Monday, July 29, 2013

No Monument To Justice

There’s this traffic light in town that I swear is against me, personally. I never, ever make this light. I live in kind of a crappy town that is comprised largely of bars, mills, and strip joints. In fact, at different points in the last fifteen years it’s held the dubious distinction of being the per-capita capital of strip clubs and methamphetamine in America and the world, respectively. I believe those titles are presently held by other fine towns, but we had our glory days. It’s the kind of blue collar burg that I can afford to own in, as opposed to renting in the nicer neighboring town. This has virtues of its own, of course, but the light at 28th and Main is not one of them.

Yeah, it’s the kind of burgh that has a Main Street. The junction of 28th and Main is kind of a linchpin in the town. It’s where the zip code changes, where the railroad spur connects the Union Pacific and Burlington Northern lines together, and the biggest Mill in town finds its home there. Between the railroad crossing, the logging trucks for the mill, the gas trucks for the Amerigas plant, and all the buses, the area gets choked out pretty quickly at certain times of day. Which are the only times of day that I ever pass that way, of course.

But I digress.

28th and Main, where I spend an inordinate amount of my adult life, has a trailer hitch shop, a battery shop and a really loathsome little cinderblock tavern on its various corners. The bar is called The OK Tavern, which is a generous assessment. I spent about ten minutes of a bad New Year’s Eve there once, where we actually got “bounced” by the Bouncer because my buddy Doug—who was already drunk when we picked him up at 9:30—chose that charming little bistro as the place to void the contents of his stomach. People like Doug and his vomitus are the reason bars have dim lighting. The night would have been a bust no matter where we spent it, because of the company, but I still hold it against The OK, and have never darkened the door of their establishment since. And it’s been eighteen years, so I guess I showed them. It could just as easily have happened at any of the other wretched hives of scum and villainy that pass as watering holes around here; The Pour House, The Alibi, The White Horse. But it happened at The OK, so fuck ‘em. I ain’t no monument to justice.

But I digress.

I have a love-hate relationship with traffic lights. And vehicles. And cell phones. And computers. And kitchen appliances. Pretty much all inanimate objects. By love-hate, I mean that I hate to love them, and they love to hate me. If there is a field of intelligence that surrounds us, and penetrates us and binds the galaxy together, it might just hate me. All inanimate objects are inherently possessed of a malevolence that is directed at me personally. I always pick the broken one off the shelf at the store, or the one without the price tag which also happens to be the last in the inventory. It requires a large portion of my emotional and intellectual resources to wage my daily war against malfunctions and sabotage, outwitting and outflanking these enemies who deceptively just sit there doing nothing, as though they were not little assassins plotting my demise.

The only inanimate object that is actually on my side is my iPod. My iPod loves me. It understands my moods, and tells little jokes by its song selections. You could argue that I’m crazy, and that none of these objects has any capacity for good or evil outside of our use of them, but you would be wrong about my iPod. It’s the only thing I’ve ever asked for as a present that has actually made my life better. Everything else is just stuff taking up space. It always plays the right song at the right time. Like when I’m sitting at the Nemesis Light at 28th and Main.

I’m most likely to get stuck here on my way home from work. As a carpenter specializing in insurance restoration, my days have a huge amount of variety in them. I go from one construction discipline to another from day to day, so it never gets boring. Framing to drywall to roofing to concrete to finish carpentry to paint. If I can indulge my ego for a moment, it’s like having a brown belt in ten martial arts, as opposed to a black belt in one specific form. If you went to work every day and were expected to be an accountant, a chiropractor, a mechanic and a photographer at any given time, then you would know exactly what my career is like. Keeps it interesting, but some days are brutally exhausting, others are messy, and some are truly disgusting. There are dead things under houses.

So the end of any given day can entail a nice sense of satisfaction at an honest job well done, or it can be a gauntlet that tests my will to live before I can get home, strip in the garage, and take a boiling hot Silkwood Shower while my clothes burn in a pyre out on the lawn. On those days, when I’m covered in paint, caulking, drywall dust, or fiberglass insulation, sitting at the Nemesis Light waiting to get clean is particularly galling. It is then that my iPod is a balm that soothes the savage beast.

Most of insurance restoration work is trying to prevent or eliminate mold. Whether from fire suppression, holes in the roof, or burst pipes, mold is the new asbestos. It has the power to induce spontaneous decapitation, and is believed to be the leading cause of dog hickeys and uncle abuse. Or so the lawyers would have us believe. The point being, mold scares the shit out of everybody in a superstitious way that you used to need a witch-doctor to induce. You’d swear it was plutonium, just radiating cancer everywhere. Over the years we’ve learned a lot about how to prevent mold. It amounts to “Keep Things Dry.”

There are specific protocols involved in preventing mold, and even more involved in eliminating it once you’ve got it. Insurance companies send us across the country to attend Mold School. We take continuing education classes every year. The thing you find out at Mold School is that there is no such thing as killing mold. No. Such. Thing. Mold can survive in the vacuum of space at nearly Absolute Zero. Their spores are almost everywhere, indoors and out, and only the environmental conditions prevent it from growing all over. It needs moisture, food, darkness and relatively still airflow to thrive. Failing these conditions, it remains in a dormant state. 

In that state, spores are effectively immortal. Radiation, heat, cold, caustic chemicals? No effect. That bleach water you’ve been using just puts it to sleep. That’s all. Then it naps until favorable conditions exist again, and it’s back to business as usual. And while fire can technically kill a mold colony, it instantly begins to eject its seed in a panicked plume of spores that almost always find a way out of the given environment. So even if we burned the world down, mold would almost certainly outlive us. The best we can hope for is containment. Really, that’s it. I had to go all the way to Vancouver, WA to learn that you need to keep stuff dry, or else bleach and paint it. Seems like they could have put that in an email.

But I digress.


So some days when I’m sitting at the Nemesis Light, bottlenecked because of a little yellow schoolbus and a choo-choo train, my iPod will throw on a song that just makes everything alright. It has a library of choices that’s about ninety-five hundred songs, organized into eighty-one playlists; one for every possible mood or occasion. It never fails to amaze me how much better music makes everything. Doing the dishes, mowing the lawn, or crawling through the boneyard under somebody’s house looking for dry rot, doesn’t matter. The right song can make it ok. Music is a panacea for what ails us, and a perfect reliquary for memories. Most days, that's a great thing. But sometimes the things it brings up out of that repository of memory can hit you like a ton of bricks. The other day when I was sitting there at the Nemesis Light—righteously ignoring The OK—one of those songs came on. And even though I’ve heard it a thousand times, it still blindsided me in that moment. The song is “Yellow” by Coldplay. It’s arguably the best song in the canon of a great band, the music and the lyrics matching each other in simple beauty and depth. I have live versions, acoustic versions, live acoustic versions and even a cover or two; it’s just exquisite.

I was pretty surprised to discover that it’s my niece Kailee’s favorite song. It’s fairly mature for a five, almost six, year old. To be accurate, Kailee is actually my cousin, once removed. Her Mom is my first cousin, the daughter of my Dad’s sister. Most people call my relationship to Kailee second cousin, but a genealogist would tell you we are first cousins, once removed. I let all my cousins’ kids call me uncle, or cousin, or just Lawrence. I’m not much for standing on ceremony. Neither are kids her age, which is something else we have in common. I didn’t find out “Yellow” was Kailee’s favorite song until we were planning her memorial service. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always wished I knew that sooner.

Kailee was killed by a drunk driver the evening of June 17, 2009. She and her parents were headed home from Church one Wednesday night, southbound on I-5, and a forty-one year old man named Stephen Whitaker was headed north on I-5, in his 1972 Winnebago. He had a blood alcohol content of .24, three times the legal limit. There was a lot of speculation about a fire that may have occurred in his RV. Whatever the reason, he lost control and crossed a sizeable median doing in excess of seventy MPH and, entering oncoming traffic, intersected with my cousin’s Oldsmobile Alero. He took the lives of Kailee, my cousin once removed, and the other passenger in his RV, a homeless friend named John Ratcliff. 

Stephen had three previous DUI’s, and was driving on a suspended license. He spent four days in the hospital and emerged with a broken leg, only to be taken into custody and held for manslaughter against $890,000 bail. I think $890 would have sufficed to preclude his release, given his homeless stature, but it was time for Statements to be made about how Seriously the System was taking this. You’d think that Statement might have been made between DUI’s two and three, but you’d be wrong about that.

The following morning, June 18, 2009 at 6:22 AM I was up for work, engaging in the ritual of making coffee and stretching out for the day of mold containment ahead of me. The rolling narrative of the previous day’s disasters was being recited by the talking heads on the morning news show. The background noise of life, all the things that were happening to Other People while I was busy making my plans. I had no sense of premonition that while Kelli Warner was talking about a little girl, name withheld, being killed by a drunk driver—to me, just another addition to the endless litany of tragedies that had happened to Someone Else—that this tragedy wasn’t passing me by. This one was for me.

The words were no sooner out of her mouth when the phone rang. I was at first surprised and then annoyed to hear it going off so early. My boss usually had the good sense to wait until the 7:00 hour to start regulating on me. It’s funny how a call from someone you love and ordinarily look forward to hearing from, can suddenly turn into a foreboding toll of the bell if it comes outside the windows of normal, civilized communication. When I saw my Aunt Kathy’s name show up on the caller ID at 6:22 AM, I knew something was terribly wrong. Without preamble, she told me that Kailee had been killed, and that Brian and Cathleen were in the hospital for minor injuries. As I tend to do in times of shock, I made some irrational objection to the idea. This time I based my rebuttal on the non sequitur that I’d just heard about an accident matching those details on the news, and the news is what happens to Other People. So clearly, what she was saying was patently ridiculous.

There is no way Kelli Warner knew that my first cousin, once removed, was gone before I knew, and was presently telling fifty thousand other people about it, name withheld. That Kailee had been absent from the world for almost nine hours of my life, unbeknownst to me. But of course Kelli knew. And so did her co-anchor, Mark. And the producer, and the camera man, and the sound guy. And for all I know, the intern that brings them coffee, too. To them, it was another in a series of ongoing tragedies that they report on each day before they get to the puff piece at the end about the Panda born at the zoo. Which seems unforgiveable, until I consider that it otherwise would have been another in the series of Other People’s tragedies that wash right over me until they get to the puff piece about the Panda, at which point I know it’s time to put the coffee on.

Without exploiting the grief of those that I love and who shared in the surreal apocalypse of this staggering loss, I can say that the ever-expanding shockwave of bereavement is somehow compounded and magnified by the logistics of death. Caskets and plots of ground to be chosen, flowers to be arranged, stationary to be selected for the order of service, pictures to be sifted through. To say nothing of Police Reports and sworn affidavits, all the professional concern of the DA and reporters. While we were circling the wagons and looking for the ripcord on the parachute to save us from this freefall of unimaginable shock, anger, and loss, Stephen Whitaker was denying and obfuscating for his life. Pleading with his doctors and priest to advocate for his innocence. It wasn’t alcohol, it was a seizure. There was a fire in the RV. The Devil made me do it. Whatever. 

It was during this process of selecting which wavelength of grief we were going to tune in to that I found out something about Kailee that I hadn’t known. I was in the back bedroom, combing through grandma’s photo albums for pictures of Kailee to scan into digital images for the memorial service. The rotating staff of the Picture Selection Committee was hard at work printing off pictures and mounting them to posterboard, or scanning images to create the computer slide show for the projector at the Church. No one could take the duty for too long without meltdown, so we rotated fresh souls into those trenches hourly. As hard it was to go through the mountain of pictures of Kailee as a baby, a toddler, learning to swim, riding their dog—a Chocolate Lab named Knuckle—we all knew that eventually we’d come to the end of them. And when we did, we’d permanently run out of pictures of Kailee, and never be able to add another. The silence beyond that was like a tsunami that could not be denied or kept at bay.  

Apple makes it super easy to come up with a photo montage set to music, and the Selection Committee was running through the demo version for the service when the unmistakable opening chords of Coldplay’s “Yellow” came on. My Aunt’s house is the last place in the world I’d expect to hear any music composed after 1965, so my curiosity was piqued immediately. I came out to the living room, to see the slideshow in progress with its musical montage. It was at one of those strange moments of grace and peace that arrive as unexpected interludes during the grieving process. A lull between tears when fond recollections and stories bring laughter and sighs of contentment, before you return to the reality where the stories are all that remain, and the wailing on the inside of you resumes.

I was sorting through these emotions and realizing that Brian and Cathleen wanted you to talk about Kailee; not avoid the mention of her name, not talk about her in hushed tones, or in the past tense. So when I came out and said how much I loved the music they were playing, they told me it was Kailee’s favorite song, which came as a delightful surprise to me. Coldplay is an acquired taste that doesn’t really fit in with the Top 40 sensibilities of most people, let alone the Church crowd. How fascinating that this little soul had resonated with something so mature and sublime in its beauty. I felt like I understood her just a little better. Like another piece in the beautiful mosaic of her had dropped into place for me, even as Yellow played over pictures of her life floating by on a computer screen, only to fade and dissolve into the next in an endless loop that could have no more added to it.

Over the coming days and weeks I was granted an opportunity to speak about Kailee at various venues. At her memorial I remarked how her eyes had the kind of shape that always looked like she was laughing. Like she already knew the punchline to the great cosmic joke God was telling. She was in on it. I told one of my favorite stories about her. How once, when she was four, she had gotten into an argument with her Mom, Cathleen, and as Mom’s sometimes do, Cathleen ended it with “Because I said so.” To which Kailee responded, “Mommy, sometimes I want to make the rules.” That was the kind of mind that she had. Even at four years old, she understood the logical structures at work in the world, the idea of Authority and where it flows from. She could game the system with the best of us; a force to be reckoned with. All of these stories I told about her, whenever I could. But never about “Yellow.” That one I’ve kept to myself until now.

During this swirl of days and months, Whitaker found it in himself to come to terms with the truth and plead guilty to the charges leveled against him. We were spared the agony of a trial, and were able to move directly to the Penalty Phase of the court proceedings. It was a small mercy that I’ve always been grateful for. The Sentencing Hearing was brutal enough; I can’t imagine having to go through the gauntlet of a whole trial to get there. At that hearing, the Prosecutor read letters from our extended family across the country who could not be there. Via his attorney, Clara Rigmaiden, Stephen Whitaker had a letter read aloud by way of apology. He said in part that he was "sorry to have been the instrument of such sorrow and tragedy," and that he would "gladly trade his life for Kailee's." The DA and the Defense made statements to the Judge. As a family, we were allowed to address the Court as to sentencing recommendations, and even speak to Whitaker directly. He never once picked his head up off the defense table, as though laying prostrate before the court and Kailee’s family.

It was a remarkable testament to us as a family that every single word that came out of our mouths was in absolution and forgiveness toward the man who had taken everything from us. Not one harsh word or epithet was hurled at him, not one voice was ever raised, only pity for his lost state as a human being. When I got up to speak I had all kinds of thoughts in my head. I’m an articulate guy; I’ve spoken to hundreds of people, even in paying gigs, and never felt a moment of stage fright. With three whiskeys in me, I ad-libbed my Best Man’s toast at my best friend’s wedding to hundreds of people and brought down the house with laughter and tears. That said, you’d have thought I’d suffered a stroke by the way I yammered when I got up to that lectern to address the Court.

I went on and on about the bizarre confluence of events that had to mesh together with clockwork precision for this man to have ended the life of my flesh and blood, instead of Somebody Else’s. Because it’s always supposed to be Somebody Else’s! I talked about how nothing could be done to reverse this and how only preventing Whitaker from doing this again could be accomplished at this late date. I was like some drunk that wants to get all deep and talk about God. May He forgive me for all the “For Whom the Bell Tolls” horseshit I blathered on about. I went on and on until I was embarrassed with myself and hated the sound of my stupid voice; until the gracious words of my family highlighted to me how much better they all are than me. Until I realized that when someone steals a car or a TV set, they can give one of those back or exchange it for equal cash value. But when something like this happens… There literally is no such thing as Justice.

The scales cannot be balanced, no matter what we do to men like Whitaker. So we build statues and monuments to Justice, and rightly name the Justice System as what it is. A System. It stands in for Justice, in the same representative way that the monument of the blind woman with the scales stands in. As my stupid voice echoed plaintive in my ears, I saw that it’s not Justice that is blind, but us. Lest we look on the world, and ourselves, and understand that Justice cannot exist in our midst. Merely representations of it. In that moment, I just trailed off. It was then that Stephen Whitaker became an object to me, and I went and sat down.

If a tree had fallen and ended Kailee's life instead, I would feel the same animus toward it that I do toward Whitaker. None at all. I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup today, any more than I would be able to pick out the particular branch of a tree if that had been her fate instead. I have no memory of him at all. I wouldn’t be more satisfied if they’d elected to feed him feet first into a wood-chipper like a tree limb, instead of giving him sixteen years in prison like they did. Stephen Whitaker’s punishment, even unto death, means nothing to me. The absence of his punishment would indeed be an injustice, one I could not tolerate. But the presence of his punishment is not Justice; it’s no balancing of the scales. His punishment, no matter the severity, restores nothing; therefore he is irrelevant to me. With men like Whitaker, the best we can hope for is containment.

Only the absence of Kailee, and the presence of memory remains for me now.

There’s this constellation of awful impressions and memories that orbit around me now, even a dozen years later. Ones no one should ever have to experience. The words of Whitaker’s attorney as she argued that he should receive a lighter sentence for the death of his passenger, John Ratcliff, because Ratcliff was also a drunken, homeless drug addict who’d knowingly elected to get in the RV with Whitaker. She said, "I don't want to sound calloused, but he was there by his own choice, drinking with Mr. Whitaker and getting into the car with him that day. He had some culpability in that situation." I guess that's lawyer-speak for "He kind of got what he deserved." It worked, too. Whitaker got four fewer years in prison for that. He’ll be out in 2025 instead of 2029 because Ms. Rigmaiden convinced the judge that Ratcliff mattered less than Kailee. I don’t envy her for having to have those words come out of her mouth in defense of her client. At first I was disgusted, but eventually I came to see that she was just doing her job, and then I pitied her. Because unlike my days down in the boneyard, there’s no Silkwood Shower that’ll ever wash that off of her.

But by far the worst of it all is the memory of the graveside canopy that we all stood under, the mass of us huddled in its shade on that blazing hot day. When the pallbearers came into view from around the bend in the path through the copse of trees, they were carrying the smallest casket you can imagine toward us. When we laid eyes on it, together and at once, the collection of mourners began to sob with a fervency beyond language. It began with a single, otherworldly cry from her mother as she collapsed into our arms, and then it was as if a match had been lit in a gas-filled room. Our collective wail went up to the Heavens, raw and inchoate, with a grief and anger deeper than any language or tongue. The casket was just so fucking small. No one should even know those exist, let alone ever see one. Because you can never unsee that. It's just a part of you for the rest of your days.

Most days when “Yellow” comes on, which is pretty often on my iPod, I simply enjoy the beauty of it and how wonderful life can be. Given its fragile, clockwork delicacy, and all the things that can go wrong, life is actually pretty great most of the time. Sometimes when “Yellow” comes on I really remember that moment of revelatory connection with Kailee, that affinity of our souls, and I smile and just soar on the memory of her. I sing at the top of my stupid voice, “Look at the stars, see how they shine for you. And all the things you do. Yeah, they were all Yellow.” And it’ll be the best thing that happens all day. Because around here, we don’t talk about Kailee in hushed tones or the past tense.

But sometimes I’ll be sitting at the light at 28th and Main, and “Yellow” will come on and it lights a match in a gas-filled room and I dissolve into uncontrollable sobs, even all these years later. I guess that’s the thing about loss and grief, there’s no such thing as killing it. No such thing as getting over it. It lies dormant and awaits the proper conditions, and then it’s alive and well, as fresh today as it was at that June morning at 6:22 AM. On days like that I repeat to the Almighty what I said to Him from the dais at Kailee’s Memorial: “Lord, if you’ll forgive me a moment of impertinence, I’d like to say...Sometimes I want to make the rules.”

But I don’t get to. The best I can hope for is containment.


“Your skin, yeah, your skin and bones

Turn into something beautiful

Do you know? You know I love you so

You know I love you so”

Friday, July 19, 2013

And Grace Will Lead Me Home



It was a surprisingly temperate Saturday evening for a February, and I was sitting out on my front porch at 2276 N. 8th St, having just finished the tail end of my stash. I was enjoying the last of the daylight on a bench that my roommate Michael had built so I could smoke my cigars outside, as opposed to in my room where he and his girl Monica would have to smell them all the time. It wasn’t unusual for me to smoke a joint right out on the front porch as well, in the shade and cover of the Japanese Maple. Of course, it wasn’t unusual for me to smoke a joint almost anywhere. Seriously, I once got high in the parking lot of a clinic on the way in to take a drug test. I failed that one, although I had successfully passed three others while I was high as a kite, so I felt I had reason to be confident. That’s how a lot of mishaps and calamities in my life begin, with a feeling of perfect confidence. That time it cost me a temp job as a forklift driver. Oh, the humanity.


That February 7th evening, 1998, I was suffering a kind of travel hangover from having just completed a nonstop sixteen hour drive from Los Angeles by myself. The 90’s included a lot of epic trips to and from LA for me. Sometimes on planes, most often in cars, but and few times on the train, and once on a Greyhound bus. On the whole, I prefer the train. The company is better and, for all its failings, Amtrak has sublime coffee service. I do believe I’d prefer to drop a bowling ball on my tongue than to spend another minute on a southbound Greyhound. The Sacramento Greyhound station is a wretched hive of scum and villainy, and they are exporting felons and drug dealers just as fast as the correctional system can spit them out. I guess I should have felt right at home. I didn’t, though.

Most recently, I'd driven, spending a week visiting my two best friends from High School. While I was there I saw “Scream 2,” “Titanic,” and “Fallen.” I rode my bike along the shore. I smoked a ton of pot. My buddies and I tripped our faces off on some magic mushrooms for a whole day down in Trabuco Canyon, just outside of San Juan Capistrano. But the thing that really sticks out about that trip was that all of my friends expressed concern about the epic quantities pot I smoked. One of them was a drug dealer. How bad do you have to be to be singled out of a group of musicians and dealers as the guy with the drug problem? I assured them it was just because I was on vacation, kickin’ up my heels. It wasn’t, though.

I smoked my first joint on October 31, 1991. 

Messenger House Care Center, Bainbridge Island, WA
My friend Wanda Rose Tingelstad had died in a car accident on her way to Moses Lake, Washington, where she had enrolled at Big Bend Community College in their pre-med program. Wanda Rose, as we called her, was just beginning as a Freshman there, and had been my very first friend, of the two that I had, in Washington. She and I met in September at Messenger House, a care center for those with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. I’d moved to Washington that July, on the day of my twentieth birthday, and had to beg, borrow, steal, and kill to get a job mopping up urine in the locked dementia wards, thanks to my credentials as a Certified Californian looking for work at the height of anti-California hysteria.

Downtown Long Beach, CA

I’d previously held down a nice office job as Division Secretary for the Southern California Rent-A-Center franchise chain. Not a milestone career, but pretty nice gig for a guy in Community College, and a damn sight better than dealing in adult incontinence for a living. But there I was, having spent three months of impenetrable solitude looking for a job in a town that literally had fewer people in it than my graduating class at Long Beach Polytechnic High School. Not just fewer than the High School itself, mind you. Fewer than the group of seniors I matriculated with. I’d been job hunting four hours a day, five days a week for three solid months before I got that shit detail, and had not made even one single friend while stranded in the lush no-man’s land of Kingston, Washington. Not until Wanda Rose.

Downtown Kingston, WA. Jewell of the Middle of Nowhere.

If you think Alzheimer’s is bad from the outside, you should try watching the gears turn on the inside of the locked wards. Tragedies churned out daily. It’s demoralizing even at the best of times, but somehow Wanda Rose took it all in stride. She had her plans, her exit strategy. She was the first person that didn’t look down and spit on the ground every time my name got mentioned, and the only friend I had for a thousand miles in any direction. Day one, she'd been assigned to train me on how to properly mop up lakes of diarrhea. Turns out it’s all in the wrist.

Wanda Rose
Wanda Rose and I didn’t hang out much, outside of work. The odd cup of coffee here and there, the occasional smoke out on the jetty. She took me to the DMV once, after I got a ticket for expired out of state plates. Mostly it was just shift work and an hour a day between breaks and lunches. But after the months of seclusion, even that was like an oasis in the desert; a balm for loneliness, if ever there was one. Though Wanda was a bit of a wallflower, kind of mousy and unassuming, she had a sweet, easy laugh, and an uncommon grace about her. She welcomed me when literally no one else would, and she was just a good egg, through and through. The kind we really could’ve used more of in this world. 

She introduced me to her crazy boyfriend, Chalon, who came to work at Messenger House several weeks later. He was an affable hippie type; a bit of a douche, but harmless enough and generally well-intentioned. After Wanda headed to Moses Lake to secure a job and an apartment in advance of school starting, Chalon and I kind of fell in together, both just waiting for her return. I never had a lot in common with him, but three months of solitude in the wilds of rural Washington make for strange bedfellows, believe me. I was into the Smiths, the Cure, and Depeche Mode. He liked Steve Miller Band and the Doors. He had brown hair almost to his shoulders and seemed like the living embodiment of Shaggy from Scooby Doo. One citified kid, a stranger in a strange land, thrown in with a hippie stoner behind the locked doors of a tragedy factory. What could possibly go wrong?

Chalon got the news of Wanda’s death at work. It’s funny how seeing someone you love somewhere they don’t belong can immediately fill you with dread. His mom showed up while we were sitting at the ersatz break table on the loading dock. It was really just a discarded wooden spool from a high-voltage line roll, but with a couple of crates to sit on, it made for an OK place to catch a smoke out of the view of the powers that be. Plus we could keep an eye on all the cute CNA’s that came by. I happened to be looking at Chalon as he caught sight of his mom approaching from the parking lot, and saw the change that came over him. He knew something was wrong before she even spoke. When she said, “It’s Wanda,” he disintegrated instantly, his whole world over. I’d known him for four days.

Circumstances kind of dictated the strange sequence of events that put me in Chalon’s house listening to “Riders on the Storm” in the gloaming of October 31, 1991. There’s a set protocol of events that kicks into gear when someone dies in a single car accident. Questions to be asked and answered, tests to be run. It’s not like a heart attack or falling off the roof. It might be drunk driving, it might be suicide, who knows? And you can’t bury the body until there are some reasonable answers. Turns out her friend, the driver, had simply fallen asleep and driven them into a tree. Which constitutes a reasonable answer, I guess, and so it came to be that by the conclusion of these inquiries Wanda Rose was buried on Halloween Day. There are no good days to bury your child, your sweetheart, or your only friend. But there are worse days. 

Halloween has got to take the cake. Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. All of his friends and hers came to the funeral, and then every single one of them had somewhere else to be. Life goes on. After all, it wasn’t just any Thursday. It's Dia de los Muertos, man. Got my best suit and my tie, a shiny silver dollar on either eye. So off they went, and there I stayed, having inherited Chalon and his grief, bequeathed to me by Wanda Rose as the vig on the loan of her friendship for the six weeks I’d been sustained by it. I try to be a stand-up guy, but even when I’m not, I never forget the debts I owe. So I drove Chalon home to his parent’s house on the edge of the Suquamish Reservation.


It overlooked Puget Sound and took advantage of the view with floor-to-ceiling windows on one full wall of the house. I remember thinking that the water was the exact same gray as the clouds that day, and then grasping for the first time that the color of the sea is a reflection of the sky. It had never occurred to me until the moment I saw them meet at the iron gray horizon-line out those windows. So I sat there as an ambassador from the faraway Land of Decency where one's friends—not virtual strangersbore burdens like this, prepared to console a dude I'd known for forty cumulative working hours, total. How, I knew not. Chalon cued up a CD from the stack Wanda Rose had left behind.
Puget Sound, as seen from the Suquamish Reservation

“Into this house we're born
Into this world we're thrown
Like a dog without a bone
An actor out on loan
Riders on the storm”

Then Chalon offered me a hit off his joint.

I’d seen him roll a joint before, but never smoke one. I’d grown up in LA and been offered it tons of times, but had never touched the stuff. I politely demurred, assuring him that I understood and didn’t care if he smoked. Who could blame the poor bastard? But he was plaintive in his desire to not be alone. Not in anything. So I did it. Out of pity, or empathy, or some shit like that. Hell, maybe it was just curiosity. Either way, who could blame me? Having come unmoored from every touchstone of my life, I was through the looking-glass and adrift in a world I hadn’t dreamed existed. One where I was a hated minority, a pariah mopping up sewage in a filing cabinet where people stored their loved ones while they waited for them to die in slow motion. So hell yeah, I hit that thing.

Nothing happened. 

We toked it all the way down together. It was small and twisted up pretty tight. I had no idea at the time, but it was a pretty pathetic joint. Tiny, desiccated, and full of seeds. It tasted like a mixture of coffee grounds, skunky German beer, and ashes. My throat felt like I’d gargled with a mouthful of burning gravel. I wouldn’t have thought my lungs could tell the difference between pot smoke and LA smog. They could, though. I knew I’d stepped off the straight and narrow, and had the vague sense that I should feel bad about it. I didn’t, though. I wasn’t really sure what to feel, but I definitely did not feel high. If I’d stopped there, I might be a psychologist today. I’m not, though. Because it worked the next time I tried it, which was fifty-seven days later when I had exactly one more friend.



2,171 days after that, I was sitting on a bench in a marginal part of a crappy town, contemplating what it meant that a drug dealer thought I had a substance-abuse problem. Could it be that no one thinks it’s normal to be high literally twenty-four hours a day for years on end? Maybe not everyone who smokes pot has a bong hit before their feet hit the floor in the morning? Or for that matter, when they wake up to take a piss in the middle of the night, lest they be conscious for even one second of the day in an accidentally sober state. 

Looking back over the previous seven years, there was virtually no sobriety in there. I mean sure, sometimes I ran out. Once or twice I went for a week, just to prove I could. Though it’s way easier to do that when you’ve got a finish line in sight; I always went right up to the minute I had set for myself, and not a second longer. Not. One. Second. I would smoke out at 12:01 AM, having fulfilled my contract to the letter. By and large it was pretty much one long, uninterrupted bender. One that had begun when I was twenty and was still in wall-to-wall effect at twenty-seven.


Assuming you’ve passed that window of years, think of the changes that occurred in that time. Finished school, got your first serious job? Got engaged, got married? Maybe you even had kids. Now imagine it passing as a slow-motion hallucination where none of those things happened. They say pot is a gateway drug, and sometimes it is. I think it most often leads to a life of sweatpants, Cheeto-dust on everything you own, and a perennially lost TV remote. But for me, it lead to Mushrooms, Acid, Benzos and other miscellaneous pharmacological cocktails of opportunity, Coke, and Crank. Not that much of the last two, as I’m not fond of post nasal drip, but plenty of the rest.

There was a lot of water under the bridge in that seven years. And by “water under the bridge," I mean felonies. It’s probably foolish to enumerate them here, especially since I don’t want to burden my attorney and law enforcement friends with some kind of responsibility to drop dime on me. I’m pretty sure the statute of limitations has passed on most of them, but who knows? Suffice it to say, I’ve spent at least ten fewer years under correctional supervision than I deserve, and probably more. A couple of times owing to a police officer with a sinus infection, or one that didn’t crane his neck three degrees further to his right, and so missed the incriminating evidence by inches.

It’s preposterous how many raindrops I tiptoed between without getting wet. I’d lied, stolen, cheated and engaged in questionable accounting practices. And I wasn’t even running for office. Eventually I even found myself on the business end of some nut-job's shotgun. And while that did prompt some serious thought as to my career choices, it never even touched my habit.

A college education up in flames. Literally.
Some people wake up in a gutter, a jail cell, or a hospital and have their moment. Some people come home to a semicircle of their friends, family, and coworkers and find themselves ambushed by love. My moment came on a home-made bench at 2276 N. 8th St, in Springfield, Oregon. Minding my own business, watching the sunset on a surprisingly temperate evening on Saturday, February 7, 1998, at 5:22 PM. Feeling a nice lassitude brought on by the end of a long trip, and thinking to myself that I should arrange for the procurement of my next ounce. Not thinking at all about the reality of chucking another $100 onto the pyre of $38,400 that I’d already burned through in the previous seven years. The facts never even entered into my thought process. But as I was considering whom I would call and when, I had a moment of interior voice-over like the kind Morgan Freeman would read in the movies. 

It simply said, “No. You’re done.” 

In response, I said aloud, “You know? I think I am.”

That was fifteen twenty-two years ago today. The end of a long trip, indeed.

Two months later I was living on my own, clean and sober. I didn’t make a deal out of it. Most of my friends were recreational users, and I only mentioned the change if they asked about it, which wasn’t until they noticed, weeks later. We still hung out; I still passed the bong to next guy when it came my way. This isn’t a sermon; I’m not even morally qualified to deliver one. It’s just my story. To this day, I’d estimate that half of my friends use recreationally, including the two guys who got me to consider that I might have a problem. I did, but they don’t. I can tell the difference between an actual problem and something that is simply a problem for me. 

I’ve thought many times over the last fifteen years about why I reached out and took the hand that Grace offered me. I think in the end, I decided that I wasn’t lazy enough to continue on like I was going. Because the reason I gravitated toward the kind of drugs that I did—the ones that impose meaning and create connections between all things, whether real or imagined—is that I’ve always wanted the world to feel a certain way. For there to be a thread of logic, order, and maybe even redemption running through the sea of chaos we’re adrift in. Not to make sense of it all, per se. Simplistic dogma and bumper sticker philosophies are of no use to me. I just wanted to believe that the vast machine that turns the quantum clockworks, whose intricacies and mechanisms I could never hope to grasp, might occasionally tell me the time of day. Pot especially made me feel that it would, and that it did. But there on Michael’s bench, I started to think that it might actually be that way already, all on its own, and I didn’t need to help it out anymore. Maybe I could look at the world and find my way without the assistance of those kinds of shortcuts. So I decided to try. More to the point, I took up the dare that was put in front of me. 

In that fifteen years, there have been three occasions when opportunity, conditions, and temptation all came a callin’ together; when there would be no one to see or care, and no consequences. And for several very long moments I actually forgot what it took to get me here. The last one was in August of 2009, when I’d already been sober for more than eleven years. Like Carlin said, “Just ‘cause the monkey’s off your back, don’t mean the circus has left town.” 

That’s the thing. The Circus never leaves town. 

I didn’t twelve-step it, though I have a lot of empathy and respect for those that work the program. As with so many cycles of the blunder-to-consequence-to-rescue scenario that have run through my life, I took the hand that was held out to me and was pulled through by something that has treated me with ridiculous care and protection all of my days. From car accidents, to drunken walks through Crip territory in LA, to riding 2nd story ladders all the way to the ground, all with nary a scratch. I’m embarrassed sometimes when I consider how many people have not been so fortunate. Better people than me. They do get arrested, or disabled, or shot. They struggle every day of their lives to stay sober. 

I have no lamentations of which to speak. I may not be a psychologist like Mom wanted, and I’m nowhere near as good at math as I used to be. Brain cells do not breed in captivity. When they’re gone, they’re gone. But I’ve been happily married nineteen years to the best person I’ve ever known, and I love my life. All because I followed the voice that said, “Come with me if you want to live.” Gratitude is all I have to offer.

“Grace has brought me safe thus far, and Grace will lead me home.”