things going on in that swamp more noticeable to me.

The weather was hot and sticky, and the place smelled of rotting vegetation and decay. And the mosquitoes were beginning to have their way with us. But fuck it, we were on a mission. Fuck the heat, fuck the decay, and fuck the fucking mosquitoes. Fuck the humidity, too.

Fuck it all. Down a few spansules of crank, slam down some cheap vodka, climb in an antique all-terrain vehicle, and make a run through the jungle.

And don’t look back.

***************

My cousin and I were crawling on hands and knees, commando-style, through the underbrush and mud, down the same trail a hog had made some time before. We were a sight to see, I’ll bet. Fred had us decked out in camouflage fatigues and Gore-Tex, which kept us somewhat dry and protected from the elements, and somewhat protected us from the mosquitoes; but it was hot as hell in that get up. I was sweating tons, and some of the craftier mosquitoes were still finding their way through, anyway.

Fred was ahead of me, “on point” as it were. He had black cork on his face and forehead, and a large Ka-Bar bayonet in his teeth. Fred had been a Marine once. I tended to forget that. I thought the big knife clenched between his incisors was a bit much, but he said you never knew what might happen walking (or crawling) the point and he wanted to be ready. It seemed to me he was reverting back to his active duty days a bit, out in this swamp.

I was about the most un-military person you could find, but I’d spent a fair amount of time out in the woods, too, in the past, pursuing my own agenda; so I wasn’t a total stranger to privation in the wild, or to stalking a quarry for dinner, either. I had a Bear Mfg. lock back knife in a leather sheath on my belt. It was a 5 ½” knife – 5 ½” folded, that is; with a 5” blade. I’d spent the previous evening sitting in Fred’s camp, sharpening my knife with one of those Lansky kits, the kind with stones of different gradations of coarseness. If one took one’s time and gradually sharpened with stones from coarser to less coarse, one could get a knife pretty fucking sharp. I ventured mine was about as sharp as a blade of that heft and thickness could get. I felt if it got down to it, that hog might get the best of me, in the end; but he’d damn sure remember me for a while.

Our basic plan was to run the hog down into his lair and then jump and, well, hog-tie him, and drag him back out of there. It seemed like a crazy-ass plan, to me. The feral pigs in that area were often 200-300 lbs., with hooves and tusks. Between us, Fred and I were about 350 lbs., but a big hog would outweigh either one of us individually by two times, at least.

That is why teamwork was so important. We’d been crawling for maybe 1/8 mile (it seemed like longer, but I doubt it was) when we came to an open area under the overgrowth. Fred stuck out his arm to stop me, and then quietly pointed to the other side of the opening. It was pretty dark, but eventually my eyes adjusted, and I could see a decent-sized sized hog, resting on his side in the leaves. He was all black, and looked lean and mean. Nothing like what one saw in cartoons, or in a feedlot. Fred started crawling around to the left. He would take on the front end, the front legs and the head complete with a couple of smallish but still nasty-looking tusks. I slipped around the other way, to sneak up from behind. I had my knife out and unfolded by then, gripped in my right hand as I crawled around. I felt like I was amped up on max adrenaline, and ready for whatever happened next.

Suddenly, Fred leapt onto the head of the hog, just as it was rising up to see what the fuck was going on. He had the front end of the pig momentarily immobilized, but I knew that wouldn’t last. As quickly as I could, I jumped across the back of the hog, landing across his hips, with his hind legs in front of me. I grabbed the knee/elbow of one leg with my left hand, and I quickly and – I thought – pretty deftly sliced into the back of the hind leg with the knife in my right hand, about halfway between the hoof and knee, just like Fred had showed me how to.

It was basically the same concept as clipping a bird’s wings. When I was a kid, my brother and I found a wounded mallard hen once, out in the marsh. We brought it home and – long story, but we ended up with a bunch of wild mallards as pets. To keep them from flying away we would take just a couple of feathers out of the wing on one side of each mature bird. It made them feel unbalanced in the air, and after a while they would quit trying to fly at all. What Fred had instructed me to do was nick the tendon on the back of one of the pig’s hind legs. He didn’t want me to slice it all the way through – that would injure the hog grievously, and render him lame. The trick was to just nick the tendon – the hamstring, I guess – just enough so the pig wouldn’t try to run for a while, at least long enough for us to get him out of there and to a pen somewhere.

I nicked that pig with surgical precision, using my Bear Mfg. lock back knife as my scalpel. Then I quickly wrapped the cut leg in cloth, and tied the back legs together with nylon rope, then duct-taped them together on top of that, for good measure. Fred had meanwhile done the same up front, and just like that, we had caught us a wild feral hog. We rolled it onto a tarp, and then Fred grabbed one front corner and I grabbed the other, and we dragged that big boy on out of there, all the way back to the clearing where the Land Rover was.

The tarp and the slick ground in the swamp eliminated a lot of drag and resistance, but still, it was close to 300 lbs. of dead weight we were dragging out of there. That burden, coupled with the heavy gear we were wearing and the heat and the humidity, really began to get to me. We kept after it, though, and finally I saw the clearing ahead. When we got to it, we dragged the hog around to the back of the Land Rover, and then, on ‘three’, we heaved him up into the back. All that was left to do was bring him to a friend of Fred’s trailer, about ¾ miles away, where we would deposit our porcine friend into a corral. He could recuperate and fatten up there, before being dispatched to his final destination. In other words, mission accomplished.

Before we got into the Land Rover to go, I sat on a hummock for a few minutes, to catch my breath. Fred seemed relatively at ease and nonchalant, but I was still on fire with adrenaline, and at the same time beginning to feel fatigued. I’d been pouring sweat, and my heart had been pumping. I felt like I’d just finished an intense thirty minute cardio workout, which, in fact, I basically had. I was fucking worn out, but I felt good, too. You know? Along with all the sweat, and all the lactic acid flooding into my muscle fibers, a lot of endorphins had been released into me, too. I felt … good … great, actually.

I looked across at my cousin, who was sitting on the tailgate of the Land Rover, looking off into the distance of the swamp somewhere, contemplating who knew what? And at the same time he was idly stroking the hindquarters of the feral hog lying mostly quietly in the back of the Land Rover. When I looked up, Fred had been looking off into the distance; but then he sensed me looking at him, and he looked over at me with the oddest look. Maybe I had surprised him out there. I don’t know. May he didn’t expect me to do as well as I did; or, more importantly, once we had decided to do this thing, maybe he was a little surprised that I went at it with such gusto, and with no fear. Maybe he was surprised, after he’d jumped on the hog’s head, to look up and see his wayward cousin, the one who drank and drugged to excess and was by most accounts totally irresponsible … maybe he was surprised to see him, right there and right on time, on top of that fucking pig and cutting him where he needed to be cut, with no hesitation. Maybe he was surprised to see me just taking care of fucking business, as dependable as I could be.

If he was surprised at that, he shouldn’t have been. Fred and I played racquetball together in college, and in our junior year we completed a mighty upset of the defending champions, who were much better players than us, and much more serious about racquetball and just about everything else than we were, and we won the intramural doubles championship, against all the odds. We were a terrific combination, actually. We trusted each other implicitly, for one thing. Fred was the tactical player, making precision shots and returns; while I was the one who dove headfirst into the walls, trying to make saves … and who bent several rackets, and had nearly a dozen pairs of goggles broken by return shots because I’d got too close to the front wall, just doing my thing. I think my style of play amused Fred, but he respected it, too. It helped us win; and anyway, it was the only way I could ever play.

Fred should have known that would translate over to hog hunting, and just about anything else I tried, especially with him. We didn’t see each other as much as we had as kids and in college, so maybe he just forgot.

It was nice to bask in the tacit approval of my lifelong friend and cousin, who I respected so much. But that really wasn’t why I felt so good that afternoon, sitting out in the middle of a palmetto swamp in the middle of fucking nowhere South Carolina.

By that time, it was late afternoon, and the shadows had begun to lengthen across the clearing we were sitting in. The sun and the shadows cast by some nearby tallow trees were dappled across my face. I looked up and just about all I could see was blue sky. I was physically spent, but in a good way. Unlike about 99% of the people I knew, who lived and worked and loved and died and never once had any real idea what it was like to be at the mercy of the elements or truly out in nature, if even just a little bit … unlike them, I knew. I’d had the opportunity … to be out there, in the open. To sweat and labor and risk injury, in order to do something worthwhile and, well, great. How many of my co-workers knew what it felt like to have a wild animal under them? An animal who meant no good, who could and would do harm, if given half the chance? How many knew what it felt like to subdue this wild thing, with one’s own hands, and feel the fight go right out of it, right under one?

And then afterward, how many would know the tremendous amount of sympathy and even empathy one would have for the quarry one had just hunted down and subdued? I remember reading of the respect and even reverence the Native American buffalo hunters held for the noble animal they hunted. I don’t think I really understood that when I read about it, back in school somewhere.

But I understood it that day in the South Carolina swamp; at least a little bit. Fred had been idly stroking the hog lying in the back of our truck, comforting it, almost. Now I pulled myself up, and went over and sat next to my cousin, and did the same. That hog was getting some mixed signals that day, for sure.

He would be fattened up and then killed and butchered, soon enough. But I felt like I had some sympathy with him, by the end of our day together. I felt like I shared something with him, if only just a little bit.

We all have our day coming, we can be sure of that. Just like that hog, and everything else walking around alive on this planet. But we don’t think about that. I am sure the hog wasn’t thinking about it, even in the predicament he found himself in at that point. We don’t spend much time thinking about our end, because we are not made to. What I think I realized that day, if I didn’t know it already, and what that hog and all his brethren knew down to their bones, is that we are here for one thing – to live, to feel alive.

Alive! All the rest of it is just the mundane details.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

On the other hand, it has a sort of jagged quality (to me) that pretty closely captures the way I was feeling at the time, I am pretty sure. Jagged and dark and uncertain. I like that. That is a hard thing to write about if one sets out to do it, which I am pretty sure was not what I was doing here. I think I have held onto it – and republished it here – mainly for that reason.

Just another sordid little story, an event or convergence of events along the way … from someone who went three roughly three-quarters of his life up to this point without a fucking clue, but still turned out all right. Well, I’d like to think so, anyway.

That’s something.

“The man is gone
Mary’s dead
Good morning, midnight”

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

UNDER THE BIG BLACK SUN

It was 1983 sometime. Mid-morning.  I was lying on my side in the queen-sized bed, my head dug down into the cool, goose down pillow lying underneath it.  I was in the bedroom of my apartment at the time, and it was time to get up, I guess.  Half of me wanted to get up, half of me didn’t.  I was hung over as hell, which was one reason I didn’t want to.  I’d gone out the night before with this girl I was seeing and some other people we knew, and we’d hit the whiskey pretty hard.  And then we hit the MDMA sometime after that.

My . . . what?  I didn’t consider her as my girlfriend, not really . . . My then current female companion, I guess you could call her, was sitting across the bedroom, slouched across an armchair, looking stylishly disheveled and a bit like Anita Pallenberg, circa 1968, before the rot set in.  She was eyeing me accusingly.  “Get up, lazy ass.  I want to go to the beach today.”  I rolled over onto my other side, so I wouldn’t have to look at her while she was mildly vilifying me; but she continued with the nagging, “You’re so lazy . . . you’re so lazy . . . you have a lazy life.”

“I’m lazy?  R-i-i-i-ght,” I was thinking to myself.  This chick was a borderline speed freak, and she stayed up until ungodly hours, chain smoking cigarettes and watching the dreck that passed for all night television programming in those days.  And that was about all she did.  Oh, she did make herself available to me when I wanted, and she seemed to participate in the subsequent goings-on with something approximating passion, which is probably why I had kept her around as long as I had.  But I always knew she was just temporary, that she wasn’t long for my increasingly dark little fucked up world.

She was right about me being lazy, though.  I had lately been overcome by a powerful lethargy I could not shake.  It had dominated my life for months.  My limbs felt inordinately heavy, and I would sit and think for minutes or even hours before deciding to do get up and do something as simple and mindless as turning down the air conditioner.  I had lost interest in the things I used to be interested in, and I’d neglected most of my friends and family for months.  And I never really wanted to go out and do anything anymore, at all.

I still don’t know exactly why I’d become so lethargic; but I suspect now that some of it was the onset of temporary clinical depression.  And also the fact I was shoveling down unknown quantities of alcohol and pharmaceuticals every night and well into the next morning.  That may have had something to do with it, too.

And now this tweaker chick I was dating said she wanted to go to the fucking beach.  Great.  Understand, going to the beach was something I would normally be ready to do at any time, at the drop of a hat.  The sand and the ocean and the waves had powerful meaning for me, and had a spiritual and intellectual and emotional hold on me as basic and primal as the church I had been born into and had given my lifelong adherence to (with varying degrees of devotion over the years.)  I went to Mass when I was in the mood to, and thought I probably should. I was always ready to go to the beach.  But on that morning, my girlfriend’s insistence that I get up and take her was more annoying than anything else.  I rolled over in the bed, away from her, so I could lie there in peace for a while, and think about it.

By that time, this girl and I had been together about a week, I think.  Maybe two.  I’d met her one night in a bar my crowd and I frequented in those days.  It was just a dive, really; a place to drink and play pool and shuffleboard, and not much else.  It was not a place one immediately thought of if one was looking to go out and score some acceptable if temporary female companionship.

The night I hooked up with my speed freak girl was an exception, I suppose.  I’m not 100% sure, though; because I don’t remember any of it.  It was later that my friend Tony recounted the whole romantic story for me.

***************

“You were playing shuffleboard, and kicking ass,” Tony said.  “Seemed like every third puck you slid hung over the edge at the other end.  The guys you were playing were bluffing you, saying those pucks weren’t hangers, and you challenged ‘em every time, and won.  You were out of your head, and playing like a demon, winning tons of free beer.  It was awesome.”

“Somewhere in there this chick just kind of showed up.  I don’t know where she came from.  She wasn’t all that attractive to me – kind of skinny, and her hair was long and straight and almost stringy.  Tits, yes, but nothing really to make a big deal about.  She had on a pair of worn out jeans and tennis shoes, and a baseball undershirt with dark blue sleeves.  Three-quarter cut.  Nothing to get your attention, really.  But she stood there alongside the shuffleboard table for a while, admiring the way you played.  And before long I guess you noticed her admiring you, and after that we could guess, from the look in your eyes, what was going to happen next.”

“Sure enough, before long you had your arm around her, and she was drinking some of the beers you’d won, and smoking your cigarettes.  It wasn’t that much longer until you guys looked like you’d been together for years.  I didn’t get it.  Not your usual type.  If Diane had seen her, she’d have laughed, right before she kicked you in the stones.  The guys and I thought it was funny … Mike said you’d finally found yourself one that looked like Tom Petty, with tits.  Ha ha.”

I was a big Tom Petty fan back then.  I’d got into him soon after his first LP came out.  I’d come across it by chance.  He and his band were basically unknown at the time, at least around here.  They recorded for Shelter in those days.  The Tulsa scene.  Some of the band’s early cuts employed Dwight Twilley and Phil Seymour as background vocalists, Twilley and Seymour playing Flo and Eddie to Petty & the Heartbreakers’ T. Rex.  It sounded really good and different at the inception, both retro and new at the same time.  1975, I think, or 1976 … you’ll have to take my word for it . . . but anyway, this chick was better looking than Tom Petty with mid-sized knockers.  And I wasn’t sleeping with her because she bore a resemblance to one of my rock ‘n’ roll heroes at the time.  I wasn’t that screwed up.  She was a decent-looking girl, okay?  Starting to show the effects of persistent drug use, yes, but … she wasn’t great, but …

In retrospect, though, through fuzzy recollection, I can kind of see how my friends made the Tom Petty connection.  She did kind of look like Tom Petty, in a certain light.  Tom Petty, with tits.  Maybe I really was that screwed up.

Oh, and the ‘Diane’ my buddy Tony referenced was a girl I loved, the true love of my life to that point, a beautiful, wonderful, gorgeous woman I’d had an on again, off again relationship for nearly two years by that time.  Diane was nothing like the somewhat torn and frayed girl I’d hooked up with playing shuffleboard.  At the time, Diane and I were in one of our “off again” phases, I guess.  But I don’t want to get off into that, here.  Anything to do with Diane is a whole other story.

***************

While my girl sat there telling me what a lazy-ass I was, I started drifting off into reverie, if not quite outright sleep.  I could hear the dude downstairs’ stereo playing The Police.  I could hear the rather haunting sounding opening bars to “Wrapped Around My Finger”.  That album hadn’t been out that long, but dude (his name was Doug or something) played the fuck out of it, all the time.  Including when he was screwing his girlfriend, which I could hear sometimes, the sounds coming up through the floor between us.  He also beat his girl to that song.  I could hear that sometimes, too.  He swore he didn’t, and she swore he didn’t, but I could hear it, sometimes; the girl’s piercing wails of pain stabbing through my mind.  After that, every time I heard that Police album I thought of Doug’s girl in pain, and me upstairs, doing nothing about it, unable to do anything about it.  It made me hate that LP after a while, which was okay, because I never liked The Police very much, anyway.  Back then, some retarded Rolling Stone critic went so far as to classify them as “punk.”  What a moron.  Andy Summers could play a little bit, okay, but come on . . .

It was kind of hot and sticky in the apartment that morning.  I’d decided that spring to save money to buy a truck, a Silverado I liked, so I scrimped wherever I could.  I’d taken to setting the air conditioner’s thermostat at 78 or 80, and turning it off altogether at night.  I usually just wore a pair of gym shorts around the apartment most of the time, anyway – no shirt, no shoes.  I’d leave the windows open in the evenings.  In the early part of spring, it was a workable plan.  But as it got on from April to May, and then into the first part of the summer, I knew I would have to shelve my plan before long.  It would get too fucking hot and humid in the apartment, and I wouldn’t be able to sleep.  Or, alternately, it would make me drowsy-sleepy during the day and, as my girl said, lazy.  Before long I would have to shut the windows, crank the A/C down to 72 or so, and just let that motherfucker run, all summer long.

***************

I finally got it together enough to get my ass up out of the bed; and take a shower, ice down some beer, and pack up the truck.  All this because my little Amphetamine Annie wanted to go to the beach that day.  It pissed me off that I was coerced into taking her, but once I got down there, of course, I was fine.

It was an average summer weekend – not too crowded, but the beach was far from empty.  We secured a good spot to park and set up, not far from where Swede’s Rd. (Crystal Beach Dr.) emptied onto the sand.  I set up our lawn chairs and cooler and this 8’ x 8’ canvas canopy I had, for shade if it got too hot.  I was up in the bed of my truck, setting up the external stereo speakers, when my girl walked over and asked me to slather her down.  So I stopped what I was doing, and proceeded to cover the parts of her body not covered by her bikini, which was by far most of it, with a thick coating of Coppertone Savage Tan, the kind with coconut oil in it.  As I finished, I realized the scent of coconut oil had aroused me a little – well, that, and the sight of my girl barely dressed and all oiled up, with the sun glinting off of her smooth skin.  But she sensed my arousal, and got out of range before I could do anything about it.  I shook my head and went back to setting up the stereo.

Once I’d got everything the way I wanted it, I settled down into my lawn chair and did what was just about my favorite thing in the world to do – I got pleasantly smashed, while contemplating the ocean, the waves, and the horizon.  And eventually, I slipped off into a daydream . . .

It was 2011, a mid-summer weekend day.  I’d been out working in the yard earlier, but now I was lying on the sofa in the living room, half watching a ballgame on the television, and half dozing/daydreaming.  It was a pleasant feeling, to lie there and know I had taken care of my weekend around-the-house obligations, and now I could snooze and half-ass watch a baseball game, with no guilt or recriminations.  The guilt would have been self-inflicted, as would have the recriminations, by then.  The soon-to-be ex-wife had moved into a townhouse with my youngest son, and my older son and I were left at the house, on our own.  And he didn’t give a shit about the yard, or household chores in general, obviously; so the only person left to bitch at me about putting off doing what needed to be done around the house was me.  And I was rarely in the mood to do it.

As I lay there between innings of the game, staring at the ceiling and pleasantly zoning out, a car commercial came on the TV.  I don’t remember what brand of vehicle it was for, but they were using music in the background that I found out later was from a then popular pop song.  I’d never heard it before that.  It was some European-sounding female singer, singing to music that sounded vaguely like electronica, or maybe trip-hop.  To be honest, I wasn’t 100% sure I knew the difference.  But anyway, this music was going on during the commercial, and I was barely aware of it, or of the commercial itself.  Then the Euro-girl sang a lyric that just jolted me to attention:  “You’re so lazy, you’re so lazy, you have a lazy life.”

It is startling how strong a memory trigger popular music can be.  As soon as I heard that lyric, I was transported back 28 years, laying around my hot apartment with this kind of pretty but admittedly Tom-Petty-with-tits-looking chick, who was eating amphetamines like candy and babbling a bunch of shit I had no idea of.  Trying to get me to get up and take her to the bed and service her, which wasn’t that hard for her to get me to do, normally.  But I felt almost too lethargic, too lazy, to even stir myself for raw, jagged sex with this terminal junkie . . . Having a girl like that had been my lifelong ambition, for quite some time; but the lethargy that plagued me then was so powerful, I barely even wanted her.

The whole period I was remembering was one of the worst and most difficult of my life.  But here I was, nearly three decades on, in the house my wife had left me alone in; and I was remembering the surroundings and events and the speed-addled chick I was sleeping with thirty years ago. I was remembering it all wistfully, almost.  In some ways, no matter how much I reflect on things, and try to work things out . . . there are some parts of me, and some things I have done, that I will never understand or be able to explain to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all my own.

I’d misheard the song lyric in the car commercial, of course.  The girl was actually singing something about an amazing life.  But it hardly mattered.  Once I heard it the way I heard it, well, it was going to be that way in my head forever.  Up there in my mind with the lethargic days, the drug taking and the listlessness and the settling for a tweaker chick who vaguely resembled a rock star … with the appropriate female accouterments, of course.

Sometimes I think it really is an amazing life.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

In my memory, that was a very dark time, my lowest point – the breakup and aftermath of a twenty-five year relationship and marriage, and the divvying up of property and children and emotions, and all that entails. The divorce had not been my idea. In fact, I was kind of blind-sided by it; though in retrospect maybe I should have seen something coming. But I didn’t.

It is good for me now, anyway, to see that, as darkly as I may remember it, even at my lowest point I had not given up hope. I had my eyes open and my radar out for what possibilities for happiness were still out there for me.

I did not end up with Lesa, the subject of this little tale, and that is perhaps for the best. It was kind of irrational at the time for me to even hope I ever would. But, though she’ll never know, Lesa – or the thought of her – sustained me for a while back then, when I desperately needed sustaining. I will be forever grateful to her for that.

That I did end up quite happy, with a girl I had no idea of at the time this story was written, is beside the point, I am tempted to say. But of course, it is not beside the point. Being happy, or ending up happy, is the only point. I have reminded myself over and over throughout my life so far, that if I can just get the fuck out of my own way for a little while, as often as not, happiness will come.

As I am reminding myself again, today.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

NEVER SAY NEVER

“Well, I might like you better
If we’d slept together … “

I dove off of the bow of the 22’ Galaxy walk around, from the little prow out front where the anchor sits; off and out and down, headfirst about 5-6 feet into the brown, soupy, and surprisingly cold water.

The boat belonged to a friend of mine, whose daddy owned a local fast food franchise. My friend was one of those kids who wasn’t too bad a guy, but put off a lot of people just by being a rich kid, so ironically he was a bit of an outsider, socially. Naturally enough, we became friends. I had a tendency to collect people like that as friends – outsiders, misfits, weirdos, etc. Actually, I still do.

I was solid with the ‘in’ crowd through high school. But at the same time I found quirky, unpopular people interesting, too; and so I cultivated friendships with kids outside the social whirl as well as within it. I sat at the same table at lunch most days, with a bunch of my friends, but occasionally I’d feel compelled to sit somewhere else. Often I’d go sit at my younger brother’s table, on the other side of the cafeteria. He was two years behind me in school, and he and a bunch of his stoner friends sat together, not eating much, killing time before easing on out to the huge field between the cafeteria exit at the back of the school and the baseball field where, along with at least half of the people in second lunch, they’d chain smoke cigarettes and/or doobies before the fifth period bell.

My brother got a kick out of it when I sat with him, and his estimation among his friends rose when I did. Those kids thought I was ‘cool’ just because I was older; and if sitting with them made them feel good and gave my brother some cachet, too, I was all for it. I don’t think I really bought into the adulation part, but then again, maybe I did a little. I was, like, seventeen at the time. Being thought of as ‘cool’ back then was the pinnacle of achievement.

Anyway, sometimes I’d sit with my brother, and sometimes I’d kind of wander around and work the room, like a politician does. Whether I bought into what was projected onto me or not, let me tell you it is a nice feeling to randomly drop in somewhere and realize the people there are glad to see you, just glad you are there with them.

There was some nobility in all this on my part, I suppose; but on the other hand, I sometimes struggled with reconciling my dual set of friends/acquaintances, and I’m sorry to say I was a bit ashamed of my oddball friends sometimes, when the cool crowd was around.

Anyway, wandering around the cafeteria hanging out with the not-quite-so-‘cool’ kids was how I met my friend John, the one with the boat. Sometimes we’d just ride around after school in his ‘76 Corvette Stingray, with the T-tops off and the stereo turned up, drinking aimlessly. When spring came he would invite me over to swim and party at his house. It was a really nice house, with a big pool out back. So I started hanging around there a lot. After a while, I wouldn’t even call first; I’d just drift in, whether John was there or not. If he wasn’t, I’d still go on in like I lived there, get something out of the fridge, then head on back to the pool house to change. His family was cool with this, by the way. His little sister was in junior high school then, that age where older guys were ‘dreamy’ and acting silly about it with one’s friends was the norm. I got the sense his parents thought it was great that John had a real friend who wasn’t hanging around just to mooch off of him (well, except for using the pool). After a while, they pretty much treated me like an adopted son. That was sometimes preferable to what I was getting at home at the time, so I began going over to John’s house pretty often, and our friendship deepened.

During and after high school it was popular in the summertime to hang out on the Neches River on the weekends, if one wasn’t going to the beach or out of town. I didn’t have a speedboat or a jet ski – well, my dad had a 18’ runabout he used to fish out of, but I wasn’t allowed near it. I knew people who did have boats, though. I’d ice down a cooler of refreshments, put a couple of packs of Kent’s in a watertight Tupperware sandwich container, and head for the public boat landing at Collier’s Ferry, or further down at the yacht club, or at Riverfront Park downtown. Just sit out there on my cooler for a while, working on the tan and draining a few cold ones. Before long, someone I knew would cruise by, see me, and circle back around to pick me up. We’d ski or tube or just drink, and try to ingratiate ourselves with all the nice looking, bikini-clad women that seemed to be everywhere.

The main recreational area on the river was above the Port of Beaumont, north of the IH10 bridge; and on the particular day I am thinking of, we’d gone even further upriver, up above Lakeview on the Orange County side. There is a huge salt-water barrier there now; but before there had been a sandbar, where the main part of the river makes a fairly sharp turn. It was popular back then to run one’s boat aground on the sand in the shallow water, and then wade over to the sandbar, which was basically like a small beach. Lawn chairs, music, coolers of beer, Frisbees, women – it was an impromptu, kick-ass party on most weekends.

That day, we were slowly easing upriver, above the Beaumont Country Club. It was wise to slow it down in that stretch. The channel was deep enough in the middle, but in the spring, during runoff, logs and even whole trees might wash down and snag and/or lie submerged around there. The water was muddy and tannin-colored, but still clear enough to see obstructions through, if you weren’t going too fast.

I looked around, and we had on board, besides my friend and I, a couple of other friends of ours. College friends; we were all 19-20 then. And, we also had five or six 14-16 year old high school babes with us … West End upper-middle-class cuties; with tanning booth tans, and gym-tight butts and legs and boobs everywhere. The girls would get stupid drunk on maybe two beers, and then run around the boat in skimpy bikinis, causing a lot of commotion, rubbing up against us older guys and stuff. It was all a bad fucking idea from the get-go, and I think we all knew that, but it kind of seemed inevitable at the time. And we were drinking, too, so on that day common sense and good judgment were at low ebb.

We’d set out that morning, the four of us guys, to ride around the lower reaches of the river, around a big jump and slalom course in a side channel, and ski for a few hours. Then we planned to cruise upriver and party away the rest of the day. And our plan had been going along pretty well. We skied and swam and rode around all morning. We didn’t start drinking until 10:00 or so, and by the time we were ready to pack it in and head upriver, all of us needed to piss. Rather than dive back into the river, or get the boat off in some slough and whiz over the side, I suggested we ride down through the port to the Civic Center. They had nice public restrooms there, right on the docks; and meanwhile we could see if there were any shapely girls hanging out down there who wanted to go for a ride out on the river.

***************

When we arrived at the Civic Center, we moored the boat along the boardwalk, and climbed out and took turns using the public facilities. I had noticed a group of girls on the dock when we first pulled up. It was obvious they were looking for a ride, and also obvious to me they probably wouldn’t have much trouble finding one. As we got closer, though, I could see they were high school sophomore age or thereabouts, so in my mind I immediately discounted any idea of us picking them up.

Today, if I met an attractive woman five years my junior, I wouldn’t think twice about it. But in teen-age, five years was a huge difference and, after all, technically a gateway to statutory rape. I knew some guys who never looked at it that way, unless it was blatantly pointed out to them. But I was operating on the faulty assumption that my friends had some common sense among them.

I forgot to factor in all the beer we’d drank by then, though. Before I knew it, some of our crew had talked up the girls and convinced them they should ride with us. So they all piled in, ass-over-tea kettle so to speak, and before long we were underway again, heading upriver to the sandbar.

It didn’t help things that one of the high school girls was an acquaintance of mine, a pretty girl named Lesa. Our families had been close at one time – her father and mine were in the same firm for a while – and we spent a lot of time with them in those days. I’d practically watched this girl Lesa grow up, from a little kid to what she had become, which was pretty damn awesome. I had always considered her as sort of a little sister, I guess. So when she sat her drunk, barely-covered self down in my lap on the boat, and put her arms around my neck, and pushed her decent-sized profundities into my chest, and started kissing me on the ear and neck and cheek and – a few times – on the lips, well . . . She had started off in a kidding way, but I began to realize at some point she wasn’t really kidding anymore. That is when I knew for sure I was in trouble.

By the time we made it to the party upriver, I had noticed there was other illicit activity of a semi-sexual nature beginning to occur on the boat. I had managed to cool Lesa’s jets somewhat by then, but she was still in my lap, arms around me, rubbing the back of my neck. To be honest, I was having conflicting thoughts and emotions about her, and what she was doing to me by doing the things she was doing; which is a nice way of saying that, for all my high-mindedness, I was sorely tempted to forget everything and just go with the flow. Which would have been a disaster, ultimately, which I knew. Even so, I had yet to make it out of the woods at that point.

When we reached the sandbar, we beached the boat on the sandy bottom, and everyone scrambled to get out. Lesa was taking her time getting off of me, and just as she was getting up, she turned and kissed me in earnest, on the lips and open-mouthed and everything. Wow! It was about then that I decided I needed to cool myself off and clear my head, so I told her I’d be over to the party in a minute, and edged up onto the prow of the boat. The water was shallow around us, but I knew from previous experience there was a small pool in front of me, created by eddies in the river as it worked itself around the bend there. So I dove off head first, down into the cool, brown water.

It was early in the summer, when the river normally ran languid; but I noticed right away the current was surprisingly strong. I was still under water, trying to gauge how far it had carried me since I’d jumped in. Around the time I guessed I was near the back of the boat, I came up for air. I was surprised to see I was 30 yards beyond where I’d guessed I was. By the time I swam toward the east bank into shallow enough water to stand up, I’d been carried downstream another 10 yards or so, and the boat and the people on the sandbar seemed to be far away.

I stood there for a moment to catch my breath, and tried to decide what to do. I didn’t think I could swim all the way back to my friends, against that current. I decided to edge my way along the bank, mostly in the river; because everything on the bank was overgrown and would be difficult to navigate fully dressed, much less in a pair of canvas shorts, no shirt, no shoes. Generally, the current was stronger in the middle of the channel. I could hardly feel it, wading along the bank. My biggest worry was not stepping off into some hole, or beating myself up on cypress knees, which were everywhere.

I’d progressed maybe 15 yards, and could hear more clearly the voices coming from the sand bar and make out individual figures, when Lesa saw me, and waved. I could see her talking to one of my friends and pointing to me, and he waved and yelled something. I sped up my pace a little, and was just edging further out into the river to get myself around an overhanging cottonwood tree, when I heard and saw commotion on the sandbar. Damn it! The Orange County sheriff department periodically raided the sandbar on weekends, mainly checking for underage drinking. I could see people milling around, and saw a couple of deputies scrambling down the bank above the sandbar.

My group of friends had charge of five underage girls, all of them drunk as hell. In addition, upon request I’m sure, a couple of the girls had removed their bikini tops. I was pretty sure the deputies spotted that, right away. So we were not only liable for contributing to the delinquency of those minors, we might be up for some charge having to do with underage sex, too. I hung back behind the cover of the tree to watch and, sure enough, I saw people being cuffed and hauled up the bank. There wasn’t going to be a mere citation and/or warning that day. One of the deputies waded out and secured our boat to the bank. I assumed they were going to impound it.

As much as I cared about the people being hauled off, I didn’t move from my hiding spot. I couldn’t see the point of going to jail with them. One of the deputies stood out on the edge of the bar and gazed along the surface of the river, looking for stragglers I guess; but he didn’t look as far down as where I was. I was pretty sure I was in the clear. I hadn’t left anything on the boat except a cooler, which didn’t have my name on it. I knew none of my friends would say anything. I figured the best I could do for them at that point was find some way back downriver to the public launch, where my car was; then see about bailing them out.

Turns out, getting back downriver was easy. There had been a few other boats on the sandbar with us, and once the deputies figured out who had the teenage girls, they let the other boats go. I waited until one was almost on top of me. As it was swinging out to go around the bend, I stepped out and waved it down. It was some people I didn’t know, but my friends had been partying with them earlier. They picked me up, no problem, and brought me back downriver and let me off.

All the while, I kept thinking about before, when I had been standing in ankle-deep water, in the leaves and branches of a cottonwood tree, watching as, in the distance, my friends were being arrested. I was absolutely still. It was in order to avoid detection, mostly. But really, I had been absolutely still, hardly even breathing. I realized I hadn’t just been hiding from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. I was hiding from the Big Overseer, as well. I didn’t want Him to see me there, hiding in the bushes instead of stepping out. I didn’t want Him to know about the girls, or some of the thoughts that had been running through my head, earlier that day. Whenever I did something good, I wanted Him to know. But even then it would be pointed out to me there was a selfish motive on my part. I surely did not want to know what He thought about the events of that day. Even though I had eluded the deputies, I couldn’t revel in my good luck. Because I knew, no way around it, there would be repercussions. I never got off scot-free.

Meanwhile, as I stood in the cover of the tree, it occurred to me that for that moment, I was alone in the universe, utterly alone … just an outsider, looking in. There would be short-term consequences for my friends, admonishments from parents as they bailed their kid out and began making arrangements with the authorities to have the charges reduced, or dropped altogether. But they would also have a bond, getting thrown in jail together; and they would laugh and tell stories about it later. I wouldn’t be part of that, except on the periphery. I couldn’t decide if it was worth it, hiding in the bushes, undetected. And all alone.

I thought a little bit about Lesa, too. Our brief encounter on the boat that day on the river was mostly benign, thankfully. We just had a little too much to drink, is all. We’d go back to being friends again, once we got over the embarrassment; and I am sure we’d laugh about it privately one day, our little secret. There was nothing to it, really; just drunken shenanigans, no need to give it any more weight than that. No need to think about it at all.

Right.

In a way, Lesa slipped through my fingers that day. I had the sense that we had maybe blown any chance of getting together, later on, when we were more age-appropriate. I hadn’t realized, but I was harboring some latent feelings for her I guess, strong feelings. As, apparently, she was for me. She was a beautiful girl and, having known her for so long, I thought the world of her.

Really, though, the moment she came onto me that day, we were done. No matter what my reaction was. It would have been wrong, wrong, wrong for me to pursue her at that point. I knew that, and I suppose I could have congratulated myself for having the will, even though drunk and being strongly come onto, to resist the urge. But, really, I am not so sure. If there hadn’t been a raid, and that day had gone on as we had planned, and I kept on drinking, and Lesa kept molesting me, would I have had the will then? I know myself; if I had enough desire built up, and was drunk enough, I could have come up with some excuse in my head . . . an excuse to temporarily bulldoze all my morals and make ragged, sloppy love to this sweet girl. That’s how fucked up I was.

It was no wonder to me I was left on the outside looking in that day. It was where I deserved to be.

***************

I mentioned earlier about standing in the river, concealed in the heavy foliage of a leaning cottonwood tree, and how I felt like I was totally alone and an outsider, watching my friends in the distance on the sandbar, being arrested.  That instance was a brief and over-dramatic realization; but to be honest, since I was a kid, I always felt like a bit of an outsider.

It wasn’t a black and white, cut-and-dried thing. There was a lot of ambiguity. In general, I was a well-adjusted kid, outgoing and popular, and it came to me naturally. I didn’t have to work at it. I was blessed with what I guess most people considered decent looks. I was pretty smart, pretty funny, and pretty good at athletics. I was pleasant and at ease with most people, and always had a pretty good grip on my temper. I was blessed, plainly put.

And yet, since my earliest memories, I always felt like I was missing out on something, like everyone else knew something I didn’t. I subsequently studied just enough psychology, in college, to be dangerous; and now I think a lot of my early achievement was driven by a desire to avoid feeling like the outsider that, deep down, I knew I really was. It seemed when I accomplished things, I was more accepted, more popular. Being good in school got me into fights on the playground sometimes, but I figured out that, everything else being equal, women preferred a guy who had something on the ball, intelligence-wise, over one who did not. Plus, it kept my parents and teachers off of my back. Being good in sports also helped with the girls, plus it often meant some acceptance by the older kids in school and in the neighborhood I couldn’t have got, otherwise. And so on.

I think my childhood insecurities sprung from some things going on at home, to be honest. I know that now; I had no idea back then. Either way, I couldn’t have done anything about it. You play the hand you are dealt, you know? Take the bad with the good. I had a poker-playing, black Irish uncle who used to tell me that all the time. I loved my uncle, but he drank like a fish, and that was the only advice he ever gave me that made any sense, or was useful in any way. Most of his advice was along the lines of, “When you get the woman home, make her make you tea before you take her back to the bedroom and bang her but good.” Just random stuff like that, after he’d been pulling on the pint of Jameson’s in his coat pocket all afternoon. “OK, Uncle Joe. I’m only in second grade, but thanks for the tip.”

But the playing one’s hand thing was good advice. That is how it became an adage, a bromide, an old saying. As tired as those sometimes are, there is almost always some truth in them. On the other hand, it was kind of weak as advice goes – that you played the hand you were dealt was self-evident, I thought. What the hell else were you going to do? When I was young, I wasn’t capable of recognizing the slight nuance in that statement of advice, the implication. I couldn’t hear the unspoken part of it, which was that you played the hand you were dealt positively, in good spirit. No whining about one’s fate, or one’s station in life. Just play your hand, win or lose. And then move on.

Without understanding it all back then, that is basically what I went ahead and did. I had a good childhood, for the most part. It was only occasionally that the outsider feelings would come up. Often, it was just me, jumping at shadows. In fact, I mostly forgot about all that in time.

That one day on the river remains a vivid memory, and I am not sure why. We spent dozens of days like that on that river, with pretty much the same results. Yet I only remember those other days in bits and pieces. I could say the raid on the sandbar made that one day stand out, but the truth is that raid happened mostly to my friends. It didn’t have that much of an impact on me.

The only other thing to consider was my awkward encounter, uninitiated by me (for once), with a pretty girl in a skimpy bathing suit who was drunk and horny and all over me. No big deal, stuff like that had happened before, and probably would again.

Of course, that time was different because I actually knew the girl. And I cared about her. I cared about her so much, in fact, it surprised me. I did not realize how strong my feelings for her were. How would I have? I only saw Lesa rarely in those days. She was a sophomore in high school, I was a college freshman. We lived in different worlds. In a sense, she had grown up and gone her way and I had gone mine, and I really didn’t know her anymore at all. If we did cross paths somewhere, we would exchange greetings and smile; but we were smiling about things that had happened years before, back to when she was a preschooler and I was a family friend, an older boy who gave her some of my attention, pushed her on the swing set, admired her crayon drawing of a horse. That is what we smiled about when we met. It had nothing to do with who we were when we bumped into each other later, at the 7-11 or McDonald’s. By then, we’d both grown up, and had grown apart. That is what I thought.

If my friends and I had not chosen to go to Riverfront Park to piss that day, if I had not had the idea to do it in the first place . . . there is a chance I would never have run across Lesa then. She and I might have kept on growing separately, with no residual feelings for each other we knew of. Then maybe four or five years later we would have seen each other again, in a more intimate setting, and maybe we would have realized we had these strong feelings for each other, so different from the ones we had as children. If so, maybe we could have done what is to me the sweetest thing in this life two people can do. Maybe we could have fallen in love, together. Maybe we could have jumped into that mighty river together, and held on tight, and just let it take us wherever it would.

Eventually, later on, Lesa and I did talk about that day. It was six months or so later, around Christmas time. I went to her house one evening with some of my family to exchange gifts with her family, and to drink bourbon in coffee mugs and in general to bring good cheer to the season. At some point the dads went into another room to watch TV, the moms became engrossed in a conversation about something or other, and the other kids wandered off to various destinations in the rest of the house. Lesa took my hand and we went into an alcove off of the main foyer downstairs, and sat on a love seat (ironically), and we each talked to each other about our feelings for each other before and after that afternoon on the river, and our impressions of where the minor chaos of that day had left us afterward.

***************

I turned off the television, which I had not been watching, anyway. It was dark in the house, and quiet. I had been sitting up late. I felt a tinge of sadness, realizing everyone had turned in. I hadn’t even realized. I walked through the house, checking deadbolts and turning off lights. I tripped over a pair of Crocs in the den, dammit. My son wears them when he goes out to check on his dog before he goes to bed. That boy is always leaving his stuff everywhere, wherever it lands. He has always done that, since he was little.

I looked in on Walter, the red beta fish my other son won at the State Fair, back in March. He brought Walter home in a bag of water, and I didn’t even want to waste the money and effort to get a proper fish bowl. I didn’t think the fish would last until the end of the day. But of course, I was on my way to Petco, my son in tow, before I knew it. We picked out just a little 2- gallon plastic aquarium, and some rocks and fake weeds and a little stone bridge, and a small water pump and filter setup. We put all that together and dumped Walter in there, and right away he started swimming around like he owned the place. Since then, he has thrived, and I feel a little guilty each evening when I look in on him. He doesn’t know, but I once had no faith in his ability to survive. Not knowing any better, Walter had just gone on living.

I turned into the hallway and heard a muffled thumping coming from one end, from my high-schooler’s room. He falls asleep with the stereo on. I used to try to go in there and turn it off, but every time I did, as soon as I switched the sound off my son would bolt upright in his bed, and ask me what the heck I was doing. After a while, I just left it alone. As long as his door is shut, it doesn’t disturb anyone else. I walked to the other end of the hall, past my younger son’s room, and opened the door into mine. It was pitch dark; and as I shut the door behind me, the darkness just engulfed me. I wasn’t ready for it, the depth and power of the darkness. It was like I’d stepped off into an abyss, and it took my breath away. I felt like I was falling helplessly, spinning around like that guy in the opening sequence of The X-Files. I didn’t know if I would ever stop.

That Yuletide evening, years and years ago, Lesa and I sat down and talked about a day we both got drunk and stepped outside of ourselves for a bit. She apologized for coming onto me that day, and I told not to apologize too much, because in truth I kind of liked it. We laughed, but of course some things were being revealed. I think we ended up resolved that we’d each continue our separate lives, and whatever happened, happened. But I had the feeling then that was basically it, as far as Lesa and I went. I had never even looked at her in a romantic way before that anyway, and it should have been easy for me to just move on. Yet for some reason, I had a hard time with it. I came away from that meeting very sad.

That sadness eventually passed, and Lesa and I both went on to marriages and kids and all that entails. I am pretty sure we forgot about each other. So I was kind of startled and pleased when I bumped into her at H-E-B not too long ago. I hadn’t seen her in a long time, or talked to her in longer. She is an approaching middle-aged mom now, but she still looks pretty good. At the store we fell into easy conversation, discussing our families and the families we’d gone on to start ourselves, how her marriage was, how I was dealing with my recent divorce.. Then, the weirdest thing, when we ran out of small talk we fell right into a conversation about the day we almost had a fling, way back when.

We talked around the edges of it for a while; and then this sweet girl, who I’d known for most of her life, whose virtue I fought (myself) mightily to preserve one day all those years ago, smiled at me and said, “You know, you should have just fucked me that day. We didn’t get together later anyway, so at least we’d have that. It’ll never happen now.”

Damn it to fucking Hell. Even when I try to do the right thing, I do the wrong thing.

But I am not feeling sorry for myself. Nope. Got to keep playing that hand I was dealt. That last conversation at H-E-B keeps replaying itself in my mind. I am 50-something now, but still in decent shape. No grey hair. Most of my scars are psychic in nature, and don’t show. Lisa is 47 or 48, and looks great. What I am saying is, there is time.  I hope she doesn’t think about me nearly as much as I think about her now, usually late, when I am trying to fall asleep. Okay, yeah I do. Whether she does or doesn’t, there is one thing in this life I have learned for sure, and I am trying everything I can think of to communicate it to her, telepathically or cosmically or whatever it takes.

Never. Say. Never.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

There will be much barbecue cooked and consumed, much loud music listened to, many alcoholic beverages consumed, much revelry had. And somewhere in there, we will remember to be briefly thankful, too, for the place where we will be celebrating. We will feel a little self-righteous and haughty for a bit, us Americans … laughing at the whole Brexit brouhaha, forgetting entirely for a few minutes what our own recent long and arduous (and boring, and demeaning) political primary process has produced, Presidential candidate-wise.

Yes, we’ll be loud and jingoistic and, to people not lucky enough to be us, perhaps a bit ugly for a little while this weekend. But it is also more than that. Underneath all the the noise and celebrating and bonhomie, I will remember to be quietly glad for much more. I will be happy for what else I have found here, where I have found myself. Very happy indeed.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

BEING ABRAHAM MASLOW

As part of my ongoing quest for self-actualization, I am taking an honest assessment of myself. There doesn’t seem to be any point to it, other than embarrassment. But, here goes.

1.) I am not particularly religious, but there are a half-dozen or so TV clergy I will go to some lengths to not miss their shows; everything from Catholic priests to some guys of whom I have no real idea what denomination they represent. There was even a rabbi-for-Jesus guy I liked to watch (I think he died a few years ago.) I don’t know the reasons behind this, except I am certain it is not some wayward search for spiritual truth (which is what my family thinks.) At any rate, I find these guys more entertaining than 99% of what passes for prime time on the networks.

2.) I don’t eat sushi or steak tartar, but I went through a phase as a child where I really liked raw bacon. My mother nearly went crazy over this; she told me I would get trichinosis (which is some kind of worm, I believe she said.) So I had to sneak the bacon. You haven’t known shame until you have been caught red-handed, or rather greasy-handed, sneaking a strip of raw Hormel out of the ice box.

3.) Since I was a kid, whenever I mow the yard I sometimes absentmindedly create vaguely geometric shapes. The shapes kind of look like crop circles sometimes. When I notice them, I never have any conscious recollection of having made them. Some have said this is proof I have some kind of connection to the Knights Templar and/or ancient aliens. Perhaps. I should add I sometimes mix alcohol with yard work.

4.) I haven’t seen any ghosts, and I don’t really believe in that paranormal stuff. I did see my doppelgänger once; Webster’s defines doppelgänger as “a spiritual wraith, one’s own ghost,” which is pretty accurate, I would say. But I’ve told the doppelgänger story previously … We won’t even talk about the time I tripped over a screaming banshee while running through my back yard one night (I was trying escape a vicious hobgoblin that was chasing me through the neighborhood) . . . (Note: A screaming banshee should not be confused with the screaming meemies, which are an entirely different thing – Eds.)

5.) I am haunted by plenty of live people, but no dead ones, as far as I know.

6.) I have a friend who is afflicted with a malady called tone-color synesthesia; basically, whenever he hears music, he sees kaleidoscopic colors floating around in front of him. As afflictions go, that one doesn’t seem so bad. Anyway, I don’t have tone-color synesthesia, but music definitely affects me more than it should. I have at various times based my entire lifestyle on certain music I liked. I have made long-term romantic decisions based on what a girl would or wouldn’t tolerate on my stereo. I once got a speeding ticket (88 in a 55, on Highway 69 in Lumberton) because a song I really liked came on the radio (“Under Pressure” – ZZ Top.) When it got to the part about, “She likes cocaine/And making it with Great Danes,” it made me feel so good I just stomped on the gas — I never saw the DPS trooper with his radar gun, until it was too late. Even now, certain songs cause me to “zone out” — basically, to slip into another dimension; so that I may be sitting there right in front of you, but I’m not really there. This often happens at the least socially appropriate times.

7.) I was once loosely affiliated with a group that called itself the Cult of Nines. This was in college. The rather pretentious title was a philosophical conceit – it had nothing to do with religion. Basically, our group’s philosophy was to strive to always fall just short of some ideal – make a 99 on a test (instead of 100), give 99% effort, hit .299 for the season, and so on. Some of us believed our obsession with this was caused by overexposure to modern commerce and the practice of price-pointing, where everything in a store is $2.99 or $5.99 or whatever. Instead of just making it an even $3.00 or $6.00, so now everyone’s got a fucking dresser drawer full of pennies at home.

8.) I once started my own religion – Apostrophism – which was based on a giant lighted apostrophe I stole off the side of a building occupied by a Wilson’s department store. I hooked that illuminated punctuation mark up in my apartment, and I had my own set of commandments and everything. But I won’t go into that right now.

Otherwise, I feel that I am basically normal.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

AT PEACE

Dusk was approaching, and the evening air was cool, dry, and comfortable. I was sitting on the deck in the backyard of my house, post-cookout, savoring maybe my fourth or seventh 16 oz. Miller Lite of the day. Who knows? I don’t usually count.

I’d been on a serious ‘Stones kick, and I had the Let It Bleed LP playing over the outdoor speakers, pretty damn loud, too. As Keith Richards launched into the searing, apocalyptic opening chord progression of “Gimme Shelter”, I had a shiver run all the way through me. It wasn’t the weather that gave me goose bumps. I looked up and saw my next door neighbor, Ted, sitting in an adjacent lawn chair, a beer in his hands, his eyes closed and his head nodding slightly, to the music. He was smiling.

In the whole great universe, there are many wonderful things to see. I was thinking about that, sitting there rocking to the music, and I’d closed my eyes now, too …

I imagined a vivid image taken from outer space, from the kind of spy satellite that can take vivid pictures of the minutest details of things down on the earth. For some reason, on this day, out of all the awesome things on the planet they could zoom in on and look at, the guys operating the satellite decided to zoom in on my postage stamp-sized backyard, in the tree-lined West End of Beaumont, near the Gulf of Mexico, in Southeast Texas.

And what they saw, in vivid detail, was two middle-aged guys sitting in lawn chairs, beers in hand, eyes closed and heads bobbing in rhythm to something, some type of music, it seemed. It was probably the least important thing going on, on the entire planet at that moment. Seriously, the satellite guys should have been looking for nuclear plants in Iran, or Al Qaeda camps in the Sudan, or something. Somehow, though, they found the sight of these two guys in lawn chairs, perfectly at peace … with the weather, with their lives, with their beers, and with whatever the hell music it was they were listening to … they found the sight of Ted and I so compelling for some reason that they couldn’t pan away, while meanwhile trucks full of weapons grade plutonium were rolling across the desert, just north of Tehran.

People are forever seeking inner peace; and they’ll climb to the mountaintop, move to the desert, blast themselves out and up amongst the stars, just trying to find it. And good luck to them, too.

It is just that some of us have found that sometimes you don’t have to go very far to find inner peace. Sometimes it comes among the simplest details, in the most mundane surroundings. Not a breathtaking vista of the Himalayas, not the austere, terrible beauty in the heart of the Sahara, or the Gobi … sometimes you can find your peace right where you live, in the smallest events, in the simplest details.

The reason I shivered at the beginning of “Gimme Shelter” is because the perhaps unlikely combination of 60 degree weather, and Keith Richards playing lead guitar on one of the best songs ever written by anyone, and Miller Lite, and my friend Ted, brought to me a profound feeling of well-being and peace, right there on my 10 x 10 deck in my small backyard in the wild West End, Beaumont, TX, USA, Planet Earth, Milky Way, Universe, 77707. I didn’t need Sherpa’s or a Land Rover or a Saturn 5 rocket to find it. Just a couple of nine-packs of these bad-ass 16 oz. Miller Lites in aluminum bottles, a kick-ass outdoor stereo system that came with the house, the second of four straight awesome LPs by the greatest band of them all, and my neighbor Ted, who I have known for maybe two months now. That’s it.

The say you can see God in the tiniest details. I am not going to say you cannot. But, if so, maybe God can see us in the tiniest details, too.

Ponder that over your next nine-pack, while listening to the ‘Stones in your backyard with your neighbor. Then tell me if I am right, or if I am wrong.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

Baseball in America, the game was aired on ESPN along with Roots. Since I was given the option of listening to Ashby or not, I chose not. It was rather like sitting with a lot of you guys watching the game, Aaron Boone and friends were trying to guess what the pitcher was going to toss, whether Marisnick would run, and what the batter would do. They did not seem to be intrigued by a game they had once played. Hmmmm.

Overall, McHugh had a decent outing. He did not receive any run support until Shoemaker left the game and the Astros got into the bullpen, but he kept them in the game when at times he could have gotten into really bad situations. Will Harris gave a bit of a scare loading the bases with not outs, but cool as a cucumber that he is while pitching, he gets a strike out then game-ending double play. He seems like nothing bothers him when he is pitching.

Valbuena was in the #2 spot in the line-up, he did pretty good. Springer, Altuve, and Correa were productive, as was Jason Castro (at-bat, he had a bad night defensively).

Great game by the Astros who gained no ground on the stupid Rangers (ugh, they beat the Yankees in the 9th) but are definitely in the race for the wild card. Yeah, I know it is too early to worry about the wild card, but the Astros were one game back of .500 and are now three games over .500. I hope they keep winning series and just play great baseball so the rest can take care of itself.

What a fun evening it was at Minute Maid Park on Monday night. The Astros bats found the ball and the ball found spots where the Angels weren’t. I do think Calhoun for the Angels had a bit of a rough night in RF and Trout could see the ball going over his head. It truly was a great night at the ballpark for Astros fans.

Doug Fister did a great job again. He went 7 innings giving up 2 runs. I think one of those runs should have been an out, but Gomez was not able to catch the ball.

You are also probably looking at the score thinking BudGirl that game wasn’t close the Astros only won by 3 runs. Well, it was close until Tony Sipp entered the game. He proceeded to load the bases, strike one out, then give up a grand slam (by former Astros Gregoria Petite) in the top of the 9th. Take away his third of an inning pitching performance and it was a great pitching effort by Houston.

So, here’s to the Astros making a strong run to .500 tomorrow and hopefully going straight to .507 on Wednesday!

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

FATHER’S DAY, PART 2

With Father’s Day just past, there has been renewed emphasis on the subject of the special role baseball plays in the relationship between a boy and his dad. Major League Baseball’s recent television ads have been slanted this way, for sure. They know a winning concept when they see it. And, who can deny that baseball is often the secret formula that unlocks the doors existing between a man and his son, between a boy and his progenitor?

People tend to get overly sentimental about this. The movie Field Of Dreams – which was openly slanted toward sentiment, unlike the novel it is based on – is a good example. The novel, Shoeless Joe, was terrific; but almost entirely different in basic ways from the resulting movie, which I found pleasant, but not great. However, Field Of Dreams is useful in pointing out how some men feel about baseball, and their dads. Not me, but . . .

A son’s relationship with his father can be complicated, and sometimes not so pleasant, especially during adolescence and young adulthood. It doesn’t have to be, but that was my experience. My father was funny and easy-going on the surface, but was distant and hard to know when you got him up close. Also, he was the disciplinarian at home, even though he really wasn’t suited for the role. But he assumed it by necessity, and therefore represented repression to a son who was contrary by nature and at the time was trying to break free and establish his own identity. Further complications arose from big expectations projected onto me by him. But I am getting off the subject here. Simply put, a father-son relationship does not have to be overtly ambivalent, but sometimes it is.

The thing about baseball is, it can be a neutral ground in this conflict. A love for the game, passed on by a father to his son and nurtured by a mutual interest, can be a place of respite in an otherwise turbulent relationship at the time, and/or a way to resolve old conflicts later on, when both the son and his dad are presumably more mature and can look at their interactions with a greater sense of equanimity. Even if the father-son dynamic is not openly difficult, there is almost always some distance left between the two, I am not sure why. Baseball can be a way to bridge that distance, at least for a little while.

My relationship with my own sons is far from perfect, but not nearly as crazy as mine was with my dad, for many reasons. Our baseball relationship has been steady but not so intense, partly because our conflicts outside of baseball are not as large, and also because I have consciously de-emphasized my own place in my kids’ baseball lives. We go to games and talk about baseball and I have tried to pass on to them the knowledge I have from playing from childhood through high school, but I have rarely formally coached them. This is again in reaction to personal experience, as my own father’s and my relationship, already tenuous in my teenage years, was almost destroyed forever by the two seasons he decided, against my tacit wishes, to be my Senior League coach.

For all the gauzy good feeling about baseball and paternal relationships, I have seen real ugliness in youth baseball. Even as kids, we used to make fun of the minority of the dads who would get all worked up about the games and yell and scream and stuff. We used to call them ‘railing dads’ because during games, instead of sitting in the stands with everyone else, they would group along the fence rails behind the first- and third-base lines, and mutter darkly to each other, and yell at the kids and coaches and umpires on the field. We thought they were a little too intense, if not outright crazy; and I think we resolved to never be that way ourselves, when we grew up.

I have kept that resolution, though it has cost me. I think I have restrained my natural passion when it comes to my kids’ participation in youth sports, for fear of fucking up their childhoods and becoming a total dickhead, like those railing dads I remember so vividly.

But apparently, not everyone has kept the promises we made, as kids. I have seen a new generation of overbearing fathers at games, hovering over everything like a dark cloud at a picnic. And though I have managed to restrain myself, I have at times felt that ugly, creepy feeling that comes when you realize you are way too wrapped up in a kid’s game, probably because in some way you are trying to relive your own glory days vicariously through your children; or, even worse, you are depending on your sweet child out there, standing in the outfield watching an airplane fly over instead of the action on the field. . . you are burdening your own offspring with the task of redressing your failures in baseball, and making up for your own shortcomings at playing a damn game.

One other thing people tend to do when discussing baseball is over-intellectualize it. But, for all the esoteric statistics and heavy theorizing based on them, the real pleasures of baseball are mostly simple and visceral and tactile. Father’s Day afternoon, my youngest son – who gave up organized baseball last season after completing his Little League eligibility, in order to concentrate on the electric guitar – decided he and I should go to the schoolyard down the street and throw the baseball around. I still enjoy playing catch with him and/or his brother, even though I have a frayed rotator cuff now, and every time I throw the ball it feels like my arm is going along with it.

We gathered up some balls in the garage and our gloves and we walked to the schoolyard and stepped through the hole in the 8 ft. high chain-link fence surrounding the campus.

Once my boy and I got to the schoolyard, we stood maybe ten yards apart and started throwing the ball to each other, in a smooth, easy motion. Once we got warm, and started throwing with some velocity, we heard the familiar sound of the ball popping the leather of our gloves. I imagined that, from a distance, it appeared we were engaging in a sort of strange, reciprocal dance … a basic instinct to throw, then catch, catch then throw. Just like it has been done for so many summers, and will be for so many more.

My boy, who I love with all my heart, probably doesn’t understand me any more than I understood my old man, at least in some ways. But, I think he understands how much I enjoy playing catch with him; and he gets a sense, at least, of the silent information the ball carries back and forth as we lob it to each other.

And the best part about it is that by understanding the weight of meaning involved in the simple act of tossing a baseball back and forth, mostly tacitly, with the man who started the whole process that brought him into this world, he has taught me what it means. I didn’t know, beforehand. I am so grateful to know it now.

I only wish I had known 35 years ago.  I didn’t, though.  I just assumed my dad didn’t want anything to do with me that required effort on his part, physical or emotional, so I never fucking asked him if he wanted to go play catch in the schoolyard, on Father’s Day or any other fucking day. If I had, maybe he would have said, “Okay.” And the world would have been changed in some small but fundamental way.

But that did not happen, and it is much too late for regrets. As it is, I prefer to dwell on the tableau now in front of us. Just a boy and his dad, standing out in the late afternoon sun on the yellow-green grass of a schoolyard, tossing a ball back and forth and occasionally talking, and laughing. There is an easiness between them that cannot be faked, and cannot be denied. They are sharing the simple joy of throw-and-catch, of mindless banter, and of spending some time together, however brief, out in the sweet sunshine.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

STRANGE HOURS

It is late at night when the darker thoughts tend to come in. I am usually asleep by then; but every once in a while, I’m not.

I used to wonder what it was like, to be older … Well, not too much. One of the greatest gifts the benevolent creator ever bestowed upon me was the self-awareness to know that wherever I was and whatever I was doing at any given time when I was young, it was probably one of the best times I’d ever have. I knew it right then, while it was happening. So I never had to worry, later on, that I didn’t realize how good I really had it, way back when. Oh, yes I did.

Oh, yes I did.

I remember my brother and I had this ongoing conversation/running joke when we were in our late teens-early twenties. We would be sitting in our lawn chairs on the beach, a big 50-something gallon Igloo cooler between us. The sun would be high, its rays glistening off of our coconut oil covered skin. The deep copper color of our hides was made even deeper when filtered through the polarized Wayfarers we always had on, back then. There were attractive young women in skimpy bathing suits and bikinis all around us. Actually, a lot of people would be around us … some were doing what my brother and I were doing, just kicking back, and being reflective; others would be throwing Frisbees back and forth, or walking along the edge of the water, flip-flops in one hand, canned beer in a foam coo-zee in the other. There might be a few Sunfish sailboats skipping across the waves a little ways out and, closer in, people doing various things in the shallower water. And, all the while, the waves from the Gulf of Mexico would come washing in, in rhythm, one after another; and one could hear the noise the waves made, all along … over, in, and in between the noise from the car stereo, blaring out the Stones or Aerosmith or Van Halen or whoever was being played on KLOL-FM that day.

The scene was a near-perfect portrait of what the late 1970’s in America was like, for me and my kind, anyway.

And somewhere in there, after we were both half lit, my brother would lean over to me and say, “I wonder what we’d be doing right now if we lived in Russia? Or Czechoslovakia?”

It wasn’t an idle question, entirely. The people on my mother’s side had only relatively recently immigrated to these shores. My maternal grandmother, who was Czech, was first generation American. My maternal grandfather came to this country at the age of 15, from Russia.  So, theoretically, if one or another thing had gone a little differently along the way, my brother and I might not have ever been there at all that day, on that beach, enjoying the all those wonderful aural, visual and tactile sensations. We might have been born and lived instead in one motherland or another, back in Eastern Europe, perhaps under one of the stultifying Communist puppet regimes that were so popular out that way, back in that time. We would have trudged through our mundane, oppressive lives, never having known about coconut oil or babes in bikinis or listening to the Stones and the ocean’s roar simultaneously, slouched in a lawn chair, out in the shining, glistening sun.

I would lean over to my brother and reply, “Probably shoveling coal somewhere, in the snow.”

And we would both laugh. We knew we had it good. Even if we were sometimes more than a little haughty about it.

***************

On the odd occasion that I am awake now, late at night, in the darkness … in the strange hours, as Loren Eiseley called them … The strange hours, when the darker thoughts come creeping in, when men have their most personal conversations with themselves. When, after having gone around all day or all year with a sunny outlook, spreading good cheer everywhere they go, they will that same night, in the strange hours, question their very purpose, their very being, whether the time they are spending here has any meaning at all. Would it even matter a bit if they did not wake up the next morning, and go about their positive rounds, spreading their good cheer?

I think it would matter. As I have grown up and matured (somewhat), I have noticed that I have slowly moved away from my younger days, when I seemed to have surrounded myself with cynical and negative or at least extremely fatalistic folks. Back then, I kind of looked askance at my perpetually cheerful peers. Maybe I thought one had to be moody and dark to really experience the meaning of life. I don’t really remember. I do know it wasn’t always easy for me, feigning the moroseness. To be honest, moodiness and darkness were not really part of my natural disposition. I had a reservoir of it in me that I could draw on, but I wasn’t inclined to immerse myself in it. I think I have come to realize I am something like my father was, in that way. He could be very dark, but normally only in brief, episodic bouts. For the most part he was funny, and he appreciated life’s absurdities, quite a bit.

My old man didn’t suffer fools gladly; but he didn’t mind being foolish himself from time to time, if it served a greater comedic purpose. He was a wonderful storyteller and physical caricaturist. It was his Irish heritage, I guess. All I know is, my brothers and I would beg him to tell us his stories – about his youth, about amusing people he’d come across along the way, about family members and friends … from the time we were kids until we had grown up. We were always requesting new yarns, or asking for a replay of one of our favorites. If he was in the mood, he might launch into an intricate characterization, about one of his family friends … Perhaps our Uncle Don, who was a decent guy and had good qualities and all, but who could at times also be hopelessly pretentious. My dad would start telling us about the time Uncle Don, normally a chinos and t-shirt and Converse Chuck Taylors kind of guy, got involved in a small community theater in his town in the 1970s, and soon started going around everywhere in a black turtleneck sweater and horn-rimmed glasses, with a serious look on his face, and smoking a pipe.

You would had to have known Don, and have seen my dad’s characterization of him, puffing thoughtfully on his pipe and scratching his chin while struggling to elucidate his ideas on method acting, to really get it. All I can tell you is, it killed us. He would have my brothers and I literally on the floor, in helpless laughter. He really had a gift.

It was a shame that the darkness in him won out in the end. I don’t know everything about that, but I know that darkness must have been very powerful; to be able to overwhelm all the good and fun that was in him, also.

When I was younger, I think I was harder on him than I should have been, in my mind. I had the haughtiness of youth going for me, and I thought less of him for his failures, back then.

I don’t think less of him for it anymore. I am older now.  I know how fucking hard it is sometimes, just to stay in the light.

***************

When one is young, one simply doesn’t have a long enough experience of living to see the incremental good that accrues in one’s favor, just by getting up every day and not being a negative prick about everything. When we were young, it was so easy to fall into a facile, faux-existentialist stance – you know, the live fast-die young attitude. Cheap fatalism. Don’t worry about the future; you might not have one anyway. It felt so cool to be that way, just wake up every day and roll yourself out of the bed and pull on some clothes, and go out and face the world like Jean-Paul Sartre, Jr., or maybe a wet-behind-the-ears Albert Camus. I shudder when I think of that now; but it felt real enough then.

The sheer stupidity of youth – I don’t suppose very many of us were entirely immune to it. I certainly wasn’t.

And now … and now. I go to bed earlier, and soberer, for one thing. So I miss the strange hours, mostly, which is probably just as well. I get pretty bored pretty quickly with darkness and brooding and lightweight existentialism these days. I realize, too, that by this point, I have mostly surrounded myself with cheerful people, some of them relentlessly so. Good for them. I tell them stories, and make them laugh. They make me feel good, and lift me up with their energy. I am not a Pollyanna and never will be, but I have a longer view with which to operate from now. And I see the value in those who choose to live life in a good and cheerful way.

I remember at my father’s funeral several years ago, so many people came up to me afterward, just wanting to talk about him a bit. It was odd in a way, because he had left town some years before – his hometown, the scene of so many of his triumphs, and tragedies. And he had never once come back. Until that day, I mean.

But various old colleagues and friends, some of whom I knew, and many who I didn’t know at all … all these people came up, and introduced themselves, and then said a few things … how it sure was a shame about the old man, he was a brilliant guy, etc., etc. Too bad things ended up the way they did.

And then, to a person almost, I would see them begin to lighten up a bit. I could see some brightness come back into their features, maybe a small smile, and before long I would hear one or a couple of tales about my father either doing something hilarious or, in a few cases, quite good and altruistic; for all these people in his universe I never really had any idea of. It was a little overwhelming to me; but I stayed until the last person left. I listened to every anecdote, or recollection of an act of kindness, and I didn’t hurry anyone along. I had a sense it was good for these people who knew my father and in some cases loved him, to work back from their sorrow to a state of gentle happiness, thinking about how much fun the old man was; or just how good he was, when he wanted to be.

I think it was good for me to hear it, too. And it makes me smile, thinking of it now.

My father’s life, from the beginning of it to the end, was not all there was to his story. I can see that now. The fact that his son could not fully appreciate all the nuances of it, and all the good in it, within his actual life span was not his fault, and I don’t really think it was my fault, either. That is just the way it works, sometimes. Thankfully, the memory of him, and his spirit, outlived the flesh and blood. I have made my peace with all of it and then some, by now. That is just an extremely gratifying thing. I don’t think I am eloquent enough to express how it feels to finally get to a place like that.

And the funny thing is, I would guess it will be the same for my boys someday, after I am gone.  Whatever happens to me, after that morning that I don’t wake up, I am pretty sure they will hear things and have things related to them … they will hear stories about the old man doing crazy or hilarious or sometimes simply kind things … stories that will make them smile when they hear them, and when they think of me. The same way I do when I am reminded of my father, now.

Meanwhile, the strange hours come, and the strange hours go. I am usually snoozing through them nowadays, dreaming of everything from hitting the game-winning home run to diving deep down into the deep, blue sea. And on the odd night I am still awake when they come, I might muse about things a bit; how I have come through so little and so much, so much darkness and so little light, and vice-versa. Only to find, having made it to the middle of middle age, when men are supposed to be brooding on their lives and their mortality and things of that nature, particularly in the strange hours … only to find myself totally unable to brood very much on anything, even in the strangest hours. I have been startled awake … and have found myself, in the middle of middle age, to be mostly at peace, and content, and very happy. Somehow or another.

Somewhere out there, I hope the old man is smiling at this. Maybe smiling at me, too, as I am sitting there in the darkness, in my middle age, unburdened. Unburdened by dark thoughts, or regrets, or fears. Speaking – barely audibly – to no one, apparently. No one in particular. Saying, “I get you now, man. I hope you can get me now, too.”

And so it goes, as the world turns and keeps turning, spinning through the endless darkness. And yet somehow, the force field that is comprised of the endless darkness and the world spinning endlessly through it; and comprised of my father and his father, and of me and my sons, and of everything else we have ever thought of or ever could think of, and of all the people we have known and not known, all along the way, on our endless, spinning journey … somehow, just briefly, almost imperceptibly, the darkened void we are all spinning through is brightened just slightly, has just been made the tiniest bit brighter, by the memory of one man’s laugh, and another man’s smile, just at the thought of it.

As we hope it will always be brightened, by little things such as this.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn’t remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
its always ourselves we find in the sea

I grew up and have spent most of my life 30 miles from the ocean – well, the Gulf of Mexico, strictly speaking. And though in the interim I have traveled far and wide, and at times oriented myself  toward inland instead of offshore, the truth is the ocean has never been very far from my mind.

There is just something about it. I cannot really explain; though I have attempted to in writing, over and over, over the years. The feeling of the sun on my skin, the smell of coconut oil mixed with salt air, the partying, the camaraderie with other beach-goers. The relaxation. The inner peace.

I have tried earnestly, but I never have quite captured it. And I don’t suppose I ever will.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

SAY YOU WILL

As it happens, I found myself walking alone along Crystal Beach this past Tuesday night, around 10:30 or so.

The girlfriend and I and a few friends of both of ours had come down to the beach for a couple of days, to relax a little, and celebrate Independence Day.  The rest of the crew had settled into the cabin we’d rented, and had begun listening to music and drinking cocktails. I intended to do very much the same. But one thing I always do when I first arrive at the beach – as soon as I can – is reconnect with the beach itself … re-introduce myself to the wind and the sand, the waves and the ocean. I told the others to go ahead and start mixing drinks (which, actually, they had already started doing), and that I’d be with them shortly. I just needed some fresh air.

My girlfriend is still fairly new to me, but she is going to be a good one, I think. She pretty much likes to do what I like to do. And she knows there are times here and there when it is better to let me be alone for a little while.

So, soon enough, there I was … walking barefoot along the edge of the water, in a pair of canvas shorts and a Bob Marley Legend T-shirt, flip-flops in hand. I was walking alone, but the beach was by no means empty. A lot of people had showed up for the Fourth, and there were people drinking, listening to music, and shooting fireworks. There were even a few bonfires.

Most people are laid back and friendly at the beach, probably more than in their everyday lives.  Hell, I am pretty sure that is what draws many back down there, again and again.  Anyway, a reasonable looking guy walking down the beach alone has zero chance of getting very far before being invited by one stranger or group of strangers or another to have a cold one, to stop and listen to some music, even to sit by the bonfire a bit, and join in the fun. I had several invitations on my walk that night, and I accepted every one. My intention was to go with the flow. Very much like body surfing … I intended to let the wave catch me and pick me up, to let the unique energy of the Bolivar Peninsula guide me and carry me along that night on my walk. I am sure most beaches have their energy, but Bolivar is special … to me partly because I have spent a large chunk of my childhood and adult life there, sure.  But the place is special, anyway. It took a direct fucking hit from Hurricane Ike, and afterward the whole peninsula looked like a bombed out beach on some no-name WWII South Pacific atoll, left for deader than fucking dead. Lost forever. Gone.

And then, within two years, one would hardly have known there was any hurricane at all.  The houses and businesses came back, the people came back, and the unique energy of the place came back, too.  If you do not believe in miracles, neither did I. Until I witnessed this one, first hand.

Anyway, as I walked along, after having stopped to talk and drink with a couple of different groups partying down on the beach, it occurred to me I had been doing this very thing I was doing now – just drifting, waiting for the beach culture to pick me up and carry me along – for nearly 40 years. It is amazing. There have been so many good times, and an endless supply of stories and anecdotes and just slips of memories.

After an hour or so of doing my thing down on the beach, I headed back up to the cabin. By the time I arrived, it appeared several rounds of drinks had already been gone through. I poured myself some Early Times over ice, and dumped in a couple of ounces of water, just to smooth it out a little. Then I went and sat on a sofa next to my girlfriend, and began to ease my way into the ongoing revelry.

***************

I don’t want to feel this way another day, it’s killing me
I don’t want to be the one you try to mess around
I could never see the reason in the way you looked at me
Baby, you’re the one I want, so come on, ’cause I need you now

 
Say you will
Say you’ll stay with me tonight, girl
You won’t be sorry …

I was 22 or 23 years old, sitting out on the open part of the deck/veranda that wrapped around three sides of the beach cabin, with my girlfriend. We had been out there awhile. It was night time, maybe close to midnight, maybe after. Who knows? We’d been partying that day for hours and hours, since noon, at least. In fact, there was a party still going on at a beach house down the way – some friends of ours – and we had been there earlier. But an hour or so prior she and I had decided to come back to our cabin.

The deck on that cabin was excellent for stretching out on at night, and looking at the sky. We had dragged a couple of chaise-lounge lawn chairs out there, and had been lying back, watching intently for shooting stars. We’d only seen a couple. In late summer, August and September, one could see hundreds in just a couple of hours. But it was early July, and the action was slow.

I had turned on the stereo, and a song my girlfriend really liked came on (“Say You Will”, by Blanket of Secrecy). She reached over and put her arms around my neck. Just then, something really bright flashed by in the sky. We both turned in time to see something large and bright and moving at a very high rate of speed streak low across the shoreline and go several miles out over the ocean, before crashing into the water with a splash, leaving a brief afterglow.

“What was that?!” my girlfriend asked.

“I don’t know, Jesus! But hey, can you hand me another beer?”

So she reached over and unhesitatingly plunged her hand into the ice and melted ice water in the cooler on the other side of her chair, and pulled out a cold Miller Lite, and handed it across to me. I loved that girl passionately, for a lot of reasons. Just one of them was the way she handed me a cold beer.

Her song had ended, but then she pushed the volume even higher when the next song came on, some dweeb Englishman singing about being blinded by science. But it had a good beat, I guess. It got my girlfriend worked up, that’s for sure; which, in turn, began to get me worked up.

We quickly forgot about the celestial anomaly we’d just seen. A UFO crashing spectacularly into the Gulf of Mexico just off the coast of Galveston/Crystal Beach was one thing. My baby getting herself all worked up over some Thomas Dolby song was something else entirely. We quickly retired to the privacy of the beach cabin to enjoy each other in the way people have been enjoying each other since all the way back in the olden days, back to when Adam and Eve and Tarzan and Jane used to get it on, in that sub-Saharan savanna in Africa. Back where we all come from.

***************

My girlfriend looked at me and laughed. She has the most beautiful smile, and I spend a lot of my time trying, in various ways, to elicit it. It is usually not that hard for me to do – she thinks I’m funny, most of the time. This time, I reached out to the coffee table in front of us and picked up my drink, and took a sizable sip of sweet Kentucky bourbon mixed with a little Ozarka water, and some ice. It felt so good going down, it gave me a bit of a shiver. Just then my girl kissed me in the ear, and when I smiled, our friends laughed.

It was nothing, really. Just a random moment, in a random cabin, on a random road, on a random night. Down at Crystal Beach.

Crystal Beach – the magical place where both kids and grownups come to play, and laugh, and feel good, and just let the beach culture wash them over, and – at least for a little while – carry them away. One day, when I grow up, if I ever do … I want to move down there.

And then stay.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>

SHRIMP BOAT BLUES

My friend David and I were riding down the beach highway one spring evening, in his 1970-something Toyota Celica. We had the windows down and the stereo turned up, but we were pretty quiet, otherwise. Pensive. We were headed southwest down the Bolivar Peninsula from Crystal Beach proper, in the general direction of Port Bolivar and the ferry landing. But we were really only headed to a bar about halfway between the two beach towns; and as we rode along, taking in the atmosphere all around us, we felt happy and at peace. It was April or early May and it hadn’t got hot yet, so the night air was pleasant and breezy. We were headed to a beach dive where some other friends were already getting started on that night’s partying. And we were both 21 years old or so, and didn’t yet give much of a fuck about anything. Carefree.

Anyway, we were going along like that when we saw this guy walking down the side of the highway, headed in the same direction we were. He had his thumb out, and was trying – unsuccessfully – to get someone to stop and give him a ride.  For whatever reason, Dave pulled over to the side of the road and motioned to the guy, indicating he should hop in the car with us.

So I opened my door and the dude slid into the back seat, what there was of one in that Celica. He was a young guy, probably only a few years older than us, short and kind of stocky, but muscular. His name was Herve or Jorge or something like that. He said he was from Guatemala, I think, and he was working on a big shrimp boat/trawler that was docked in a small cove across from Bailey’s Fish Camp in Port Bolivar … and could we take him there?

Port Bolivar was beyond our intended destination, but it wasn’t that far out of our way; so we told him yes, we would take him to his boat. It was a ten minute drive, and along the way Dave and I peppered our passenger with questions about shrimping, what it was like to go out into the Gulf every day, and like that. Herve seemed pleased we were so interested in the fine details of his occupation, and the trip passed quickly, while he filled us in on what went on in a shrimper’s life.

When we got to Port Bolivar, our hitchhiker directed us down a shell road off of the highway, on the Galveston Bay side. The road wound around for a bit, between some decrepit-looking trailer homes, past a rusted out boat or two up on racks, with high sea grass and shell and sand all around. Finally, we emerged into a small cleared area paved with seashells, and before us was a small, man-made inlet off of the Intracoastal Canal, with a few docks lining it here and there. There was a shrimp boat at one of the docks, a big boat, and Herve told us that one was his.

I had been a habitué of that area for most of my life, and was familiar with most everything in the vicinity of Bailey’s, but I didn’t think I’d ever seen or been aware of that little inlet before. In the evening light it was rather beautiful. It was protected from the bay and there wasn’t much wind, so the water was as smooth as glass. There was high grass on the levee on the far side, and beyond that the Intracoastal, and beyond that Galveston Bay. One would occasionally hear a tugboat pushing barges going down the canal, and be able to just see the top of the boat’s stacks, over the grass on top of the levee. The evening light played off of the smooth surface of the water, and like everywhere else in Port Bolivar, one heard seagulls all around.

Herve walked us over to his boat. We could tell he was proud of it. The captain and the rest of the crew were staying somewhere on dry land while they were in port, but Herve lived right there in his workplace. He was insistent about showing us his quarters, too; so what could we do? We climbed aboard and then walked around the front of the wheelhouse on the main deck and came to a stairwell which went down into the darkness, into the hold of the ship. Herve told us his crib was down there somewhere, and Dave and I looked at each other and shrugged our shoulders.

Dave started down the stairwell with me right behind, and our new friend followed behind me. I had the briefest thought flash across my mind – that maybe we were too gullible, and maybe this guy Herve was really luring us into his killing chamber, where he had chainsaws and axes and shit, where he could do his grisly work in private, down in the hold of this boat. Later on, David told me he had almost exactly the same thought, that Herve might be hiding an axe behind his back as he headed down the stairs behind us, just waiting for the right moment. I asked why he didn’t mention it at the time, and Dave said, “Well, you were between him and me. I figured once he started chopping on you, I’d have time to run and try to find a way out of there.”

Turns out our concerns were baseless. Herve showed us his small berth below the wheelhouse, then he went into the captain’s cabin and came back out with a cold six-pack of Molson’s, in cans. We headed back up to the deck, and Dave and I sat down on a gunwale and started popping open the beer, while Herve ran up a small set of stairs into the wheelhouse. I don’t know if anything could have seemed more incongruous at the time, but the next thing I knew, we were hearing Transformer-era Lou Reed – in all his androgynous, junkie, glam rock glory – boom out across this peaceful cove, while meanwhile a flock of herons took off in the opposite direction from the levee on the other side of the inlet.

Herve came back down the stairs and grabbed a beer. He told us they had a kick-ass stereo system on the boat; which by then we could hear for ourselves.  I saw two huge weatherproof speakers mounted up on the sides of the wheelhouse, which I had missed before.

It was so weird and cool at the same time. Here we were, down at Bolivar, in some cove I’d never known about before, sitting on the deck of a shrimp boat, drinking Canadian beer with a Guatemalan fellow we’d just met about 30 minutes before. And all the while, Rock And Roll Animal was playing at top volume, rolling out across the natural landscape and displacing the placid quiet of the inlet with what I consider to be Lou Reed’s finest solo work.

I am tempted to say it was bizarre, but what it was, was fucking awesome.

I loved my life so much back then. And I loved the way I lived it … just drifting through it, really … going with the flow.  Because of that, things like the shrimp boat thing would happen from time to time, with no warning, just out of the blue.

That evening was just a minor, forgettable experience along the way, of no consequence whatsoever. But it made a lasting impression on me. As I sat there on that boat, cracking open my second Molson’s and just beginning to feel the faintest hint of the start of the beginning of a nice buzz, the song “Rock And Roll” was playing, and Steve Hunter’s (or was it Dick Wagner’s?) epic guitar solo in the middle of the song was reverberating off of the water and all around the darkening cove. Jesus, I thought. Does it get any better than this?

The answer is, no, it doesn’t. And, it’s funny. I was as happy there in that spot at that moment as I would have been doing anything else, anywhere else in the world.

Some men are born to greatness, to achieve great things, to garner great wealth, to ascend to great fame. These things are held out as ideals of accomplishment, and who am I to ever question it? But the thing is, I only know what I know.

Somewhere along the way my DNA got crossed up, and as I grew to manhood I realized I really wasn’t all that interested in achieving great things, or earning great wealth or fame. Some men are born to greatness; some are born to admire great men.

Me, I don’t care much about either. I‘m just out looking for great times. The rest of it, you can keep.

<><><><><><><><><><><><><><><>