Black Sheep

I had a very illuminating conversation at the Sunday family lunch recently. Sadly, my Uncle's nephew Roy, on the other side of the family, took ill and recently died. Although he was a nephew like me, he was much older due to the wide age gaps between my Uncle and his many siblings. Still, his passing was untimely, as he was only in his sixties. I’d never met the man and only learned of his funeral—which happened yesterday—after the fact. According to my Aunt and Uncle, the people who in attendance painted quite the picture of the Roy's life, one that was pretty surprising to them.

It appears that Roy, who was widely regarded as a black sheep on that side of the family, was living quite an interesting life. He'd been a source of some concern for the family over his refusal to attend church or have anything to do with organized forms of religion for many decades now. To the older generation (all well into their 70's and 80's), attendance is not only mandatory, but is one of the only barometers of a moral lifestyle. This is a tight-knit family, and they loved Roy very much, but never could understand his disdain for Church. This attitude is one that I've been aware of my whole life, and will often gently challenge and speak against.

I'm not looking for a fight at the Sunday dinner table, because these really are salt of the earth kinds of people who don't just espouse virtuous beliefs, but live by them. They volunteer at the mission, give to charity, and have taken in all manner of wayward souls in need of a roof over their head and food in their belly. Including Lindsay for a brief time, as well as myself in my younger days. The world has no shortage of those that will talk the talk, but not walk the walk, but these people are an example of the exact opposite of that. They are wise, kind, and compassionate, and yet totally set in their way of thinking. So I don't go after it with hammer and tongs, but with gentle cajoling and a steady drip-drip-drip of mild challenge and dissent.

Obviously they were quite upset by Roy's untimely passing, as anyone would be, but they were quite impressed by the turn-out at his funeral. It wasn’t just in the number of people that they found so moving, but the testimony that this myriad of souls offered about Roy’s impact in their lives. It seems that quite a number of people that got up to share were homeless people, friends that he'd made at the local coffee shop while he was buying them coffee and chatting with them over the years. By turn, employees at the coffee shop talked about him paying their utility bills when they were hurting for money, and veterans arose to speak about all the time he spent listening to their war stories and traumas. Eventually the Church had to shut down the remarks portion of the service because it just kept going and going, with a line out to the door.

It was both interesting and sad to me that my family got to meet this man, that they thought they knew, for the first time at his funeral. When seen through the eyes of others, and judged by the impact he had on the lives around him, they had an entirely different perspective on Roy. I felt kind of sorry for them, because they couldn't see the man who was in front of them, only who he appeared to be when viewed through preconceived notions.

After I heard that story I said, "Going to Church makes you a Christian like standing in the garage makes you a Cadillac. Attendance doesn’t mean much, because the world isn’t changed by our beliefs, but by our example." I mean, what kind of a superstar do you have to be to have homeless people track you down to speak at your funeral? My God, what a breathtaking legacy.

“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’ (Matthew 25:40)

Thirteen Objects

As another in the continuing steps I’ve taken to make myself more at home in the new office, yesterday I loaded Pandora on the computer and set up a great shuffle of artists to get me through these days of endless emails. Today a song called “At the River” came on, by Groove Armada, and it transported me for a vivid moment to the night of my Bachelor Party on August 30, 2001.

My Bachelor Party would have been the most boring thing in the world to be a fly on the wall for, but stands out to me as one of the best nights of my life. My best friend, Christian, came up in advance of his wife so we could have our night together before all the other celebrations began. Since my wife and I had maintained separate residences right up to the last day, I’d sleep two nights in my old place, get married, go on my honeymoon and return to our shared home, not setting foot in my place again, so I had to clear out my first and only bachelor pad at the last minute.

A caravan of friends and relatives moved what little furniture I was keeping over to my wife’s place, and then I set my horrible love seat out on the curb to be collected by whomever passed by, not envying them the discovery of its certified status as World’s Most Uncomfortable Fold-out Bed. It, along with my entertainment center and TV, was gone in less than 5 minutes.

So when Christian arrived, he came into a barren 600 square foot filing cabinet with exactly 13 objects in it:

1. A mattress

2. An inflatable mattress

3. A shitty clock radio

4. A 5-disc CD changer

5. A stereo amplifier

6. A speaker

7. Another speaker

8. The Joshua Tree, by U2

9. Play, by Moby

10. Vertigo, by Groove Armada

11. A case of Black Butte Porter

12. A bottle of Jaegermeister

13. A box of wet-naps

To be clear, there were no linens, pillows, cups, silverware, dishes, bottle openers, soap, or any other accoutrements to complement these items by way of creature comforts. I’m not including any items that were on my person, of course. Like my Zippo or the cigars in my shirt pocket.

Before this little space, I’d never lived on my own. Always with a girlfriend or roommates up until I turned 26. This was the place I came to after my first 45 days of being sober, to live alone. It was in a bohemian section of town near the river and the beautiful Owen Rose Garden. I found it reeking of dog piss so bad that you could smell it through the door from the outside. I'd steam-cleaned the carpets multiple times, eventually uncovering the fact that they were inexplicably purple. I laid new tile in the entry, painted the interior, put up all new blinds and curtains, and then burned enough sage and incense to drive out whatever evil spirits had kept company with the hippie glass-blower that lived there prior to me, until finally the space was mine.

Before there were such things as Spotify or iPods, I filled it with music, creating a continual stream from whatever would shuffle between five discs at a time on the CD player. I once had a man come visit who may be the only person I’ve personally met that had a real live demon in him. With the sage burning, lights down, and a shuffle of Phil Keagey, Kaki King, Sara Masen, U2, and Lucinda Williams, he said it was literally the only time he’d felt at peace in his life. I knew just what he meant, because it was the first place I’d ever felt like that, too.

The night of my Bachelor Party, Christian and I plunked down on the purple carpet, besmirched with stains and cigarette burns too incorrigible for even the diligent scouring I’d given them, and passed a bottle between us and smoked cigars. We spoke of the things that a dozen years of friendship bring out in you on the night before your life changes forever. We were at ease with the philosophical differences between us, while respecting that they exist. There’s a camaraderie that arises from drinking from the same bottle passed between you, after the biggest battles that friends can have are all safely in the past. It’s an acknowledgment that neither of you would be here without the other.

And so we listened to U2, Moby, and Groove Armada on endless repeat until the sun went down, because there was nothing else but the haze of cigar smoke, the pop of bottle tops opened with the edge of a Zippo, and easy laughter. And there was U2, Moby, and Groove Armada. For nine straight hours, U2, Moby, and Groove Armada. We shared the grace of two friends who are never more at their ease, in their element, or at home than when they are in each other's company. We mocked the other, searched one another, and talked until the sun came up again. Honest in ways that men can only be with each other, the frankness of our discussions born of a thorough knowledge of the other's blind spots, weaknesses, and idiosyncrasies; having gone at it with hammer and tongs through years-long debates, and emerging from the searing heartbreaks that only youth can produce.

And we sat on a purple carpet and let U2, Moby, and Groove Armada roll over us until an entire album would pass in a moment’s time, like a year passes with blinding speed to me today. The music and the sound of our voices echoing in that slightly haunted way that every empty house has about it. That’s it. For nine hours. Just that. One of the best nights of my life.

Because when I’m with the people I love and they ask me what I want to do, I always look them in the eye and say, “This.” Being with them is the whole point. If we do that at the movies, a restaurant, on a hike, or sitting on a purple carpet for nine hours, I couldn’t care less. Companionship is not ancillary to some entertaining activity, rather it's the entire point. I guess some people need a pretext, some activity around which to base the experience of fellowship and camaraderie. Not I. Because for me, there is nothing else.

I don’t even know what the hell any the rest of it is for anyway.

The Miracle

On a sweltering Thursday in August of 2006, I was working alone in the little town of Goshen, really just a glorified truck stop out in the middle of rolling hills and pasture land. I was trying to help a client, Bill Looney, prepare his house for sale, addressing a host of issues revealed in the home inspection. It had once been a pretty nice house on a decent rural spread of about five acres, but it had been uninhabited for over a year and had been left to the weather and neglect, so it was reaping those consequences. There were things for me to do at every corner of the exterior, as well as some interior leaks and rot. It was as I was running around like a madman, cutting back rotten siding, demolishing trim and deck boards, that I made a false step in my haste that pretty much changed my life.

The grass was overgrown and the ground uneven, and I wasn’t paying close enough attention to each individual footfall, so I stepped into a gopher-hole I hadn’t noticed and hyper-extended my right knee. It felt like a jolt of electricity had shot through my knee-cap, and like a spring had sprung deep inside the joint (I could almost hear the “sproing” sound conducted through my bones). I instantly went down, crashing to the ground in a heap, the clang of my heavy tool bags ringing out to be heard by no one but me. After a few minutes I flexed my leg experimentally and decided I could get up. It was pretty painful, and would bear almost no weight, but it only swelled up slightly. I limped around on it for the rest of the day, thinking that it would be fine once I got some ice and Advil for it. Besides, I only had to make it one more day before the weekend, when I could put it up and take it easy.

At 35 I had bounced back from many injuries over the years, and I imagined this would be the same, so rather than report the incident to my boss I simply went to work the following day prepared to limp through to Saturday. I had a misplaced sense of responsibility and loyalty toward the Mom and Pop operation I was working for, and didn’t want their Worker’s Comp rates to go through the ceiling owing to my stupid injury. After all, it wasn’t as if I was engaged in some Herculean task of lifting a huge beam or packing heroic amounts of lumber; I was walking across the yard. That’s it. One does not apply for Worker’s Comp because one strolled through a dewy meadow. It’s just not done. So instead, I limped on the left leg for the rest of Thursday and about half of Friday, just looking to make it to that magical weekend of rest. Then my left knee also gave out. Without warning, the thing just went on strike and said, “No more!” It seems it was unwilling to do double the work, so I went down again.

This injury felt totally different than the one just twenty-four hours previous. The pain was much more intense, but located on either side of the knee cap, as opposed to right over the middle as it had been on the right side. I called it a day right then, informed my boss and said that I’d be taking Monday off as well. When he found out what had happened he agreed right away, knowing that I could file a claim and pretty much blow him out of the water. Which, it turns out, is exactly what I should have done. Instead, I put my knees up for a couple of days, alternating heat and cold with a steady diet of anti-inflammatories and painkillers. By Tuesday, I’d picked up some of those compression braces that athletes wear when they need to play in spite of an injury and went back to work. And I have been wearing them fourteen hours a day, six days a week, ever since.

That’s nine years of the ever-expanding size, strength, and design complexity in these braces. Neoprene, gel-packed, gusseted, spring-reinforced, mid-shin to lower-quad spanning monsters, just compressing the hell out of every muscle, ligament, and tendon in a desperate attempt to keep everything in place. All while I beat mercilessly on the joints by wearing forty pound tool bags, pushing wheelbarrows full of concrete, packing dozens of sheets of plywood and sheetrock across jobsites and up stairs, climbing up and down two and three story ladders relentlessly, demolishing entire structures with sledgehammers and prybars. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year for almost a decade. To say that my knees were utterly destroyed would be an understatement.

If I’d filed for Worker’s Comp I could have had the medical coverage and, more importantly, the paid time off to recover for twelve weeks from a crippling double knee surgeries. Turns out I’d injured the quadricep tendon on the right side and the ACL and MCL on the left side, according to the doctor. She couldn’t be sure without an MRI, which I never got since I couldn’t afford the surgery in the first place.  But since I’d stupidly decided to shelter my employer and gut it out, I made do with spit and bailing wire to hold my Frankenstein knees together and was never able to lose months of pay to have them repaired, so they went from bad to worse, as you’d expect.

I was fine standing, or at a full squat, but anything in between ranged from sharp pain to complete agony. Things would pop and occasionally grind, like bone on bone kind of feeling. Shooting, burning pain was common. All this is with the braces on, to say nothing of how it was without them. Taking stairs or ladder steps anywhere between the ball of my foot and my toes was like being stabbed with something dull that was also on fire. The best part of any day was taking off the braces, which I not-so-lovingly referred to as my Knee Bras. By the end of a work week, they smelled like a dirty diaper left long in the sun.

Now, at 44, I had no hope that this situation would ever be rectified. I’d been looking for a way to get out of the actual labor side of construction for several years, knowing that my knees had a clock on them which was getting shorter by the day. I couldn’t walk further than a mile or two without the braces, no mowing the lawn, or playing Frisbee with the nieces and nephews without them. I couldn’t run at all. But with no solution on the horizon I just kept my head down, did my work, and tried not to think about it.

That all changed one week ago.

Last Friday, Lindsay and I took a trip to Redding, CA for a three-day weekend. While we were there, we visited a local church that has gained a reputation for being very friendly, open, and known for inexplicable healings. So much so, that people from all over the world come to the place by the thousands for a chance to receive prayer. So Saturday morning, Lindsay and I went in to see what all the hubbub was about. We were surprised to see how many hundreds of people had come to receive prayer at that early hour on a Saturday. People from all over the world. We met people from Canada, Scotland, Japan, New Zealand, South Africa, The Dominican Republic, and Vietnam there. Some had back problems, foot problems, eye problems, Cancer, Crone’s Disease, Tourette’s Syndrome and more. All come for a chance at relief. It was both sad and inspiring all at once.

The Church—Bethel it’s called—opens its doors every Saturday morning for any and all to come and receive free prayer. No collections plate is passed, no membership cards are checked, no religious tracks are passed out. You could be anyone; homeless, atheist, Buddhist, communist, criminal, or curious looky-loo. No conditions applied, no questions asked, except about what you wanted prayer for. People came who were terminal and had exhausted all medical options, people came who had no medical options to begin with because they had no insurance. We were every color, every gender, every age, every orientation, every income level.

There was live, contemporary music played by very capable musicians; people dancing with colored banners; a circle of a dozen artists all painting on different canvases; people meditating; people praying; people huddled in small groups; people reflecting in solitude. Like a carnival of souls. In turn, people from the church, who all had name badges and were very warm and empathetic, would approach different people and ask if they wanted prayer. Always a team of two, a man and a woman, working together. The people that approached me were named Reuben, who was from South Africa, and Marry, who was from The Dominican Republic. They asked some questions about my injuries, and heard an abbreviated version of what I’ve relayed here, and then they asked if they could pray for me.

Of course I said yes. What could it hurt, really? But honestly, I was pretty much only there because of Lindsay’s interest. I haven’t been to Church much—besides holidays and family gatherings—in over ten years. We left a Church in 2005 with a lot of heartbreak and cynicism and haven’t been back. So to say the least, I was phoning it in. In fact, if it hadn’t been for Lindsay, and the strange phenomenon of thousands of people coming from all over the world, I would never have bothered with such a place. Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Because we were out on a Saturday, I wasn’t wearing my loathsome Knee Bras. So when Marry asked me to try and bend down at the knees to see if anything had resulted from their prayers, I was fully expecting to get about half an inch down into the stabbing/burning zone and pop back up, reporting failure. After nine years, I’m pretty well versed in how it goes. So imagine my surprise when I made it all the way down and back up without a stitch of pain. I was incredulous, and at first thought that I’d just done it too fast. So I went back through the motion, down and back up, but slowly this time, which is always a suicide mission. When I have to go through the Zone without my Knee Bras, I do it at full-speed, because every second spent there is excruciating. So I went back down and hovered in the zone, even went up on my tip-toes, came back up, went back down. Nothing. No pain at all. I dropped down suddenly, then jumped straight up, because landing from a jump is like a bomb going off under my knee caps—guaranteed agony—braces or no. Still nothing.

Reuben and Marry—these two strangers, one man, one woman, one white, one black—were looking at me quizzically. I can’t even imagine what the look on my face was. Shock? Disbelief? Absolute relief? I just kept testing and trying, looking for the old, familiar pain. Where had it gone? I probably spent a full minute looking for a way to find the pain; twisting, hopping, lunging; anything I could think of. Nothing. Nothing at all. Having had such low expectations, it was like I didn’t want to believe it was possible. Who needs false hope? Who doesn’t hate to have their expectations raised and then dashed? But after that long minute of looking for that hated but all-too-familiar pain, I had to admit that it was nowhere to be found. It was totally gone.

I said, pretty much to no one, “For the first time in nine years, there’s not even a bit of pain.”

That word spread like wildfire. People all around started clapping and jumping up and down, I heard total strangers murmuring about “Nine years?” Next thing you know I was bawling like a baby. I’m just hugging Reuben and Marry, and any strangers that got close enough for me to get an arm around. I couldn’t stop jumping up and down, doing lunges, hopping up and down on one foot. Because as happy as I was, I was still looking for the injury to return. For this obvious placebo effect to wear off and the pain of hamburgered ligaments to reassert themselves. But it never did.

When I woke up the following morning I immediately checked to see if the psychosomatic nonsense had worn off. Surely a day of sightseeing, going to the movies, and eating out had dissipated whatever religious mania was at the root of this momentary reprieve, and a night’s sleep had rebooted the world to its proper order where I was halfway to being an invalid. But it hadn’t. No pain. None at all. I jumped, I squatted, I lunged. Nothing. I was both perplexed and over the moon at the same time.

When Monday came and we were home again, I returned to work, not wearing my Knee Bras for the first time in almost a decade. I decided that if this fake-out nonsense was ever going to be revealed it would be at work. No Jedi-Mind-Trick-herbal-gerbil-mind-body nonsense can withstand the serious brutality of my average day at work. I resolved to not only go about my day as normal, totally without my Knee Bras, but to go out of my way to beat the crap out of my knees while I did it. I jumped down from the ladder, I took extra-heavy loads in one trip instead of two, I kneeled on hard concrete, things I wouldn’t have done even with the braces on. The coup de grace was when I installed a 150 lb. steel fire-door by myself. Nothing I did could even bring a twinge to either knee. I have been at it like that all this week. Strike first, strike hard, no mercy, sir! Still nothing.

Since this all occurred I’ve been skipping, running, and jumping like a kid. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve literally jumped up in the air and kicked my heels together. Like, seriously, so many times! Nothing your kids do on Christmas morning can match how I’ve been acting. Completely over the moon. I feel like the word “miracle” gets bandied about way too much, and has lost its meaning. I wish I could think of a different word to describe this inexplicable, yet undeniable experience. I got nothin’.

For me, the kicker is that this isn’t a story of the faithful being rewarded with that for which they have believed and quested for so long. It’s the story of a tired, faithless cynic half-assing his way through a pointless church meeting, only to be given a gift by One whose generosity and kindness do not depend on anything about me. Gratitude is all I have to offer.

There were a lot of other people there reporting that they were also healed of various maladies that day, but I can’t speak to the veracity of their claims. I hope they were all true. God knows we could use a little relief around here. One thing I know: I once was lost, but now am found. Was blind, but now I see.

Make of that what you will.   

Touchstones

I've discovered that nothing I see in the mirror or in pictures can make me feel as old as other people's kids. I went to the high school graduation of my business partner and friend, Ronnie's daughter last night. I have a vivid memory of her as a three year old jumping up and down on his knee, while her little blonde ringlets bounced in perfect Shirley Temple style. Now she's off to a full ride scholarship at the University of Oregon, where my wife Lindsay was graduating when we first met. Yikes.

Still, there's something comforting about the milestones and routines of life. The births, graduations, Bar Mitzvahs, Quinceañeras, the weddings, and even the funerals. These universal touchstones create a context for the continuum of life, to remind us that our time here is finite and is indeed passing while we're busy making our plans. When we are old, they remind us of our younger days, and they validate our accomplishments and transitions we're young. They give us things to look forward to, and things to wistfully reminisce about. They create a commonwealth for old and young that unites us, despite a disparity of age and experience.

The speeches and ceremony did tend to drone on, especially the ones given by the principal and other scholastic bureaucrats whose careers center around telling the endlessly revolving door of kids how unique and special they are. Still, the very act of going through these motions serves the purpose for which it was intended. The seniors get to celebrate and be honored among their peers, while being endorsed and welcomed across the threshold of adulthood by the grownups, which is a once in a lifetime occurrence for them. For the adults—suffering dutifully through yet another cycle of pomp and circumstance—it serves to remind us that people were born, educated, married, and buried long before we came, and will continue to do so long after we are a forgotten footnote lost to the sands of time. I guess we get to decide for ourselves if that fact gives meaning to our days, or not.

As the heady days of summer kick off again, I'm often reminded, as I see little kids running and playing with the kind of abandon and freedom that only they can generate, of how I felt at that age. I still carry sharp memories of firecrackers, bike rides, and a head bursting with plans and shenanigans. Of how endless the days felt as I wiled away entire afternoons carefree, with a slingshot and a bag of empty soda cans down at the train trestle, trying to learn a skill so that I could successfully fight crime as an adult. Time well spent, if you ask me.

Though those days are long gone, they've never really left. I still think of them whenever I see a kid racing down the road on his bike, no shirt on and headed to the river with his fishing pole. If he sees me at all, it's as some old guy that can't possibly understand who he is or how he feels. But as long as I carry those memories with me, I do understand, in a way that he can't even fathom, yet. So when I'm annoyed with the school bus I'm stuck behind, as I so often am, it helps me to remember the view from inside those windows, looking out, as opposed to merely looking in. If you forget what that was like, then everyone is a stranger, always one step removed from you. Merely objects in space.

It's one of the great tragedies that we only understand the world and our lives when reflecting on them down the length of our years. In the moment, it's a confusing cacophony of impressions and emotions, misperceptions and gut feelings. Watching events unfold like random images that pass by the window of the school bus. It's often only when it's too late that we sort out what was really going on, and what was accomplished in us, or lost in the moment. But for as heartbreaking as that can be, it's far worse to never gain the perspective at all. To continue in myopic disconnection from everyone and everything, never understanding the continuum of connectivity between us. That is the true tragedy of our nature and existence here. It's "Us and Them." Or worse, "Me Against the World".

When we see ourselves in everyone else, no matter how different they seem, we have arrived. Then every birth, graduation, Bar Mitzvah, Quinceañera, marriage, and funeral is our own. That place is our home.

"May the Grace of God be with you always in your heart

May you know the truth inside you from the start

May you have the strength to know you are a part of

Something Beautiful."

Hold Steady

Like entirely too many other times in my life, it had seemed like a good idea right up to the second the cops showed up. As soon as they did, it immediately became obvious how insane it was to be on the grounds of the Lakewood Country Club after midnight on a Saturday, looking to vandalize one of the exclusive homes inside its gated walls with impunity.

But impunity was my middle name back then, and the girl that lived there had had the temerity to find me nerdy and uninteresting on our one and only arranged, quasi-blind lunch date. Mind you, she’d been dressed like a Gothic court jester, talked about the power of crystals and how she could use them to levitate things, but somehow I was still the loser in that match-up. Which is why we were there, caught out in the open with 96 rolls of toilet paper and no earthly reason to be breathing the same air as Brenda Jezak and her affluent clan.

This fact was sharply underscored when Mike Burke—our de facto wheel-man—hissed, "Cops!" from across the street and then dove across the front seat of his Volkswagen Beetle. Then he pulled the door behind himself, thus killing the dome light and rendering himself invisible in the relative safety of his cherried-out antique vehicle. Meanwhile, Christian and I were in the middle of the broad circular driveway, mid-throw on a couple of rolls of single-ply Vons house-brand TP, completely exposed as the cop's cruiser came around the corner. I grabbed Christian by the shoulder and yanked him down into a squat beside the gleaming black BMW sitting askew in the driveway, just as the wash from the cop's headlights swept across the house in an arc.

Christian, who is not a girl

"Shit!" Christian exclaimed in a voice too squeaky for a guy his size. It was no wonder my Mom always thought he was a girl when he called the house, even though he was 6'2" with broad shoulders, kind of gangly all around. He was my new best friend since I'd traded in my old one, Phillip, for the girl who couldn't decide between us. Aside from music, books, movies, and culture, being rejected by women who were out of our league was the thing Christian and I most had in common.

I was nineteen and he was seventeen, so probably only one of us was actually going to jail that night for whatever charge they could level. Criminal trespass and vandalism, probably. Maybe vagrancy, since we were both technically unemployed and had spent all our cash on toilet paper. But for some reason Christian seemed far more nervous about the prospect than I was. Although to be fair, this wasn’t my first time playing hide and seek with the boys in blue.

The first of the handful of times I’d found myself in the searchlight of the cops had been two years previous, with Phillip as always. We’d gone up to Shell Hill, the highest point in Long Beach and our local lovers’ lane, looking for his girlfriend Claire, whom Phillip suspected of cheating on him with a jock douchebag who’d been making time with her at school. Turns out he was right. Which we discovered by roaming around the Barrens—the industrial wasteland smack-dab in the middle of the hilltop where all the illicit fornicators parked—on foot, peeking into the vehicles randomly scattered around the giant water tower and oil derricks to see if she was in one. We’d split up to search separately, but were communicating regularly via the walkie-talkies we carried. So to reiterate, two teen boys were running around lovers’ lane, peaking into parked cars with fogged-up windows and jabbering into walkie-talkies, just suave as hell. No idea what took the cops so long to show up.

By the time they did, we’d found the unfaithful Claire steaming up Billy’s Celica windows, made a little scene about it, and were headed back to Phillip’s Impala without her. We’d jumped a low fence and were cutting across the Barrens beneath the water tower. As we were passing through the wide gravel lot, randomly dotted with trundling oil derricks, tirelessly slaving away with their ghostly, yawning squeals, a cop car came prowling around the lane. Phillip had a semi-feral way about him, and could always spot trouble in our road from miles out, so he knew instantly that they were there for us. As their spotlight clicked on and stabbed out toward us in the darkness of the Barrens, I felt totally exposed.

Phillip, the Conman

“Shit!” I exclaimed in a voice too squeaky for a guy growing such an impressive, not-smarmy-at-all, first mustache. Phillip grabbed me by the shoulder and pulled me into a squat behind the only cover available, a piece of tumbleweed a bit smaller than a park bench. Its unlikely presence in the emptiness of the gravel lot high atop a butte in the middle of 33,954 square miles of metropolitan sprawl was a reminder that Mother Nature’s intent for the Los Angeles Basin was for it to be a desert. Apparently, twelve-million people never got the memo, but the damned Clint Eastwood High Planes Drifter tumbleweed sure did, and thank God for it.

Even so, out there in the open industrial wastes, fifty yards from anything, a thorny skein of dried vines felt a lot like trying to hide behind a window screen. The light seemed like the solar pinpoint of a magnifying glass would to an ant as it searched for us, so when the million-candlepower light finally made its way to our tumbleweed, I fully expected it to go up in flames. It inched across us in agonizing slowness, and only Phillip’s hand on my shoulder kept me from running the second the glare touched my skin. It was so unbelievably bright, it felt like we were inside the sun itself. There was simply no way they could’ve missed seeing us, two ghostly white kids, hidden as we were by something essentially made of holes. But Phillip remained stock still, hand on my shoulder, steady as an Easter Island Totem, willing me to do the same.

“The ones that run right now, are the ones that get caught,” he whispered.

When I heard the cruiser’s door open and shut briskly in front of the driveway, I knew Christian and I were out of time. In a few brief strides the cop would come around the BMW and the jig would be up. I motioned to the underside of the Beemer and then belly-crawled like a grunt in Basic, seeking the flimsiest shelter imaginable. Short of a tumbleweed, that is. Christian joined me under the chassis just in time as the cop walked up the drive, his Maglite snapping on and probing all around.

His footfalls were slow and deliberate, the localized halogen pool of light swung in careful scrutiny across every surface, pausing when he found the abandoned pyramid of TP stockpiled in the driveway. The muted chatter of his radio seemed too quiet to mask the sound of our breathing, which felt like a cacophony under the Beemer. I could tell he was a cop from an affluent city by the mirror polish of his Florsheims, and knew then that he wouldn’t let us off with a warning in mock disapproval at our youthful shenanigans. We were inside the walls of the palace that paid his salary, so we were going down, no two ways about it.

He stalked around the car like the killer in a horror movie while we, the idiot teens, hid under the bed waiting to die as we watched his feet plod in painful slow motion, inches from our faces. Each time he stopped I expected to see his face fill the narrow rectangle between the concrete and running board, smiling in sinister fashion at the nitwits face down on the gritty driveway. But after a minute of circling the car and shining his light all over the front of the house, he made his way to the side to look over the fence into the back yard. Just as he left our sight, Christian made to bolt from our position, an instinct I understood only too well. But I grabbed him by the shoulder and held him steady.

“The ones that run right now, are the ones that get caught,” I whispered.

We stayed where we were in defiance of every urge from the lizards living deep in our unevolved brains, watching the officer make his rounds, hunting for us impudent vandals behind the garbage cans and in the arbor vitae. He came back toward us, stopping at the TP pyramid to mutter something into his radio, before taking a final look around and getting back into his prowler and creeping away slowly.

Not yet lulled, I held Christian fast until the cop car came back past the house on his way out of the gated community. Once he was out of sight, Christian and I clambered out from under the Beemer, dusted ourselves off and looked at each other, finally daring to breathe a sigh of relief.

“That was too close,” Christian said.

“Hell yeah, it was. Can you imagine if we’d gone to jail tonight and had to tell our cell mates we were in for toilet papering a house? Might as well be wearing a dress.”

He laughed in nervous release, looking around to see if anyone had stirred from the activity, but we were alone in the dark again. “I don’t think I’d do well in prison,” he said. “With these looks, I’d be traded for cigarettes on day one. Probably fetch at least a carton, maybe two.”

“Don’t sell yourself short, buddy. I’d pay three for you, any day,” I said.

“Thanks, man. You’re all heart.”

“I guess we should give Mike the all clear, huh?” I said.

“Nah, let him stew for a few more minutes. Serves him right for only saving himself.”

I looked around at the sad tableau before us. A couple of lame streamers over one corner of the house and a lonely white garland up in the crown of their tree. Compared to some of the epic mummifications I’d doled out over the years, it was hardly worth mentioning. In fact, suddenly it seemed kind of childish. I walked over to the stockpile in the driveway and gave it a little kick, toppling a few rolls from the peak.

“We should really get going,” Christian said.

Ms. Bahaus, Brenda

“I know,” I said, picking a roll up and pulling loose the first square to unspool the end. “Just a couple more rolls. This is too pathetic to leave like this. I mean, she called me a nerd, dude. She was wearing black-and-white striped Pippi Longstocking leggings and looked like Beetlejuice’s girlfriend. And still Ms. Bauhaus herself saw fit to call me a nerd, with a straight face. I can't let that go with three rolls, it wouldn't be right.”

“You’re nuts,” he responded, but then picked up a roll, too. “Bella Lugosi’s dead… Bella Lugosi’s dead,” he chanted under his breath.

“Bam-bam-bam, b-b-b-bam-bam-ba-bam, I wanna be levitated…” I chimed in sing-song.

I lobbed one up and onto the roof, just shy of the ridgeline, it rebounded and rolled back down, laying a trail of single-ply ass-wipe all the way. Christian pitched his and it sailed high up into the diffused halo of light from the streetlamp and over the ridge, unspooling squares furiously as it tumbled. It went out of sight into the back yard, never even touching the house, the long tail fluttering down onto the roof.

“Perfect shot, man. That really had some mustard on it.”

“Thanks. It felt good as it left, I could tell it was gonna be a goner.”

“Well, you may sound like a girl on the phone, but you sure don’t throw like one,” I said.

“That’s funny, because you don’t sound like a dick on the phone at all…” he replied.

I tossed him another roll from the crumbling pyramid. Then turned to pitch some up into the tree, knowing that I couldn’t hope to match Christian’s throwing arm in clearing the house.

“You know, if Mike had been out here, instead of squirreled away in his Bug, we probably would’ve gotten caught,” I said. “I mean, if one guy goes down, he takes everybody with him.”

“I guess so,” he replied dubiously, cocking his arm back for another throw. He paused and said, “I suppose we’re lucky he didn’t bail entirely.”

I thought about that for a minute, wanting to believe Mike wasn’t that kind of guy, but realizing he was. “We’d have been screwed for sure, then,” I answered.

“Nah, you’d have thought of something,” he said as he pitched his roll. The white streamer laced out like the tracer behind a shooting star as the roll disappeared into darkness. “You always do.”

Mike Burke, the Wheelman

“Jeez, let's never test that theory,” I answered.

“I think we just did, didn’t we? ‘Cause I’d definitely have made a run for it when the cop went around the corner of the house. I thought you were out of your mind to double down on that bluff. He was six inches from our faces.”

I thought of Phillip’s steady hand on my shoulder as he’d brazened us both through the narrow margin between escape and certain doom. The ultimate conman—where almost every grift in my bag of tricks had come from, and the reason I never sat with my back to the door—forever hanging on by his fingernails, but somehow always coming up smelling like a rose. For the second time that night, I heard Phillip’s words to me in the Barrens tumble from my mouth.

“Hold steady. Deny till you die.”

After a few more rolls we decided to stop pushing our luck and went back to the car, leaving the ersatz TP pyramid as a cryptic calling card for them in the morning. Christian rapped sharply on the VW window with his knuckles. Mike’s head popped up like a whack-a-mole, wearing a look of purest guilt, obviously thinking we were the cops. Christian and I both chuckled as we wedged ourselves into the tiny Beetle, teasing Mike incessantly about being such a pansy as we drove off. It wouldn’t be long before he showed his true colors and we stopped hanging out with him altogether, but since we never TP’ed anyone again after that, he wasn’t missed much.

I was laid out in the back seat, letting my steady breathing quell the adrenaline storm I’d been disguising the whole time, watching as the Jezak job receded from view. The paltry streamers faded away like the fluttering remains of a tepid parade whose celebrants had forgotten why they came. 

When we cleared the gates of the Country Club Mike asked, “Where to, boys?”

I said, “Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.”

He turned out onto Paramount Blvd, where the commoners’ territory began, and turned his amazing stereo way up. With my head between the rear speakers it was like being inside music itself, as Depeche Mode sang:

“As years go by

All the feelings inside

Twist and they turn

As they ride with the tide

Clean

The cleanest I've been

An end to the tears

And the in between years

And the troubles I've seen

Now that I'm clean

You know what I mean

I've broken my fall

Put an end to it all

I've changed my routine

Now that I’m clean”

And it was like I’d never heard it before.

Nostalgia's Greatest Hits

When we were kids, my sister had an inexplicably awesome stereo in her room, which she cobbled together from my Dad’s old bachelor hi-fi set. It consisted of felt covered Zenith speakers, a Marantz tape player, a Fisher turntable, and a Pioneer receiver. And while I was blowing through my allowance weekly on slurpees and action figures, she was using hers to hoard 45’s and K-Tel compilations of one-hit-wonders, storing them up in an old milk-crate. I would come across different mysterious treasures of hers when she was out with friends and I was sitting home bored of comics and Star Wars and looking to give her Barbies haircuts for kicks. I wasn’t trying to be cruel; I figured that if Growing Up Skipper could grow a pair of boobies, her hair would grow back, too, right? Not so much, actually.

It was on one of those little scavenger hunts that I came across the milk-crate, and in it the album “Escape” by Journey. Most of her other musical collections were K-Tel greatest hits albums, with the likes of Blondie, Soft Cell, Michael Jackson, The Clash, Hall & Oats, Diana Ross, The Stray Cats, and The Pointer Sisters. Or else individual singles on 45 by Whitney Houston, Phil Collins, Glass Tiger, and Gloria Estefan. But the first album I ever sat down and listened to, start-to-finish, was Journey’s “Escape,” because that was the only stand-alone album she had in the crate.

I would sit and listen to it on the Magnavox headphones she’d scavenged from the heap of random boxes in the garage, only getting up when it was time to perform the sacrament of turning the record over to side two. That was kind of an intermission when I’d go get another oatmeal cream pie and Hawaiian Punch, flip the album over, and settle in for another session. “Escape” contains the single most popular song of the 20th century, “Don’t Stop Believing,” but the entire album is great. Certain songs from it have played at key moments in my life, ever since. “Still They Ride” was the first song I ever slow-danced with a girl to; “Don’t Stop Believing” kept me from getting into a fight I was sure to lose with Andy Viglucci in sixth grade; and “Open Arms” was the track that was playing when I discovered that a-million-to-one odds mean nothing when fate decides to intervene.

But before any of those things could happen, when it was just music coming through scavenged headphones, the music still conjured something. I couldn’t name even one of the notes, the chord progressions followed theory I knew nothing about, and the import of the words were beyond my ten year-old’s experience. But still there was something... An abstraction that I had no name for, but whose edges were implied like an emotional algebra I was almost ready to comprehend. If I could just solve for X, I'd unlock some secret waiting for me. Perhaps then I'd understand why we invent words like “wistful” or “bittersweet.”

I mean, at 10, there was really no reason that lyrics like “midnight train to anywhere” should have made me feel the way they did. I'd never had my heart broken, unless the unattainable Ms. Brimmie—my first grade teacher—was taken into account. My very first kiss with Ylani Ballares was still almost a year away, and even that was a millisecond-long peck. It was like being nostalgic for places I’d never been and things that had never happened. Like I was just yearning to have my heart broken, so all the songs could finally be true.

So when Jesse rode through the night under the Main Street lights, the traffic lights keeping time and leading the wild and restless through the night, I’d yet to experience the exquisite romance of a highway scrolled out like a ribbon of black, no one ahead, no one behind. Or why a vast horizon ahead, or the vanishing point in the rearview should hold such powerful sway over me. I only knew that they did. And then I grew up, slowly populating all those archetypes with my own experiences, steadily imputing my own meaning to all those lyrics. Until, eventually, every song was somehow about me; the tragic, misunderstood hero of my own story.

But where did the initial instinct to do that come from? How could a ten year-old kid project from a world of tetherball and four-square into a melancholy world of solitude, nameless longing, and broken hearts? And, really, why would he want to? It seemed an oddly superfluous mechanism to be designed into a kid, not unlike a dog’s ability to dream. I wondered about it for a long time, then came across an unlikely answer in an unlikely place.

In the book “Count Zero,” by William Gibson, an art student is tasked by an enigmatic billionaire to find the creator of a series of anonymous curios, released by an unknown artist simply referred to as the Poet. The curios were single-serving tableaux of random objects—a tarnished silver comb, snippets of strung pearls, the wing of a bird, a doggerel of disintegrating lace—arranged in an antique box in such proportion as to evoke powerful reactions of yearning and loss in its audience. People were becoming obsessed with them, yet no one knew who the creator might be.

Eventually the student discovers that the Poet is a machine, a truly sentient Artificial Intelligence. This intelligence spent its days directing a robotic servo-arm to sift through the heaped remains of an affluent family’s lost heirlooms, constructing the curios from the crumbling bits of treasure left from a centuries-long dynasty that had finally imploded under the crushing weight of its own decadence. A lone machine mind, telling stories to itself by sifting through the moldering detritus of forgotten luxe. After discussing its haunting work with the Poet, and learning why it was making them, the student finally asks, “Are you sad?” The Poet replies that it is not. Yet when she presses it about the sadness reflected in its creations the machine replies, “They are merely songs of time and distance. The sadness is in you.”

And just like that, I understood.

The wail of the train passing at midnight, the vanishment of the rearview and every far horizon…all of it. The dog-eared copies of haunting novels, a box of love letters and fading pictures, a backward glance at the airport gate, long desert highways, a scroll of streetlights keeping time, that first bashful ask of a slow dance with a pretty girl. And how the four right chords can make you cry. I finally understood it all.

The list is endless, because the ache of heartbreaks past and the yearning for an unknowable future is equally endless. When tomorrow's horizons become yesterday's regrets and cherished memories; when all of the mundane trials and small victories take on the sepia tint of nostalgia; when the ordinary moments become the good old days, it's then that we invent words like "bittersweet.” Because in so doing, we can be happy and sad at once, in a way that's better than either one alone. That need isn’t in the fourth, the fifth, the minor fall or the major lift. It’s in us. In how we’re all connected, our lives woven together of chaos, heartbreak, love, and distance.

If, as Homer said, men are haunted by the vastness of eternity, perhaps it would explain why yesterday becomes so sweet and so much hope for happiness is placed in tomorrow's promise. The tension created by that wistful harmony is the only way we know to come to terms with the mystery of X, and balance the vastness of eternity against the vanishing mist of our days here. In our defense against an unsearchable eternity, we give rise to every song ever sung, and reason to every story ever told. 

A ten-year-old boy may not have been able to articulate that thought, but he damn sure knew it to be true. Knew it in his bones.