Big Wheel Keep On Turnin'

It is my considered opinion that it’s good to be the King. Much better than not being the King. I spent the first five years of my life not being the King, and it sucked. Then I became the King, and all was well. King of what, you may ask? All. Of. It.

Although you wouldn’t know it to look at me now, parts of my life were spent not being totally awesome at all times. In fact, I grew up wearing Toughskins jeans, Pro-Wings tennis shoes, and various other house-brand garments from Zodys, K-Mart, and Monkey-Wards. My parents probably thought I didn’t know the difference between Izod Lacoste and Sears' Braggin’ Dragon, but I did. Oh, yes I did.

Of course, I wasn’t born knowing the difference, I had to be taught. And who better to teach you to that there’s something wrong with you than all the other kids? There you are,  just walking down the street secure in the knowledge that Mom and Dad are doing right by you, only to discover that they let you out the door thinkin' you ballin’, when in fact your Garanimal-clad ass is subject to ridicule in those streets because of their dereliction. It’s child-abuse, really.

Apparently, real Vans have a distinctive waffle tread on the bottom that the Payless version don’t have. Apparently, real Lego are not interchangeable with Duplo blocks, Lincoln Logs do not play well with Frontier Logs, and real Big-Wheels are not made of metal. All of which I discovered the hard way. Walk outside all atwitter with the excitement of new stuff, only to be met with derision in the street over something so nebulous as a stamp, a brand, or a label on your stuff. How the hell anyone knew which one was the ‘right’ one was beyond me. But it was real easy to tell which was the wrong one, because it was always whatever I had. What are the odds?

Of all the egregious counterfeits I ever tried to pass off as ready for prime-time, nothing compared to my metal big-wheel. The popular (read: name-brand) Big-Wheel was a plastic dragster-style tricycle, with recumbent seating and flashy coloring. Mine was brown metal but had chopper-style handlebars on it, which I thought kicked-ass. It turned out that I was wrong about that. Additionally, being much heavier it didn’t have great off-the-line speed, since the inertia was tough for five-year-old legs to overcome. Meaning that not only was it drab, it was slow. So the length of time it took for me to go from excitement about my uniqueness to humiliation for the exact same reason was quicker than popping a Pop-Tart. 

Once other children have deemed something worthy of mockery, your otherwise beatified parents can offer no redemption. So their explanation of the virtues of an indestructible big-wheel meant nothing to me, because durability implies longevity and the spectrum of time. And as a kid there was no such thing as later on, down the road, or in the long-run. All I had was right now, and right now I didn’t fit in. Taking pity on me, my Dad took the big-wheel to work with him at the Naval Base in Monterey. There he had a couple of Mid-shipmen engineers disassemble and spray-paint it hot-rod purple, complete with shiny metallic flakes, which would obviously make it much faster. It was so badass. 

Or it was, until I took it outside. 

“Ha! Look at your gay big-wheel!” Bryan Verbrugge exclaimed from astride his name-brand Big-Wheel. His twin brother Kevin was the first to join in the chorus of laughter and pointing that spread quickly through the semi-circle of other kids. “Ooooh, so shiny!” Kevin cooed, he with his hornet-like Green-Machine—obviously someone that could never be uncool. I’d literally never heard the word “gay,” but at first blush it didn't seem complimentary.

In that moment, I was filled with a hopeless certainty that I could never escape the inherent unworthiness that seemed to attend my very existence. Suddenly, this black rage boiled over in me and I fired up my gay big-wheel, setting a collision course. Do you have any idea what happens when forty-five pounds of five-year-old astride thirty pounds of steel hits ten pounds of an all-plastic Big-Wheel at full-tilt ramming-speed? The effect was spectacular; the suspension forks and that iconic front wheel folded like a pizza-box struck by a sledgehammer.

Both Bryan and I were equally shocked by the result, although our reactions diverged immediately thereafter. He started to scream bloody murder over his irreparably-mangled toy, while I was exultant with the sudden, shocking recognition of the power I and my unique big-wheel possessed. But the exhilaration of my victory was short lived, because his brother Kevin instantly yelled the two most terrifying words that a five-year-old can hear: "I'm telling!" He flipped a quick one-eighty on his agile Green-Machine and high-tailed it out of there. At first, I was worried that he was going to my house to tell my folks, but when I realized he was headed home to tell his own parents I was truly terrified. I took off after him post-haste, with no plan other than to silence him.

With his head-start and the inertia of my heavier ride, there was no way I could catch up to him. That didn’t stop me from pedaling pell-mell after him, as though my life depended on it. When we hit the downhill slope at the other end of Mervine St. near where he lived, something unexpected began to happen: my big-wheel started to pick up speed. Like, so much speed that my feet couldn’t stay on the furiously revolving pedals and were thrown clear, almost derailing my pursuit. Instead, I tucked them in on the bar between the seat and the suspension forks, gripped those chopper-handlebars for dear life, and let my gay big-wheel do its own thing. The greater weight of my shiny dragster on the downhill straightaway allowed me to overtake Kevin and his fancy plastic Green-Machine. 

He looked back just in time to see me and my sparkly-purple steed bearing down on him. I can only imagine the maniacal look I must’ve been wearing to inspire the terror written on his face. When my front tire drilled his right rear tire he immediately spun out of control and crashed, ass-over-teakettle. Like his twin's before him, Kevin's ride was permanently damaged as well, the plastic rear wheel being badly dented, and thus the Green-Machine was never the same.

Over the next several days I finally got invited to join the other kids’ reindeer games—seemingly impromptu sessions of a newly-developed interest in demolition-derby. But given that me and my gay big-wheel were always the target, it soon became clear that there was nothing spontaneous about it, and these kids might not actually be my friends. They were out to get me. But none of that mattered, because my fabulous purple bulldozer was pure steel, and as long as I kept my feet tucked, I was invulnerable to their paltry plastic attacks. Sadly, they could not say the same. Bitches gotta recognize, the King stands alone.

Eventually word got around to the parents that I was the one destroying all the Big-Wheels in town, at which point my own parents attempted to rein-in the reign of O’B The Terrible by teaching me to ride a bike instead. But it was too late, I was on my path and I been ballin’ ever since.

What can I say? You come at the King, you best not miss.

The Circus Never Leaves Town

They say that you can't actually remember physical pain, your brain won't let you. That what you're actually remembering when you think of that broken bone, sprained ankle, or deep gash is the experience of pain, not pain itself. Your reaction to it, not the thing itself. That seems like a rather fine and pointed distinction to make, and I can't say if it's actually true or not. I can say that I remember a moment when all pain and worry and care for anything in this world left me, and it was literally the best thing that had ever happened to me.

On day 6 (of 10) of trying to pass a kidney stone the size of a BB through a short tube of muscle fiber as small as the eye of a needle, I was pacing in a small circle in the lobby of the urgent care center, just sweating like a hooker in church. To kill time, I was trying to decide whether Metallica or Vivaldi on my iPod would go best with groaning, shaking, and otherwise stifling my screams into more socially acceptable whimpers. It's Vivaldi, in case you're wondering. 

As an unfortunate veteran of passing any number of stones, I was well aware that 6 days was way too long. 1-2 days is pretty average, and usually one prescription will do the job of covering up the agony of a jagged mass of calculus and ethylene-glycol tumbling and clawing its way through you innards. For the record, I was already done with my third bottle of OxyContin, having been accused of prescription shopping with lessening degrees of subtlety each time I came back with my hand out. No one ever believes me when I say that Vicodin may as well be Flintsones vitamins as far as my body is concerned, so I instill a lot of suspicion when go straight for the Oxy like a junkie snubbing Methadone in favor of the good stuff. Thank God they can do a urinalysis and rule out any junkie chicanery in these cases.

In fairness to my doctor, I have more in common with said junkie than my affect would indicate, and she knows it. I've discussed my addiction issues openly with her from day one. Which also happened to be the day that I discovered I was passing my very first stone, in February of 2002. That's how she came to be my Doctor, in a moment of purest agony. When you get your second scrip for Oxy, the eyebrows go up and the scan of your chart becomes more deliberate. Like Elaine on Seinfeld, I've never actually seen my chart, but I know somewhere in there it must say ADDICT in all caps. Don't trust this motherfucker. So she's cautious about people like me, because she is absolutely the smartest person to ever put their finger in my butt. It's not even close, really. 

My Dentist tried to give me laughing gas once in order to do a rough procedure on my gums. When I said no, she told me that I wouldn't be able to handle it without it. But she checked my chart, presumably saw ADDICT in there somewhere, and then we gave it a white-knuckled whirl anyway. It turns out I actually could handle it, and I took pride in her telling me that my pain-threshold is off the charts. But really, I was just more scared of what would happen if I let myself have the gas than I was of the pain. 

And it turns out I was right to be afraid. Because on Day 6 of the Rock of Gibraltar's migration out of my penis, they gave me a shot of Demerol to hold me over until they could do all kinds of tests to determine why I hadn't passed it on Day 2. And when the sweet tide of that narcotic hit my brain it was literally the best thing that had ever happened to me. Like, seriously, ever. 

Not for the reasons it would be for you. The cessation of that kind of pain—that mothers of three have agreed is worse than childbirth—is one thing. When someone stops stabbing you with a dull knife that is also on fire, it's natural to be relieved. When the miles-long skein of white-hot barbed wire is finally done being pulled through the 12 inches separating your kidney from your pee-pee, it's Ok to be happy about that. But that's not what happens in my brain. Or at least that not all that happens.

On Day 6, I'd been sober over a dozen years, but that inexorable tide of bliss still blew through every single worry, insecurity, injustice, sin, and woe in the entire world like a weapon of mass exultation. When it hit me, it was like it was the only thing that had ever mattered, the only thing that could ever matter. I felt at perfect ease and yet unstoppable. It's kind of like that moment when the buzz of a good scotch or a nice glass of wine hits you at the end of the day, and those first ten minutes you're sober enough to be cogent and tipsy enough to be at your ease. Now combine that with the apex of an orgasm, the afterglow of great sex, and multiply times infinity.

When I'm at that equilibrium, it's like a the most beautiful harmony of confidence, well-being, wholeness, and love. Like nothing matters, but I can do anything. I can feel the world turn under my feet, God is in His Heaven, and everything is perfectly as it ought to be. Why would you ever want to stop feeling that way? Why would you ever take a break from that sense of connection, and being in the groove of some grand purpose? And if a little is good, then more is better, and there's obviously no such thing as too much. Although if there were, it would be just right. Even now, the condition persists, because drugs are not my problem. Reality is my problem, and drugs are the solution. That is addiction.

I've been sober for 18 years, 9 months, 10 days, 17 hours, and 38 minutes, as of this writing, and it still makes me sad sometimes when I think about the utter completion as a person that the shot of Demerol gave me. Like it seriously competes with my Wedding Day as the best moment of my life. And that's my hind-sight perspective, saying from a sober place that it competes with my wedding day. In the moment that euphoric tide washed over me, it wasn't even close. Hands down, the absolute Best. Thing. Ever. That is addiction. 

Two decades of sobriety are no guarantee of anything, because there is no off-switch. No matter how bad the consequences of going back to that world would be for my marriage, my health, and my career, there is still a part of me that has to be restrained from jumping off that cliff. Because falling feels the same as flying, provided you drop from high enough, and every second up to the moment that the terrible impact destroys my life will be a helluva ride. That is addiction. 

George Carlin once said, “Just because the monkey is off your back, doesn't mean the circus has left town.” But that's the thing. The circus never leaves town.

Like A Rolling Stone

For no reason I can name, I’ve always loved the train. If not for the intervention of Lindsay’s parents, we’d have had our honeymoon on a train trip across America, instead of the far superior cruise that we took instead. Such is my hobo-like love of the rails. I’ve been top-to-bottom of the West Coast on trains, and even traversed the snow-dappled Alps when I was young, traveling from Rome to Berlin for Christmas. And while the rest of the family slowly went mad from cabin fever on that trip, I settled in like a zoo critter returned to its natural habitat. 

Perhaps it’s the womb-like rocking, or the steady staccato of the tracks, something swaying, rhythmic, and maternally soothing in its ceaselessness that makes me feel warm and safe, slightly somnambulant. Whatever it was that appealed to me as a child, it’s something else entirely that appeals to me as an adult. 

For as obnoxious as trains are to us in our normal lives—blocking traffic at key intersections for long stretches, the blaring of horns at midnight as the train cuts through the neighborhood—they are still fairly invisible for most of our days. They run along the back side of everything, in the interstices of places not seen or traversed by the civilized. These twilight borderlands are all drainage culverts, broken ramshackle fence-lines, rusted hulks of forgotten things overturned, and the unkempt back-lots of businesses that you never see from the showroom floor. 

Out-of-the-way spaces holding the dirty laundry that gets shoved under the bed when company comes over; a hot mess of capitalism and official boundaries, broken up by tunnels and waterways, dotted with invisible homeless encampments. A train ride is a rare chance to tour the secret histories going on all around us. A story of collapse, with shanties groaning under the relentless work of entropy, blooms of rust and oxidation spreading silently, and the disturbing beauty of a world receding into loam.

Or perhaps the magic of the rails is really created by the fact that I’m always on a break from my real life when I board the train. Headed out on vacation, or sometimes ferrying someone home in their car and then returning to my own via the Amtrak highway. That's the case on this rainy day, as I find myself hugging the water’s edge of Puget Sound, tracing the iron-gray inlets, isthmuses, and estuaries as I meander homeward like a rolling stone. 

I jumped outside my normal life early Monday morning at the sound of my Dad’s labored breathing and almost ceaseless coughing, an alarming rattle attending his every breath. He’s been living with advanced COPD for years, but this was beyond the pale even for him. Around 3:30a I decided that there was no way he’d be able to make his way home safely if he was still coughing for 15 minutes of every hour, especially after a night spent that same way. 

So I rolled him and his CPAP machine, oxygen bottles, and ukulele up and piled him in the car for the supposedly six-hour trip back to little Kingston, WA. We made it in five. He slept for most of it, which I was glad to see. He opened his eyes once, saw that it was snowing to beat the band, that we were boxed in on three sides by semis, and the visibility was slashed to near-zero by the onslaught of slush and the gray haze of spray rising off the road. He said, “Oh, my.” Then he went right back to sleep and left me to it, just as I’d done a million times as a kid, when all of the problems in the world were his and not mine. An unanticipated exchange of something, me and Benjamin Button passing each other in the middle and swapping the baton. 

He seemed to have stabilized when reinserted into his native environment, and was returned to good spirits this morning. So I hopped the ferry in little Kingston and the train in Edmonds to spend the next ten hours leisurely making my way home through the drippy, verdant folds of the Cascades, along the Cowlitz, Chehalis, and Columbia rivers, navigating the warren of secret tunnels and clinging to the mountainsides high above the steady stream of cars on I-5. 

For me, every minute spent captive to the steady plodding of the train, away from any ability to answer the call of my life, is a minute spent outside the boundaries of the world. As my iPod tirelessly queues up the tunes, every passing thing seems apropos to what I’m hearing, imbuing each song with fresh import. I can’t help wondering, from the comfort of my rolling portal on the world, at the lives of people that sleep on all those mattresses under lashed tarps in the passing woods. At the world we actually inhabit, as opposed to the thin cross-sections we allow ourselves see every day. 

It gives me the uneasy feeling that the real world might actually be happening in the forgotten spaces, where relentless tracks march ever onward behind the disguise of raised berms and thin tree lines artfully arranged to separate us from the unappetizing utility of life's real work. Maybe the clean, well-lit I-5 parts of life are just what you do to keep your belly full and have a little light to gather around. Where we never have time in the midst of our hunter-gather-y lives of work, shopping and entertainment to think about it—whatever “it” is. Lest we consider arcane prophecies scrawled in graffiti on the mouldering columns and buttresses out in these badlands.   

Before he made his trip down to see us, my Dad told me to wave him off if any of our friends or family was even a little bit sick, because of the COPD. Fortunately no one was, so he came to town to visit, talk religion and politics over brunch and cocktails, and play ukulele and Euchre with us. He never travels alone like this, so I was delighted to have some Dad time, though a bit worried about him making it all the way on his own. 

It was as we were eating eggs at a new breakfast place in town that he said that the next time he got the flu would be his last time. Just casual like that. He was being careful about things, and took the possibility seriously, but was otherwise at ease with the reality of it because he’d already accepted this thing that was so striking to me. So he could just go right on eating his eggs after he said it, and he did. 

When you’re away from the hustle and flow of everyday life, you have time to realize that your days can be measured out in any number of ways—minutes, hours, years, even switching-stations and whistlestops. But no measurement is anything but a parsing of the definitions of finite things. I first realized the uncomfortable reality of this years ago, in hearing a line of song that said, “His heart ran out of summers, but before he died...” Like summers are a unit of measurement, the same as gallons of gas, and you aren’t going to make it. 

So perennial things like Christmas mornings—that seem like innocuous markers on the road to wherever—are actual the ticks of a metronome winding down, and sooner or later you simply reach the end. Maybe you've got a hundred Christmases in you, but probably not. So when you know there is such a thing as “flu season,” hearing that the next flu will be the last one is like finding out that there's such a thing as “death season.” Like you might just spontaneously die because 'tis the season and somebody’s got to go. 

As the last of the gloaming gives way to true night, I’m more aware of the lights of the world as everything else recedes into the gathering darkness. Without the incandescent urban halo rising off a million points of light, the passing landscape disappears and the train window is just a black mirror, revealing only me staring right back at me. But those dark interludes are becoming fewer as I draw closer to home and towns simply fade into each other, briefly separated by the inky negative space of empty fields. Cars are sitting at flashing barricades as I hurtle past, and I'm feeling rather important to be holding up the business of all these people on their way somewhere else. 

I already know I won’t care about any of these thoughts the next time I’m trying to get home to eat and watch TV, only to find myself delayed at a flashing railroad barricade by some jackass on a train writing his memoirs as he hurtles past. Oh, well. At least flu season is over, right? Missed me again, bitch. 

Better luck next year.