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.

John Henry Has Left The Building

Year One vs. Year Twenty-Five

A year ago today, I hit the reset button on my life and started Act II. What follows is the love-letter and breakup note I wrote to my old life on my way out the door.

So today marks the end of an era. After over twenty years in the game, I’m hanging up these heavy ol’ bags and taking a public-sector job coordinating projects for the University of Oregon. Like most big transitions in life, it was both a bittersweet decision and a much-needed change that’s been a long time coming. By now it goes without saying that I’m a sanguine soul, given to reflection and pontification upon life’s vicissitudes, and never more so than at times of momentous change.

I still remember donning my first set of borrowed leather nail aprons in February of 1994, and going to work for my then-girlfriend’s hard-ass father, Doug Parmenter, installing cedar siding on a second story scaffold of dubious structural integrity. I had an innate fear of heights and power tools, I got shocked by faulty extension cords a bunch of times, and was soaked to the skin for over eight hours on day one. After just that one shift, I was convinced I could never bring myself to return; it was not only physically taxing and painful, but terrifying as well. But my fear of death was no match for my loathing for the taste of Ramen noodles, Gub’ment cheese, and poverty. So return I did.

Throughout the nineties I held a variety of short-term construction gigs, from cleaning up job-sites to digging ditches, demolishing structures, pouring concrete, and driving forklifts. I worked for peanuts, risking life and limb for hardcases, assholes, and felons that stiffed me money, and who eventually died by gunfire. I drifted along, letting life happen to me while I had no particular plans; days became weeks that floated by until I was hemorrhaging entire years as though I’d live forever. Then one day I woke up in the 21st century and realized that I was a carpenter. I wasn’t in school or any form of training for other occupational pursuits, and I had no plans to do so. I figured I’d either better get busy making other plans, or start being what I was about. So I decided to embrace the path I was on, and bloom right where I was planted.

First set of trusses I ever rolled. A terrifying experience.

Since that time, I’ve broken most of my fingers, several of my toes, and lost all of my fingernails multiple times over. But I’ve kept all my digits, which is no mean feat, believe me. I did destroy both my knees in the process, but saw them inexplicably regenerate after nine years of wearing braces full time. I bore witness to one other miracle I can’t explain, but that saved my life. My hands, arms, and legs are a network of scars whose lividity on cold mornings is like a topographical map of all the glancing blows, near-misses, and narrow escapes that the Almighty has, in His good humor, seen fit to grant me. I’m told He has a soft-spot for carpenters for some reason. 

I’ve pulled embedded nails out of my own hand with pliers clenched in the other, closed up wounds with superglue and electrical tape in lieu of stitches, and seen a man crippled before my eyes. I’ve spent entire summers living out of town in crappy motel rooms, worked months on-end in the claustrophobic confines under houses filled with dead cats, rats, and live possums, and doubled down on fifty-hour work-weeks with side jobs for family, friends, and total strangers. I’ve ridden three companies into the ground, then started my own, which took me from the height of success, making more money than I’ve ever made in my life, to the depths of poverty where we almost lost the house. 

It’s been a brutal couple of decades, but not entirely without its charms. I’ve built thirty-four houses, five of them beginning with the foundation itself and ending at the ridge-cap on top, including every board, nail, and drop of paint in between. I’ve demolished whole buildings by hand, resurrected over forty homes and businesses from the unspeakable devastation of fire, and even built a dog house and a couple of chicken coops, to boot. 

I’ve worked countless weekends—many of them for free—to make things right for my boss or our clients, and once went seventy-one days straight without a day off. I’ve met some of the most intelligent, talented, hardworking, and generous people on Earth by working in the trades, been mentored by the finest gunslingers and scalawags, and taken more than a few greenhorn apprentices by the scruff and gruffly passed on the industrial wisdom and roughneck grace given to me in love. 

I’ve ridden second story ladders all the way to the ground, fallen off two roofs, walked third story catwalks with no safety gear, and even worked a thirty-eight-hour nonstop shift once. I’ve thrown the ball for countless clients’ dogs, answered a billion questions from their kids, and been rewarded with bottles of the finest hooch—even a Takamine guitar once—as a bonus for a job well done. People have entrusted their homes, their businesses, and their very lives to my craftsmanship, and I’ve lost sleep over those responsibilities many times. But I’ve also earned the best nights of sleep in my life for those exact same reasons. 

It’s been a helluva ride. It’s been a life. In those twenty-some-odd years, I’ve never met even one carpenter—three-hundred pound Marines included—that could pick up my bags without exclaiming how heavy they are. I guess I got used to that weight, because I'm finding it hard to put them down now. The pride I take with me from my hard-earned membership into the fraternity of men and women that build the world is not something that can be bought for love or money, and not something I’d trade for anything in this world, or the next. But I’ll take that office and pension now, please and thank you.

Onward.

 

Straight Pimpin' It

On my first day of work at the University of Oregon I met a myriad of people, ranging from the VP of Administration, to one of the Governor’s Aides; from the Director of Budget Operations for the entire University—who writes million dollar checks all day, every day—to the guy who cuts every single key, for every single door in the entire University (113 buildings across a 295 acre campus). But the only guy whose name I remembered at the end of the day was Sam’s.

I met Sam on day one, and he started giving me shit on day two. Like, first thing in the morning on day two, 7:25AM. So needless to say, we hit it off right away. He works over in Campus Stores, where we get our electrical breakers, thumbtacks, and department uniforms, among other things. He drives a forklift.

The other day as I was walking past their delivery bay door, he called out to me about the new shoes I was wearing. He was sitting astride his Hyster just waiting for another cog in the machine to do their part, so he fired off some quip in my direction, as is his wont. As it happens, that was the very first day I’d worn the shoes in question, since they’d just arrived in the mail all the way from Northamptonshire, England. They're Brogue leather Wingtips that badly need to be broken in, because they are tight and squeaky when I walk. They're also a rust color that is hard to describe, as it lies at the intersection of Classic and Mariachi Band. As a surprise to no one at all, they are Dr. Martens, which makes them inherently awesome.

My love affair with the good Doctor began in 1989 when the coolest Bohemian Punk Rock Girl I’d ever met showed up with pair, giant pilgrim buckles and all. I spent a long time envious of their ineffable cachet before I  bought my first pair in 1991, when I’d finally scraped together $120 of disposable income for the first time in my life. In that twenty-five year span I’ve worn out only one pair, but all the way through, so that the soles of my feet touched the pavement. I’m on my second pair, which I’ve worn daily for fifteen years, and they look every bit of every mile they’ve covered.

I walked over to Sam’s forklift to give him a solid gander at the awesomeness of my imported kicks. Then I told him the tale of how my Mom sent me a hundred bucks in the mail recently, and told me to buy a pair of shoes that made it look like I belonged in the world of carpets and air conditioning, instead of sawdust and cursing. When Sam heard I’d been in construction for twenty five years he gave my khakis and polo the once over and shook his head.

“So she wanted you to look like you been somewhere,” he said. 

I thought that about summed it up. She knew I’d spent a few hundred dollars trying to look the part of someone that belonged in this ecosystem, but after that I’d stepped right back into my ancient Docs, broken and worn by hard miles of living. Didn’t even bother polishing them. 

Then I propped my foot up on the wheelwell of the Hyster and pulled up my pant cuff to show that the neon-rust colored Wingtip Docs were also a seven eyelet boot. 

He gave an appreciative whistle and said, “Damn, son. You straight pimpin’ it!”

At this point I should mention that Sam is black and in his fifties, so he totally pulled that off. I’m white and in my forties, so I laughed uproariously, but attempted no street-cred response. Partly because this is the University, and PC is not just the law, but the religion of the land as well, and cultural appropriation is a capital offense. But mostly because I still say things like “street-cred” along with other dated urban references that clearly mark me as hopelessly uncool. To which I can only say that I have the virtue of being aware of it and the wisdom to not pretend otherwise. I swear, it's purely ironic. I’m a fan of graciously letting go the things of my youth—like superhero T-shirts, swinging hammers and, you know… street-cred—and stepping gently into the Autumn. 

Of course, some things are easier to give up than others. This transition from working man to full-time supervisor has been harder than I thought it would be. And I don’t mean my duties. I still jump at the chance to do actual work with the guys when I’m supposed to be job-shadowing them. I still take straight-line solutions instead of entering the labyrinth of University bureaucracy, even though my position exists exclusively to lead contractors and clients through that same Byzantine bureaucracy as if I held Ariadne’s Thread. 

Although my skill-sets, both professionally and personally, lend themselves to this position, I still feel like I’m only pretending to belong here. Putting on a costume of polos and khakis and feigning polished adulthood. Leading meetings, setting agendas, writing memos, requisitioning this and that, authorizing expenditures, assigning work orders. Like Dianne Fossey amongst the gorillas, I’m attempting to assimilate myself into this ecosystem. Except she kept company with noble beasts while I am walk among the Professionally Politically Correct. Here every syllable is carefully measured, every word weighed, and the audience —including those that might be in earshot— assessed, before anything is carefully doled out in the most geometrically inoffensive way possible. We’re on day twenty-two, and so far no one suspects anything. They appear to have accepted me as one of their own. 

Someone recently used the words “newly-minted work persona” to describe my change in circumstances, and it stopped me in my tracks. I couldn’t have put it better myself. It perfectly captures the entire ethos of clothes, diction, and affect I don in the morning like other people put on their pants. The funny thing is, I distinctly remember doing the same thing when I entered the world of construction, all those years ago.

The first time I ever told someone on a construction site  that the 3-4-5 triangle they were using to square up a wall was actually called the Pythagorean Theorem, I instantly discovered that erudition would be met with disdain. So l eschewed my polysyllabic vocabulary in favor of an Everyman patois, scratched myself inappropriately a lot, and said “Da Bears” as much as possible to avoid displaying an intellectual pedigree, lest I be "accidentally" thrown from a roof one fine day. 

But after twenty five years of wearing a blue collar and affecting that as my identity, it’s become clear to me that the surface guise has metastasized all the way to the bone, as evidenced by the fact that I think Sam is the man, and I can't even remember the name of the Governor’s Aide. It appears that the thing I was only ever pretending to be, I have become. 

Hopefully it’s not too late to step out of those ratchet workbooks and into some dope-ass Wingtips, and straight pimp it to some street-cred in this 'hood. Word, homey.

The Sleepwalker's Guide To Chicago

Lately I’ve been talking in my sleep. I can’t imagine what I’d have to say, or what cryptic messages might arise from down in the dark where the Other Guy lives. Usually I sleep like I’ve got an off switch, a dreamless blink of my eyes and night becomes day. You know, except for like...twenty-seven years of sleepwalking culminating with me half-naked on an Interstate in the dark of night and far from home. Aside from that, I sleep like a stone. 

Of all the places I’ve ever come-to when that Other Guy let go the reins, the most disorienting was definitely the night in 1998 when I found myself on foot out on Interstate 74 outside Chicago at 3:OO AM at the age of twenty-seven. The most practical was when I was fifteen and woke up having just finished cleaning my room at 4:00 AM. If only all my chores could be done in my sleep. It’d be like always waking up to a better world. Imagine that. Another time, I woke up taking a dump in the kitchen garbage can when I was five. I’m not really sure how to classify that one. I guess that’s polite enough when you consider how many other places, besides the toilet, he could have done that.

No one’s ever caught me in the act, so I don’t actually know if I would die from being roused in that state, though I’ve landed in some scrapes because I didn’t wake up in time. Once, when I was twenty, the Other Guy swapped places with me in midair, having lunged from my bed at the throat of some enemy we must’ve dreamed up. Like Wile E. Coyote realizing he’d sped over the edge of a cliff, I seemed to hang in mid-air for a moment before crashing down into the pile of dirty laundry at the foot of my bed. It could’ve been worse, not every landing is so gentle. When I was nine I woke up with my legs tangled and twisted up in the sheets, dangling upside-down from the top bunk, trapped between the bed and the wall, having dreamed of imprisonment in the lair of the Wampa from Empire Strikes Back. My waking escape from that predicament was somewhat less heroic than Luke Skywalker’s.

I’ve wondered many times over the years about the Other Guy, this somnambulist squatter living in my head. I mean he looks just like me, but seems to have no compunctions whatsoever about the propriety of bowel movements or dress codes, though I will grudgingly admit he has better housekeeping habits than I do. He might also be a bit more courageous than me; never hesitating to do the thing that needs doing, charging in without thought to the consequences. Which is how I wound up out on that Interstate in the wee hours, left holding the bag for the mission he was on.

Pretty sure the swank Inn he was headed to has a strict “no shirt, no shoes, no dice” policy that he didn’t think through too well, since he left my crappy motel room going commando in a pair of Levi's, no shoes or shirt. Gotta give him credit for remembering our room key though. And the pants. Let’s not sell him short there. Because that would’ve been a helluva thing to explain to the graveyard concierge at the Davy Crockett Motor Lodge where I was staying. But lacking shame, fear, or the sense God gave to a mule, I can’t decide if he’s the best or the worst part of me. Shitting in Mom’s garbage can would seem to make a pretty solid case for it being the worst part. But I can’t help thinking that what propelled him headfirst across an Interstate, on foot in the dark of night, marks him as the better part.

When I received her wedding invitation, I felt like pinching myself. Was I awake, or had I dreamt those years of my life?  How else could time enough have passed for her to meet someone, fall in love, get engaged, and plan a wedding? To have become an actual adult? Did I miss that many letters and phone calls? Had I sleepwalked across three entire years, open-eyed but fast asleep? Invitation in hand, I packed a bag and headed for Chicago to find out.

The ceremony passed like a fever-dream. I watched two grown-ups get married in their finery, while my best shirt and only tie stood out like a Fig Newton on a plate full of Christmas cookies. At the Country Club reception, the affluence was attended by a river of Grey Goose and Courvoisier that flowed continually, while I tried to blend in and keep my flask of Jaegermeister out of sight. I felt like I belonged at the kids’ table. 

When the music began I found myself with beautiful women in my arms as the drinks flowed, world without end. A strange fervency propelled me forward; as everyone else celebrated the beginning of a life together, it was like I was mourning the end of something I had no name for. Fueled by this—and a bottomless vodka glass—I won a heated gladiatorial contest for the Bride’s garter, thus becoming King of the Party. I used my powers only for good, of course: cutting in on any slow dance I felt like, and generally making a genteel ass of myself. And a lovely time was had by all. So much so that when decorum mandated the party come to an end, the core of us that were still raging decided to take the festivities to the Drury Inn just down the Interstate, where most of the wedding party was staying.

Sadly, the staff at the Drury were a bunch of fuddy-duddies who took a dim view to our 1:00 AM revelries and took it upon themselves to alert the constabulary of the greater Chicago area, who responded promptly to quell our shenanigans. In response, the coterie of well-heeled drunkards scattered when the flashing red, white, and blue lights of freedom began. In a sudden maelstrom of chiffon, the ladies attending me took flight, hems in hand, cerulean satin garlands trailing in the breeze of their passage. The panicked staccato of their scurrying heels would have been comical were it not for my imminent arrest as their ringleader.

And so I slunk out the back door into a gravel lot and hoofed it across the Interstate, threading my way boozily between the sparse traffic, to duck into the cheap little filing cabinet I’d rented for to lay my head. That was my intention, anyway. Turns out Other Guy had other plans. Feeling restless and deflated, I showered and passed out. I remember dreaming about those fair damsels in distress, being loaded into a paddy wagon by Eliot Ness and the coppers, as is the Chicago Way. So, feeling I had deserted them in cowardly fashion, I rallied and went to the rescue. Because fuck the Po-lice!

But when the Other Guy made it into the grass median separating the East/West lanes of the deserted Interstate and saw the Drury—lights down, silent as a tomb—it was me that woke up and realized that the party was over. Really over. I may have rallied for years on-end, but it was closing time, the lights were up at the bar, and I had the kind of life you get when the music ends and you sit in whatever chair is left to you. I hadn’t been in a meaningful relationship in over two years, I had a job a teenager could do, and I was half naked on an Interstate far from home, trying to rescue people that had gone back to their real lives simply by going to bed. Closing time; you don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.

I can’t help thinking that's what he'd been trying to tell me.

I awoke on the highway Eisenhower built in the sure knowledge of all the things that had slipped through my fingers; the friendships, the opportunities, all the days lived on good-time autopilot, open-eyed but fast-asleep. And all I was left with was no shirt, no shoes, no dice. Because it turned out that no one needed to be saved, except me. For the first time, the Other Guy seemed like the one who’d been wide awake, looking out for us while I was asleep at the wheel, allowing my life to spool out without care, as though I’d live forever. So I turned away and gingerly made my way back to my shabby motel, my bare feet wet with the morning dew, relieved when I found that he’d remembered the key.

And the pants. Let’s not sell him short there. 

I’ve never sleepwalked again from that day to this. It seems twenty-seven years was all it took for the Other Guy to get us back on course. When I awoke the following morning, I had the mother of all hangovers, my mouth tasted like something had crawled in it and died, yet somehow I didn't mind. I made my way to the airport feeling like absolute hell, but went back to my life eyes open. 

Imagine, always waking up to a better world.

On Hangman's Hill

So the reason One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish is the best Dr. Seuss book of all time is because the lady who hit me with her van happened to have a copy of it on hand, which her friend read to me as my head rested in her lap, soothing my tears on the way home. Turns out both of the ladies knew my mom from the neighborhood Tupperware parties, because that’s how they rolled in 1977. So instead of calling an ambulance like they would today, they just picked me up from the bottom of Hangman’s Hill and loaded me and my ruined bike into their sweet ’73 Econoline camper-van, and drove me the two blocks back to my house at 27 Mervine Ave., Monterey, CA.

I was thinking of that moment today, recalling the tinted window in the wall of the camper-van and the scratchy texture of the lady’s polyester leisure pants against my cheek as she read those endlessly rhyming Seuss couplets. I’d never seen a van with a picture window or table and chairs in it. I imagined my sister and I playing Go Fish or Battleship at that table—as opposed to being shoehorned into the back seat of our little Datsun—while our family rolled down the highway on any of the infinite road trips we were always making to visit aunt, uncles, and cousins in other states. To this day, that Econoline luxury remains, to me—along with One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish—the pinnacle of awesomeness. But even as I was reminiscing about the incident, the wonders of modern technology were working their particular magic. Namely, letting the air out of my childhood memories as I strolled virtually down the old avenue from the comforts of my couch using Google Earth.

I’d been looking for my former home and discovered that the entire neighborhood had been razed and rebuilt after the Military closed the base and their housing tract during all the consolidations under Clinton. Our old addresses still existed, but instead of the three basic models of DOD domiciles that had proliferated in prosaic little lines to house the ever-rotating roster of Naval officers and their families, newer homes had been erected by civilians which reflected the architectural character of that historic town instead. It’s a much better looking neighborhood now, but I can’t help feeling kind of sad about it. I guess we all want the world of our childhood to stand inviolate as a museum of our lives, a monument to our existence.

   

Although 27 Mervine Ave. was a totally different house now, it was still cool to roam up and down the streets. From the convenience store on Leahy where I’d plunk down every nickel I’d hoarded in exchange for as much Bazooka-Joe gum as I could cram into my gob, to the mud-flats behind the store where we'd hunt pollywogs; past La Mesa Elementary where I’d fallen in hopelessly in love with Miss Brimmie and enjoyed my only season of athletic prominence as I utterly dominated at 4-square; then all the way up to the much-vaunted Hangman’s Hill at the end of Mervine where it intersects with Shubrick Rd. The Hill was a place that even angels feared to tread, but where fools rushed in.

Fools like me.

While we lived on Mervine I made three very serious attempts to become a superhero in complete earnestness, all of them ending badly. Two of them were variations on the theme of me attempting to gain superpowers by purposefully shocking myself with 120 volts of electricity, about which the less said the better. The third was when I attempted to turn my 1977 Murray Eliminator II bicycle, complete with banana seat, into the Batmobile. I accomplished that by means of an ingenious parachute of my own design, which would theoretically stop my bike dragster-style, just like Batman. That’s right, I’m the reason your favorite TV shows have to have the disclaimer: “Kids, don’t try this at home.”

My infallible Bat-parachute was made from the finest materials: a black store-brand garbage bag from under the sink for the ‘chute, and some brown packaging twine from Dad’s tool bench in the garage to anchor it to the rear of my banana seat. I punched several holes in the edge of the garbage bag to knot the twine through, looping it around the tail-reflector behind the seat. I was careful not to unfold the garbage bag before its maiden voyage, lest it get tangled in the rear wheel. Because safety first. Instead I tucked it between the seat and the reflector, ready to deploy for the first time on its maiden voyage down the precipice of Hangman’s Hill.

None of the neighborhood kids had ever dared to go rocketing down The Hill on their bikes, so if my invention worked, I and my bike… nay, Batbike…would be the envy of the entire first grade. I couldn’t have been more ambitious, excited, or filled with unwarranted confidence as I sat astride the Batbike staring down The Hill, ready to launch myself into the annals of history sans helmet, pads, or adult supervision. 

Such was my total confidence in the Bat-chute that when it failed to deploy—and my six-year-old brain could only think, “The Bat-chute… it does nothing!”—I never even applied the coaster brakes that the engineers at Murray had so thoughtfully installed on the Eliminator. Instead, I shot full-speed through the stop sign and out into the T-intersection at Mervine and Shubrick, with my unopened ‘chute streaming behind like a black flag. As I collided with the unsuspecting ladies in their groovy Econoline van (complete with desert mural) just behind the driver’s-side door, launching myself ass-over-teakettle into a faceplant against the side panel, rebounding off and rolling out into the road, I cussed myself as a novice. Because I hadn’t unfurled the bag from the factory-folded condition it came from the box in. Except for that, it had been a GREAT idea! You know, if not for that one and only flaw in my otherwise awesome plan.

The next day when I saw the condition of my bike—the handlebars bent 180 degrees around, the front wheel completely crushed in, the tire flat and the rim a twisted wreck—I realized what a bullet I’d dodged. If I’d been a fraction of a second earlier to the bottom... she'd have hit me, instead of me hitting her. But owing to that fraction of a second's difference in time, aside from a skinned knee, I didn’t have a scratch on me. I’d gone head first off the edge of the world like a champion, got hit by a car, and had come out unscathed. So although my plan had failed, I held a place of distinction amongst my fellow first graders for my dauntless bravado. Because you know who else dodges bullets like that? The goddamn Batman, that’s who.

And then adulthood and the Internet happened.

Today, as I was on my virtual walking tour of the neighborhood, I finished with a trip down that Matterhorn precipice of memory, mighty Hangman’s Hill. In my six-year-old’s mind it was a miles-long, vertically diving Olympic-level ski-jump. But thanks to Google Earth I’ve now seen that it was about the length of four houses and was around a 5-6% grade, which is just a tad bit steeper than the drop on the kiddie-coaster at a carnival.

I guess that explains why the Bat-chute didn’t work; there wasn’t enough velocity and wind resistance to force it open. What I really needed was a better quality trashbag, not like that flimsy store-brand kitchen one. Maybe a Hefty Lawn and Leaf bag… some grommets to reinforce the eyelets and keep the bag from tearing… some bailing wire to attach it to my bike… maybe an explosive of some kind to deploy it. And of course a much, much steeper hill.

Quick, Robin! To the Batcave!

Fare Thee Well, Jesse James

I hadn’t been at my delivery job with Industrial Finishes very long, so when Gary the Plant Manager for Silverado Trailers called me back to the office to inventory the order of automotive paint supplies I’d brought, I thought I’d done something wrong. It turned out that he just made up an excuse to try a new card trick out on someone. It was called The Jesse James Gang, and it seemed like real magic, so I immediately began cajoling him to show me how he’d done it. But like any good magician, he wouldn’t budge.

Gary and I got along like gangbusters right away, despite the twenty-year disparity in our ages. He knew a few more card tricks, but was a boundless repository of jokes and the most god-awful puns. What sound does a piano falling down a mine-shaft make? A-flat miner. See what I mean? Once a week I’d make an identical delivery of thirty-six spraycans of metal primer for the welds they made on the trailer frames, he’d call me back to the office away from the shop floor to “inventory” the order, and we’d spend ten to fifteen minutes shooting the breeze, and exchanging all these awful puns and jokes. What’s blue and smells just like red paint? Blue paint. Badump-kssh! 

I didn’t ask him to teach me The Jesse James every time, although I always wanted to. Though it was mysterious on the face of it, it seemed frustratingly simple. It only had three moving parts, and there was no shuffling involved. How hard could it be? The set-up requires collecting all four Jacks and assembling them side-by-side and top-to-bottom, displayed together in one hand. This is the Jesse James Gang, and the deck is the bank that they’re going to rob. Three of the Jacks go into the “bank,” randomly inserted anywhere in the deck, while Jesse stays up on the roof—the top of the deck—to keep lookout. He gives the signal to let the gang know that the Sheriff’s posse is coming and to get up to the roof for their escape. At which point the magician taps the top of the deck and all four Jacks are suddenly back on top, which they demonstrate by flipping them over. Three Jacks down in the deck, tap it once, and where only one Jack should be, suddenly all four are back on top. Abracadabra. 

Gary was a man of considerable stature, tall and portly, hair already silvering like our President, Bill Clinton, at age 46. An affable guy in his niche, not overly burdened by ambition or regret, an MBA running a shop full of nachos & NASCAR types. I’m guessing that’s why he took a shine to me and my polysyllabic ways, as someone to volley with in an otherwise prosaic world of machined surfaces and utility. 

As time wore on, between jokes he would sometimes tender a bit of wisdom to a young man too cocky to think he needed any. Some of it seemed comedic and silly to me, although I think he meant it. “Don’t marry a beautiful woman. They’re nothing but trouble.” Some of it didn’t seem to apply. “Learn how to drink Scotch.” I’ve learned. And a lot of it was generic stuff that I’d heard a million times from parents, uncles, youth pastors, and other mentors of more standing than Gary. “You become the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

One thing he said to me has stayed with me over all these years, probably because it was unique to him. No one ever said it to me before him, nor have I heard it since. Gary asked me one day how old I was. I told him I was twenty five and he replied that he was actually twenty-five himself. “Or at least that’s how old I feel on the inside. That’s the thing they never tell you, how you stop aging on the the inside, but the outside goes right on. At some point you notice that your neck doesn't turn all the way to the left anymore, and you never really get that back. Every day I look in the mirror and wonder, 'When the hell did that happen? And why does my back hurt?' You don’t ever feel old, you just get old.” He looked at my twenty-five year old face and saw my blank incomprehension and said, “Ok, I can see you don’t believe me. But don’t throw it away, file it away.”  

So I did. And as the years advanced, careers changed, relationships came and went, friends moved into other more distant orbits, responsibilities piled on, money came and went, tragedies ensued, I realized that Gary was right. I felt like a stone in the rapids, somehow stationary and unchanging as events and time flowed around me. But then I’d look at my hands and see the advance of time written in callouses and scar tissue; I’d see the back of my neck in the barber’s mirror and realize the deep lines and wrinkles baked in by years working under the sun had been tirelessly advancing; a picture from the wrong angle highlighted an incipient bald-spot. And the first time I ever said aloud, “When the hell did that happen?” I thought of Gary. 

The day inevitably came when I couldn’t keep driving a truck for a living just because it was fun and I loved my coworkers. As I was moving on the the next phase, I paid my last fifteen minute slice-of-life visit to Gary. We made all the usual awkward talk about how great it had been over the last three years and how we’d stay in touch, and hovered between manly handshake and uncomfortable man-hug for what seemed like an eternity. Before I left, I took one more pass at getting him to reveal the trick to the Jesse James. 

“Do you really need me to do that?” he asked. “You’re a bright guy. Isn’t there really only one way it could possibly work? After all, it's not as if it's actually magic.” 

I said that I didn’t, although I still did. I left without ever learning the secret, and of course never saw him again.

Now that I’m the same age Gary was then, I can’t believe how many times I’ve repeated his insight to all the guys I’ve mentored in my life and career over the years. I don’t even take credit. I tell them the story of Gary, and simply endorse his wisdom with my own experience. And then they look at me the same way I looked at him, and I just say, “Don’t throw it way, file it away.”

Since Gary was right about that—even when I was too dumb to know it—I’ve decided to similarly believe all of those other people who say from their deathbeds that their number one regret is losing touch with their friends. I must be past the halfway point, because all I really want anymore is time with few good friends and somewhere to be where we can look each other in the eye and actually hear what each other is saying. I mean, I may feel twenty-five, but the second I’m with people in their twenties, I realize I’m for sure in my forties, and I don’t need all the noise or flash in my life anymore. And then I wonder when the hell that happened. And why does my back hurt?

The other thing Gary was right about was me not needing help to solve The Jesse James. Eventually, I figured it out on my own. I mean there’s really only one way it could have worked. The Jacks are a mask for the disposable cards hidden behind them, and they themselves never really go down into the deck at all. Once I saw how the trick was done, I wondered how I’d ever fallen for it. Like every magic trick, it’s really about distraction, while the switch is made right under your nose. Just like the rest of life.

After all, it's not as if it's actually magic, right? Abracadabra.

Errant Signals

Take it from me, when you’re on the lam like some rube in witness-protection—except from your own life instead of the mob—and you find yourself out on a nameless ribbon of blacktop in the middle of the night, unsure even of what State you’re even in, you’re gonna wish you’d spent more than five bucks on a pawnshop boombox of dubious provenance. Especially when the tell-tales in the dash light up like a Christmas tree, the open hole where your car-stereo used to be is venting hot air into the cabin, and there’s nothing but the feeble cones of your jaundiced headlights stirring the darkness out in front of you. Because when that Pawnshop POS eats your last mix-tape and you’re left with nothing but a bellyful of anxiety and the static-lashed spectrum of AM radio on the dial, you’ll know what you should have done with the extra cash instead of splurging on name-brand cigarettes.

I was pretty sure I was still in Montana, but only my watch and the gas gauge told me so. If my calculations were correct, I had just enough fuel to coast into a parking space in front of the dorm at my new job in Yellowstone National Park and immediately begin singing for my supper. But the only thing I actually knew with any certainty was that I was southbound and down on Highway 89, I had a quarter-tank of gas, a half pack of smokes, six dollars cash—assuming a buck-fifty of assorted change in the seat cushions—and exactly that much was right with the world.

In the debit column was everything about my hooptie. The window-crank was useless, and the glass was held in place with a matchbook wedged against the frame, the speedometer was inaccurate to varying degrees depending on what gear you were in, and the driver’s side door was held shut with a rope. Don’t even get me started on the calamities the heads-up display was screaming about. I should’ve put those last couple bucks in the tank back in Livingston, but I thought I might want something to eat other than a cigarette or roadkill.

I’m on a road with a number for a name and no speed limit, that feels like it’s being created from nothingness just beyond the reach of my headlights. Hoary telephone poles march relentlessly alongside, draped in mute skeins of wire. Otherwise, there’s one ahead and no one behind. I’m just hoping for a gas station or rest area to appear, before my bleary eyes forget to open after a blink. With no music to combat the numbing road noise, my head begins to feel like a bowling ball rolling precariously atop a tired post. So I paw at the Pawnshop POS on the bench-seat next to me to toggle it over to the radio.

There’s no sense pretending that FM even exists out here in these Martian badlands of sage, scrub, and igneous peaks; that wavelength is just too short to even attempt this vastness. Without looking I can tell the difference between the polite, muted white-noise of the FM band and the insistent buzzing of AM static, like a swarm of something angry. So I begin to scroll the tuning knob indiscriminately, searching for anything in the dark. Merle Haggard, Tammy Wynette, Dr. Demento… Anyone. Anyone at all.

Dots and dashes of fading lane markers flash silently past me, and drowsing in and out of highway-hypnosis, I strain to decrypt an otherwise silent message somehow embedded in the air itself using technology invented in the 1870’s. They didn’t have ballpoint pens, but this they could do. I’m practiced at this patient crawl through the increments of the potentiometer from all the nights I spent trolling the barren airwaves with the crystal-radio kit my vaguely anarchistic uncle helped me build as a kid.

Then, as now, I was up past my bedtime with nothing but all the time in the world to strain for a voice in the darkness of mere being.  Didn’t matter if it was sleepy public-radio monologues, Waylon Jennings, or madmen crying out in the wilderness of local-access pirate-radio. There is an exquisite loneliness inherent in a voice arising from the emptiness, at once furtive and confidential, like a guttering flame pressing back against the void. With radio, neither the speaker nor the listener can know one another, or whether or not they are alone in this world as they connect in some uncreated space of charged particles.

My head drops and I catch the faintest wisp of dream, ephemeral as smoke, before my chin hits my chest and wakes me. I snap back up with an electrochemical jolt of purest panic, and for a second I think I'm standing still as the road moves under me. I shake a cigarette loose from the dwindling supply and chase the tip with my Zippo, willing the nicotine to work some buzzing magic on my head as I blink away the flame’s after-image from my dark-adapted eyes. The dial bottoms out at one end and I start back the other way, patiently searching.

Each blink is a gamble and the white-noise is beginning to sound dangerously like a lullaby when the voice of bedlam itself emerges from the static, as real as a passenger suddenly with me in the cab. It’s  an ancient baritone, grown tired from decades of whispering through an AM megaphone about perpetually falling skies. His seditious murmurs like those of an agitator stalking the edges of a crowd, gently inciting, fomenting. Art Bell. The Hobo-Laureate of the airwaves, whose voice distinguishes itself from the fuzz of interference by virtue of its madness alone.

Art Bell, Hobo Laureate of the the AM airwaves

Soon I’ve sucked down four smokes back to back and I’m wide awake like a kid listening to ghost-stories around a campfire. But these tales are told by grownups living twilight lives, echoing from the loneliness of graveyard shifts, as they call Uncle Arty to talk about a bump heard in the night. Everyone with a straight face, everything given equal credence around the warmth of the radio dial's dim glow. Time seems to dilate until I see my own dim glow ahead that resolves into a pair of sodium-vapor lights attending an empty parking lot. I pull into the empty Emigrant Peak rest area, the sweep of my weak headlights revealing picnic tables, restrooms, and an inexplicable little chapel standing alone on the edge of the pool of light.

I park askew, in haphazard disregard to all the lines, and kill the engine. Draggin' my beleaguered bones and the POS into the bed of the truck, I pull the canopy shut behind me. Wrapping up against the April chill in a nest of sleeping bags and dirty laundry, I’m awash in conspiratorial whispers of chemtrails, mind-control, and alien visitations until they lull me into a dreamless sleep. I awake in the morning to the insistent buzzing of white-noise; the station is pure static once more. Whatever serendipity it was that arced an errant signal off the Stratosphere to find me in the dark has passed.

By way of thanks, I offer the first and only genuflection of my life in the chapel at the bust of St. Christopher, patron saint of travelers and lost souls, and then hit the road. One hour later, I slide into a parking spot in front of my new home, with almost a gallon of gas to spare. Almost.