In His Wake

The day after Christmas 1995, a Scotsman walked into an Irish bar for a German wake in a fading corner of the geographically largest city in America. I was 2,956 miles from home. At twenty-four, I was old enough to order whatever I wanted inside the doors of MacCool’s, but still young enough to feel like I didn’t belong in a place called MacCool’s. I went in anyway because you don’t duck out on a wake, especially for your own Grandad, regardless of how you felt about him. Or so I'd gathered. I’d never actually been to a wake, which seemed like a very grown-up thing to do. At that point I’d yet to do anything that actually made me feel like an adult, and I thought maybe going to a wake might be the thing that would.

And I guess it did, at that.

Leo Frey was: a first generation immigrant, born in England to German parents, a military man, and a hard drinker. He arrived at Ellis Island as a child of ten, just in time to grow up in New York City in the teeth of the Great Depression. So they lived the kind of hard-scrabble life that immigrants do pretty much anywhere in the world, multiplied by the grueling effects of that economic nightmare. Eventually he went off to war, and when he came home he raised two kids who turned out to be outstanding individuals. Who, in turn, raised another crop of outstanding individuals, if I do say so myself. Which I do. His wife Nana—that's Muriel to you—stayed with him through thick and thin for all the decades of their married lives, with one notable exception.

She came to stay with us for a time when I was about nine, because of Leo’s drinking. My parents put her in my room, and I moved out into a glorified shed on the back of our property. I didn’t really mind because it was like having my own house, plus Nana doted on us all the while, so my cookie intake tripled. Still, it painted a picture of Leo that was kind of disturbing to a kid, and I didn’t have a lot of positive memories of him to begin with.

Mostly I thought of him as a gruff guy who liked to tease. Like once, when I was five, he let me steer his golf cart, but I almost put us into a sand trap and never heard the end of it after that. And he used to joke about making cat soup out of our household kitty, aptly named Klutz. It should have been obvious he was joking, but the limits of my humor didn’t extend past an anvil dropping onto Wile E. Coyote’s head, so ironic remarks about the culinary appeal of my pet were not well received. His nickname in the family was Pickle-Puss, not only because of the roughness of his affect, but the permanent scowl on his face, even at rest. Resting Bastard Face, we call it today.

He wasn’t all bad, he used to sit my sister and me on a giant stuffed lion named Leo, which he owned as a personal mascot, and drag it around his living room with us on it while he made lion noises, which he excelled at. But since the birthday and Christmas cards always came in Nana’s handwriting, and even his name was signed in her floral script, he seemed like a distant ancestor whose entire contribution had been in making my Mother. So walking into his wake in MacCool’s Irish Pub in Jacksonville, FL in my only button-up shirt to say a final goodbye seemed like a formality. A show of respect to my Mom and Nana, but little else.

Needless to say, I was surprised when—after the salty, old-school elegy his compatriots delivered—one of his VFW buddies made a beeline for me while I was waiting my turn at the bar. The ancient pub was full of white heads and VFW garrison caps, it smelled like dust and spilled liquor. As I waited, the air was slowly turning blue as a pall of cigarette smoke filled the joint. With all the dark mahogany paneling and inches-thick armor of lacquer on everything, it seemed like a library of alcohol.

The Irish were born thirsty, so I'd been waiting for a while. Although at a wake full of seventy and eighty-year olds, a twenty-something punk doesn't even register on the radar, so I might have waited forever. Thankfully, the instant the old VFW guy walked up, the barman immediately had time to take an order, but the old duffer kindly deferred hist turn to me.

"What's your poison, boyo?" the old duffer asked in an Irish brogue that must have been quite thick in his youth.

The barman looked at me like I wouldn't have the decency to order a Guinness, or worse, that I'd order a Coors Light instead. Which I did. I was just starting to become a proper beer snob, but none of the microbrews I approved of had made their way to Florida by that point. Since Guinness seemed less like a beverage and more like an ingredient for a pipe bomb, what choice did I have?

"Coors Light?" the old duffer asked in dismay. "Belay that order," he said to the barman. After a moment's silence, he looked up from his facepalm and asked with exaggerated patience, "You know what kind of beer we drink in these parts?"

I shook my head.

“Scotch.”

I barked a laugh, the first I'd had since being immersed in the solemnity of Leo’s passing, days previous. The old timer smiled and his dentures were white as snow as he extended his hand to shake mine. “I'm Doyle. How’s about I buy you a man’s drink, O’B?” He seemed to enjoy my surprise at his knowledge of my childhood name, long since changed. He continued, “Or are you still going to insist on being called Lawrence?”

I looked around, trying to figure if someone was playing a joke on me. Should I know this grizzled old Irishman? I couldn’t even say if Doyle were his first name or his last; could've gone either way with old Mick like him. So that was no help and my family was spread out around the room socializing, and none were looking my direction.

“Stand easy, boyo” he said. “You don't know me. But I knew Fry a long time, so I felt like I knew his kids and grandkids some, too.”

I started to say, “Actually it’s pronounced…”

But he went right on, “I know bloody well it's pronounced ‘Fray!' But ol’ Fry hated being called Fry, so I kept right on with it. Served the old Kraut right.” Doyle said to the barman, “Two Glenlivets.” He gave me the once over, then turned back and said, “Lots of ice for him.”

“Thanks,” I said, not meaning it now that I had a glass of Scotch to choke down.

We plunked down on a couple of stools against the mile-long mahogany bar, and he pulled a pack of Pall Mall’s from his shirt pocket with liver-spotted hands. He offered me one, but I was already reaching for my Camel Wide’s, as a big a snob about cigarettes as I was about beer. He beat me to the punch with his lighter, and I noticed that his hands shook as he chased the tip of my smoke with the tiny flame. I felt a sharp pang of fear at the idea of growing old.

“I didn’t think that barman was ever going to serve me,” I said.

“He wasn’t. It's the Devil’s own luck he didn’t keel haul you out of here, dressed like that,” Doyle said.

I looked down at myself. Button-up blue and black plaid shirt, khaki pants, Doc Martin boots. Again he confused me, which is all the old Mick seemed to be able to do. I couldn’t tell if he was just a drunken Irishman, or if I was just an idiot.

He read my confusion and seemed to enjoy it. “That’s a Scottish tartan you’re wearing for a shirt, boyo. Your family’s, I’d guess. Any other day in here, they’d have fed you your lunch and popped the bag. But Fry was alright, for a Limey-Kraut and all, so us old timers made an exemption for him drinking in here with us. Long as he had his garrison cap on.”

He took his own off his iron-gray head, and showed it to me. It had an emblem sewn onto it that I couldn’t make out, but it seemed heroic. It was surprisingly heavy for what was essentially a woolen envelope for your head.

“You feel that weight?” he asked. “That’s three silver dollars sewn in under the patch. That way when we was in port, if some towny ballbeg started asking for it, a fella could sap his noggin with it right quick and proper.”

I knew his words were all in English, but they were still Greek to me. I nodded sagely and took a drink of my Scotch, lest he think me a ballbeg and sap me.

“You need a chaser with that, boyo?” He asked, ready to flag the barman. I shook my head, afraid I’d have to chase the napalm out of my mouth with the nitroglycerin of Guinness. I waited for the warmth to hit my stomach and then had a hard hit on my smoke. It didn’t help much, but it was better than nothing.

“Sounds like you must have known my Granddad a long time?” I asked.

“Oh, aye. Me and him came up Puddlejumpers in the Coast Guard back in the war, when them Navy Squids was too hi-falutin’ to take guys with missin’ teeth like us.”

I nodded sagely, as though I despised them Navy Squids as well.

“Bout had to thump Leo good when he made Warrant Officer,” he continued. “A workin’ man’s got no business bein’ called ‘sir.' But he got what was comin’ to him when he had to work with all them college pukes as had gotten their commissions the easy way.” He drained his Scotch in a single draft and signaled the barman. When he had a fresh glass in hand, he raised it up and said, “To absent friends, Limey-Kraut Sunsuvbitchin’ Officers though they be.”

“Here, here,” I joined him in his toast, realizing it meant I had to fire another swallow down my gullet. It went down a little easier than the first draft. After that we sat in silence for a minute, him out of respect I guess, and me because I had no more in common with this old stranger than I did with my Granddad. If Leo had been there instead, the same silence might have been there between us since we hadn’t seen or spoken to each other in over ten years.

“You know he used to talk about you kids?” Doyle began again, apropos of nothing. “I suppose all us old-timers do, sooner or later. Nothin’ else to go on about ‘cept them glory days, and even we get tired of those old lies, eventually. So he’d show us pictures of you young chiselers, let us know how you got along in the world. It’s how I recognized you, don’t you know?”

“I was wondering about that. Guess I’m surprised he had that much to say.”

“Oh my, but he did. ‘Bout all you kids, though you’re the only one I see here.”

“My sister’s here somewhere,” I said. We scanned the room and found her looking for an escape from the semicircle of dirty old men trying to dazzle her with their charm.

“Shall we go and rescue her then?” Doyle asked.

“No. Trust me, they’re the ones in trouble.”

He laughed and said, “You've got ol’ Pickle-Puss’ tongue on you, all right. Said you were a quick one.”

I had no idea how Leo would have known any of that, and felt a strange sense of having been watched, retroactively. It was unsettling, though not entirely unpleasant. Like I was being curated from afar.

“Runs in the family, I'm told,” I replied. “But I've always taken it to be a Scottish trait.” I gave with a wink and had another slug of Scotch. It looked like he was thinking about giving me a proper sap with his garrison cap, but instead he let out a peel of laughter.

“Perhaps it is, O’B. Perhaps it is.” He crushed out his smoke then asked, “So how do you find driving a forklift to be? Better than diggin’ them ditches, I'd wager."

“Beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick,” I said. “But…”

“…Not by much,” he finished with me, followed by a wry chuckle. “Guess you’ve kissed the Blarney a time or two yourself, Lawrence. So I suppose you can be forgiven for tradin’ your moniker from a fine Irish one like O’Brien to a Limey one like Lawrence. Least ways as long as you don’t go by Larry. That’d be a travesty, even for a Scottish dog like yourself.”

“God bless America, land of the mutts,” I said.

“I’ll drink to that.”

I crushed my smoke out and said, “I thought you might.”

He signaled the barman for another round for both of us, and I didn’t object. My stomach was feeling pretty warm and my head pretty light, but the avalanche of ice in my tumbler hadn’t had a chance to melt much, and it would be wrong to let it go to waste. It went down easy as I sat and talked with Doyle for another half hour about ol’ Pickle-Puss, and so met a man I never knew.

Never knew that he’d kept track of my various jobs and girlfriends, the occasional move or adventure. Never knew that he was actually proud of me. I’m not sure I would’ve believed that as the kind of generic, reassuring platitude from one of my relatives at a funeral. But from a stranger picking my face out of the crowd, solely from the pictures he’d been shown over the years? That went down easier than the Scotch.

Doyle and I went our separate ways soon after that, him blending back into the sea of white hair as I went and rescued those dirty old men from my sister. She had them wrapped around her finger like she’d kissed the Blarney a few times herself.

All in all, the wake was pretty much as I’d expected, except for the part where it was nothing like I’d expected. You know, the part where I met a guy at his own funeral more alive in the memories of his crusty drinking buddies—and on the unseen fringes of my life all those years—than he’d been to me in the decade prior to his passing? I thought about the little narrative I’d written, rehearsed, and replayed over and over through the years about who Leo was. I started to wonder where the hell I’d come up with any of it.

As the family regrouped and headed out of the dim Irish pub and into the Florida sunshine, warm even in December, I was feeling a lot less sure of the world than when we went in. Like maybe I had no idea what was going on.

And if that ain’t the definition of grown-up, I don’t know what is.

Punchline

I first realized that God has a sense of humor on August 30, 1988, day one of my senior year. I was standing against the wall of an overcrowded classroom with thirty-five other kids, waiting for Ms. Zerby to assign our seating in the dingy space that would be our homeroom as we sprinted toward the daylight of graduation and freedom. I always hated when teachers assigned us desks, instead of letting us pick our own seats. Especially at a school like Long Beach Poly. There were so many thugs and tough-guys in the population that picking the right seat in a class could make the difference between sailing under the radar and getting noticed by someone that would spend a year making a sport out of my misery.

As such, I'd been looking around the room at the cross section of human misery not ready to face Algebra II at 7:45 in the morning, and had already identified a half-dozen guys that I knew would be trouble. My feral survival instinct as a 98-pound whiteboy at an inner-city school would have been to let them pick their seats and then sift myself somewhere in between the ones I was trying to avoid. Instead, I’d be stuck sitting next to whomever fate had assigned me the misfortune of sharing an alphabetical association with. Aces.

Matt Dillon, Outsider

In spite of all the questionable characters in the room—ranging from neophyte gangsters to truculent bruisers racing toward expulsion and a career under correctional supervision—I’d singled out the guy whom I’d decided was the absolute worst one. The competition was stiff, but I’d winnowed it down to the honky with the Elvis sneer, black boots, ripped jeans, white T-shirt, and a black leather motorcycle jacket. He looked like he’d stepped right out of The Outsiders, as though he belonged in 1950’s Poly instead, ready to menace Melvin Poindexter, my 50’s counterpart. Out of the wretched hive of scum and villainy that made up my plethora of shitty choices, why I picked Sean Blake from among their number, I’ll never know. But when Ms. Zerby called his name, I thought, “Thank God, he’s a B and I’m an E. That should put plenty of distance between us.”

Ms. Zerby the insane

Then she started directing the students where to sit in the bizarrely laid-out room, and the impossibility of predictions became clear. Instead of a standard class layout—with the teacher at the front and the desks all facing toward her—the room was divided in half, with rows of seats on the left wall and rows of seats on the right wall, both sides facing the center of the room with a wide aisle between them. Ms. Zerby’s desk was on the third wall of the room by the blackboard, in line with that aisle. Thus, the students all looked across the room at each other, but had to turn their heads to see the board or Ms. Zerby. This idiotic layout complicated things, so my mental calculus went into overdrive, one jaundiced eye on Sean the whole time.

Even with the unusual arrangement, I assumed that—like any sane person—she’d start with the first seat on the first row closest to her desk and assign people A, B, C down that row from the center aisle back to the wall. And so on, until she’d filled that half of the room and then move on to the other half across the bizarre center aisle. Given the proximity of B and E to each other, I thought I’d likely wind up on the same side of the room as Sean, but several rows down from him. However, as I was soon to learn, Ms. Zerby was an insane person. She began seating people right to left along the back wall and working in from that wall toward the center aisle. So the rows marched parallel down the wall, and inward toward the center, ninety degrees from the direction that I'd been expecting. What kind of a fucking psychopath thinks that way? One that puts on a sock and then a shoe, then the other sock and the other shoe, no doubt.

As I watched each person trudge slowly over to their seat, I was trying to estimate just how close a B and an E could be to each other when plotted along this cartesian cross-section of Ms. Zerby’s madness. I was suddenly filled with a dawning certainty that I’d wind up in dangerous proximity to Sean. He took his seat the second tier of rows in from the wall, and I watched seats fill with glum souls like I was watching a fuse burn inexorably down. 

“Blake… Bueller… Calhoun… Calibuso… Chu… Cordova…" I closed my eyes.

"Dacosta… Dao… D’angelo… Dorsey… Duarte… Echevarria… Eimer…"

Elliott.

Poor Lynelle

When I opened them, I saw that I’d be sitting next to Lynelle Eimer… and directly in front of Sean Blake. Sweet, fancy Moses! What were the odds? I trudged over to take my seat, resigning myself to a year’s worth of Wet-Willies, Flat-Tires, and Indian Burns, already feeling him flicking me on the back of the ear and demanding “Yo, dork! What’s the answer to number four?”

As it turns out, the first words Sean Blake said to me were actually, “You have to perform the functions inside the parentheses first, then go left to right through the equation.” Despite my expectations to the contrary, he didn’t sound anything like Biff Tannen from Back To The Future. He also didn’t have any tattoos, keep a pack of smokes rolled up in the sleeve of his white-T, or listen to Slayer like I assumed. And of course, he was noticeably better at Algebra II than me. So the year unfolded in ways unanticipated and unplanned, as they ever have, as they ever will.

It turned out that Sean and I made a sport out of Lynelle Eimer’s misery instead, by playing on her revulsion with spiders, squishy bodily noises, and the word “moist.” She gave as good as she got though, and cast us in the role of lovers desperately pretending to be straight, with our displays of machismo and boorish behavior. Eventually, I went on to tutor her in Chemistry in trade for her teaching me how to do the Robocop dance so I wouldn’t make a complete ass of myself at the Spring Formal. Or so I’d at least blend in with all the other twits making asses of themselves by doing the Robocop at the Spring Formal.

As the days passed, Sean and I discovered the many commonalities that we shared outside school. We both went to church, listened to Simon & Garfunkel incessantly, wanted to learn to play guitar and form a band someday, and enjoyed a good debate session for its own sake. He was from the wrong side of the tracks, or the river actually. The LA “River” was really just a massive concrete culvert we called the flood control. It bisected the city, functioning as a fifty mile long gutter, and there was definitely a right and a wrong side of it to be on. On the East Side, we had pockets of crime and gang activity, on the West Side, gangs were in open control of huge swaths of territory. So Sean’s West Side tough-guy demeanor and adornments served him well as a camouflage, but a peek under the hood revealed a kind guy, with an incisive mind and a nimble wit. Sean was a Junior, so we only had the one math class together, but we slowly built bridges each day toward being actual friends, as opposed to the at-school-only variety.

The day came that we crossed over when Sean said, “So, who you basin’ on, dude?”

The Los Angeles "River." We just called it Flood Control.

My mind instantly went to work trying to decipher by contextual clues what “basin’” was, so that I didn’t have to appear uncool or lacking in street-cred, which was an actual thing back then. I took a stab at answering the question, based on the assumption that he was asking who I was trying to date. I couldn’t really answer because I’d become embroiled in a cold-war love-triangle with my best friend and his girl. I couldn’t admit it, and I couldn’t move on, so I offered up a different truth.

“Yeah, I broke up with this girl over the summer, and I’m kind of bummin’ on chicks right now. What about you?”

“Heinous, dude. Sorry to hear it. I’m kind of into this fine-ass chick, Paulyne.”

I got a sinking feeling and said, “Wait. Not Paulyne Blanco?”

“Yeah, man. You know her?”

Unfortunately, I did know her. “Hate to say it, chief, but that’s the girl I broke up with this Summer.”

At this, Lynelle jumped in and said, “Drop the act, boys. No one’s falling for this. Just kiss and make up, no need for all the drama.”

Sean in ROTC uniform

In unison, Sean and I grabbed a pinch of cheek on our faces, wriggling it rapidly it in an out creating a gross, squishy sound that we knew was like nails on a chalkboard to her. She quickly plugged her ears and turned away, going “La-la-la-la-la,” to drown us out. Sean and I fell out laughing until Ms. Zerby shooshed us, as she’d gotten in the habit of doing. Turns out that our quadrant of the room was way more trouble than any of the so-called bad kids, who just kept their heads down and actually did their work, like a buncha losers.

Toward the end of class, when we’d been good for almost a half-hour—which was an accomplishment for us—Sean said, “Well, I’ve only been talking Paulyne up for a minute. I was gonna swing by and see what she was up to at lunch, but I could check in with my ROTC crew instead. We got us a couple of hotties over there, too.”

Paulyne

And that was that. He veered off of Paulyne for good, and never said another word about it. For which I was grateful, because I’d been a terrible boyfriend to Paulyne, cheating on her because she was a good girl who wouldn’t give it up and along came a girl that would. As well-deserved payback, Paulyne had no compunctions about flirting with—and dating—people in my circle of friends. So I had no doubt that Sean, with his confidence and charm, could easily have caught her interest, but he chose not to for my sake. No mean feat that, because Paulyne was smokin’ hot. And so Sean and I crossed over.

Ms. Zerby “retired” at the semester break, which I assumed was a euphemism for a recall to the factory to have her bolts tightened. It got us out from under her almost-human ministrations, though not quite soon enough to prevent Sean from seeing Ms. Zerby at the beach in a swimsuit one unsuspecting Saturday. The struggle was real, people. We all wound up in a new classroom with Ms. Wolfe, and life moved on.

Leighann or Winona?

Sean and I decided to take guitar lessons and start that band, so we found a course offered in the evenings at Long Beach City College. A washed-up old hippy taught us to play and sing some easy folk songs like “Tom Dooley,” “Leaving On a Jet Plane,” and “Feelin’ Groovy,” which obviously made us a band. We named ourselves Sir Lawrence of Blake Street, aka SLOBS, which was apropos if you’d seen either of our bedrooms. While we were taking the class at LBCC, Sean ambled up to a girl on the quad one evening and introduced himself, a skill I never mastered, or even really attempted. Her name was Leighann, and she looked just like Winona Ryder. I was always jealous of Sean’s ability to walk right up to girls and just start basin’ on them, shrugging off any rejections to bounce right back. I always took everything so personally that I would never venture out to initiate anything that didn’t occur organically. Sean could base on anyone, anywhere, anytime.

After the guitar lessons, Sean and I started doing more and more stuff outside of school together, which was a much-needed sub-plot to counterpoint the developments in the cold-war love-triangle of the main storyline of my life. Sometimes I would go and visit his holy-roller church, where everybody wore jeans and flip-flops and went to the mall after to share the Good News with all the boys and girls. That was another “other side” facet to our friendship, since my Church-life was governed by slick shoes, button-up shirts, and all the somberness that implies. My Church’s Calvinist Cadet Corps had taught me to build a fire, read a compass, and shoot a .22, but we didn’t share our faith, and we certainly weren’t allowed to play syncopated music the way Sean’s tribe did. Don’t even get me started on the heresy of their drums!

Having Sean as someone outside my main circle of friends was good for me in ways I couldn’t have predicted. He didn’t listen to the Cure or Depeche Mode, or obsess over Goth chicks. He didn’t have time to feel sorry for himself or ponder his navel. My nails were painted black, while his often had engine grease under them because he was fixing up a Honda Civic himself, paying for all the parts out of his wages from the frozen yogurt joint he worked at down on the shoreline. He was in ROTC at school, part of the rifle-drill team and they were seriously impressive. His room was all books on art, theology, and philosophy, stacked up on cinderblock furniture next to a weight bench. He listened to N.W.A. and Bob Dylan, Sinatra and Joni Mitchell, Metallica and Keith Green.

My Dad was an Elder in our Church, so I had a skeleton key that let me in pretty much anywhere on the premises. Some nights we’d break into the Youth Room at the Church and kipe root beers, play ping-pong, and lounge in the bean-bag chairs strumming on the guitars that Youth Pastor Dan left there. Other times we’d go to the community racquetball courts at the University, or the smoky pool halls downtown to play 9-ball, or the Laser-Floyd shows at the Planetarium. As the year wore on and school came to a finish for me, Sean fell tragically in love with a girl from his Church named Michelle. Meanwhile, my secret love for my best friend’s girl, Amy, came to light in the worst possible way, blowing everything to smithereens.

Although I’d graduated by then, Sean and I were joined at the hip, and we mooned over lost loves together, all bravado and basin’ aside. I’d ride my bike down to Shoreline Village—where he worked at Heidi's Frogen Yozurt—so I could mooch a half-gallon of Fro-Yo and an avalanche of sprinkles off of him. We’d sit out on the bench in front of the shop, eating fro-yo and hatching plots that had no chance of succeeding. Then we'd go and execute them with military precision. How in the world we got two guitars past security at LAX and into the international terminal to serenade Michelle into not moving to New Zealand is anyone’s guess. It went about like you'd expect.

For a minute there, Sean really owed me one for that last-ditch public proclamation in song. But then after my first breakup (of many) with Amy that Winter, he paid me back by letting me moon all the way to and from Knott’s Berry Farm on New Year’s Eve, listening to “Trip Through Your Wires” and “With Or Without You” on countless repeat as I lamented like only a besotted teen boy can. Which had the effect of negating all the rage from the Christian punk rock concert we’d gone to see. I can assure you, even the thrashings of the quintessential Christian punk band One Bad Pig are no match for teenage angst and self-pity. We drove home down the 91 at 20 mph in the thickest fog I’ve ever seen, Bono serenading us incessantly. Talk about taking one for the team.

Sean soon caught up with me at Long Beach City College, where I was already a campus fixture on the quad with my acoustic guitar, playing Jim Croce and White Lion songs. Much to my chagrin, rather than joining in with his guitar, Sean went another direction for his campus life by rushing a frat called THOR. He got in by successfully swallowing two live goldfish, so I’m not sure if either of us could really lay claim to being the big man on campus.

My main main, Red Floyd.

After I purchased my very first vehicle—a scrappy, red fixer-upper VW Bus named Red Floyd—I hit Sean up for repair advice constantly. When the clutch plate shattered into a million places on the last day of exams, he wrangled his dad over to my house to walk me through replacing it step-by-step. His dad was a gruff Vietnam Vet with a bum leg, so he could only instruct from a distance and point to things inside the engine compartment with his cane. He was an impressive mechanic, if a bit brusque and impatient at having to explain it to a couple of novices rather than do it himself. Under that crusty exterior, I think our admiration for his skills was satisfying to him in a way he couldn’t let show.

Amy and I at the Prom

Over the next year, I had an on-again/off-again love affair with Amy that produced more angst and heartache per pound than any other teenage melodrama in history. It necessarily came to an end when I was forced by economic circumstances to follow my parents to a nowhere town in rural Washington State. But while my parents moved up in May of 1991, Sean invited me to stay at his house for two months so that I could take Amy to her Senior High Prom, and have one last dance to say goodbye. I took him up on it, and we became roommates. 

Just like that, I was suddenly from the other side, too. And walking those mean streets that Sean had grown up on was an eye-opening experience. Seeing the gang-tag graffiti scrawled on sidewalks, stop signs, and fences, then learning to decipher their arcane scrawls to reveal the explicit death threats they contained, was more of an education than Poly ever gave me. I immediately felt the urge to trade the head-to-toe black gothic-ware, black fingernails, and Robert Smith-lite hairdo that I was sporting for an Elvis sneer, black boots, ripped jeans, white T-shirt, and a black leather motorcycle jacket.

Although Sean and I were both gone with work and school most of the time, we were still crammed into a 10 x 12 room together, with me on a futon on the floor. You never really know someone until you live with them and literally know what their shit smells like. Thunderdome! Still, we survived, making it all the way to P-Day. Predictably, my Bus broke down one more time on Prom night, so Sean and his dad got in up to their elbows to fix it so that I didn’t get grease on my tux or under my already black nails. I picked Amy up in her white dress and went to the Anaheim Hilton for our last dance together. As we parted the next day, Amy’s proclamations of love followed me down Broadway from her balcony.

Surprisingly, even after the months of living ass to elbow in his room, Sean still volunteered to go with me into the badlands of Nowheresville, WA, a thousand miles up I-5. So we headed out on our first road-trip together, mechanical problems dogging us the whole way. After a nightmare journey where both of our guitars got stolen, and a cultish backwater town filled with children of the corn almost cannibalized us for lunch, we arrived in Kingston, WA. My bus promptly died in the driveway, never to start again. Still, the fact that ol’ Floyd had sprinted a thousand miles across three states while essentially being on fire the entire time earned him a place amongst the honored dead in my eyes. After laying eyes on Kingston, I kind of envied him.

There were fewer people in the tiny hamlet than in just my senior class at Poly, and I felt like I was being marooned for all eternity. To make matters worse, during lunch down at Drifters—Kingston’s only restaurant—I called home to Long Beach, even though I’d promised Sean I wouldn’t. Come to find out that even though I’d only been gone two days, Amy had already hooked up with one of my best "friends." That was the day of my 20^th birthday. So that’s how that went.

From Long Beach, CA to Kingston, WA overnight. A bit of culture shock, to be sure.

After those months as my very first roommate, Sean could read me like a book, and could tell I was growing morose and beginning to spiral. Ever the optimist, he put on his cruise-director hat and began to manage my re-entry and decompression in Kingston, which I think had been his real intent in going with me on the trip to begin with. An old family friend of his named Eli lived about ninety minutes south, and when Sean got off the phone with him I had a job interview with Eli’s family-owned landscaping company. Not to mention tickets to see Crowded House in Seattle with Eli two weeks later. Then he took me by the scruff of the neck and drug me across Puget Sound into Seattle to meet girls.

My heart wasn’t really in it, but we found a scraggly waterfront dive called the OK Hotel Café where Sean chatted up the locals about the happening scene and where a sailor new in town might go to find a good time. Nothing materialized, but it weren’t for lack of trying on his part. On the midnight ferry ride back “home,” the ship was ghostly quiet, and I was feeling deflated. I was mulling over how I, a 20 year-old man, might run away from home and return to Long Beach to live in my van down by the river. Preferably on the East side, obviously. Although, really, if the Insane Crip Gang would have me, who was I to turn up my nose? But without Sean or his dad to bring Floyd back to life, how would I even get there?

Even though Sean was taking the train back to Cali first thing in the morning, he went balls to wall right up to his last minute in Washington. So when he saw two girls sitting kitty-corner from us in the empty main lounge of the ship, he decided to get up and go base on them. I could not have been more exasperated with him, but true to form, Sean came back with the two ladies in tow. He’d already been talking me up, and they came over all smiles and suddenly we were in business.

The lovely and talented Nicole.

The first girl was named Nicole, and she was a willowy brunette with gorgeous brown eyes and curly hair. Her friend Malia, however, was another story, and not a happy one. They could not have been more diametrically opposed in terms of their affect, and since Sean had done the leg-work—and was all confidence and smiles, while I looked like the poster child for a suicide hotline—I assumed that I’d get stuck with Malia. I've since learned that Malia is Hawaiian for either "of the sea" or "bitterness." One look at her and I knew exactly which one her parents had in mind. Or should have, anyway. The state I was in, it felt like a punishment, but I should have known better. Sean got the conversation going between Nicole and me, then turned and promptly threw himself on the grenade.

By the time Sean left at O’Dark:30 the next morning, I had a job interview, tickets to an amazing concert, and a date with the lovely Nicole to watch her strut down the catwalk at her very first modeling show. He’d been in Kingston for a total of 16 hours. Naturally, all of it went horribly wrong the second he left, but that’s on me. If Sean been the one marooned there, they’d be calling the place Seanston today. The term ‘wingman’ wasn’t really a thing in ’91, but as far as I’m concerned Sean Blake invented the job and then immediately broke the mold. To this day, when I remember what was going through my head the first time I laid eyes on Sean, I think it was the best joke the Almighty ever played on me.

Decades later, the punchline still has me rolling. Badump-kssh! 

All the young dudes.

How Ya Like Me Now?

In July of 1991, I was compelled by economic circumstances to move with my parents from Long Beach, CA to podunk Kingston, WA. The long-term relationship I was in came to an abrupt end as a concession to the fact that long-distance love affairs are folly. So I packed my guitar, comic books, and heavy heart into my VW Bus, and headed for the world of uncertainty a thousand miles up I-5. My best friend Sean Blake volunteered to go along for the ride without me even asking, for which I was grateful. I think he wanted to cushion the blow and see to it that I landed soft in my new life. He's a good egg like that. 

We were quite the pair, Sean and I. He was a tough-but-folksy-rockabilly type, who would have been at home in The Outsiders; leather jacket, white t-shirt and all. I was at the tail end of my Goth phase, black fingernails, Robert Smith-lite hairdo, and black everything head-to-toe. Together we were the founding douches of the band Sir Lawrence Of Blake Street, aka SLOBS. Our one and only gig had been at the Los Angeles International Airport, where we attempted to stop his girlfriend from leaving on a jet plane with the power of our acoustic guitars and smooth melodies. It went about like you'd expect.

A few hours into our pilgrimage to the great white north, the head on my Bus's engine cracked so we plumed thick clouds of white smoke out behind us continually, as we burned engine-oil like it was going out of style. If the engine weren't in the rear, or if it were water-cooled instead of air-cooled, the trip would have been sidelined immediately. Instead, every time we stopped for gas people saw the miasma of billowing smoke enveloping us and exclaimed that my car was on fire. Which they seemed to find alarming while we were at the gas pump. We just ignored them and added yet another quart of oil to stave off the inevitable heat death of the engine. Pure moxie and the benevolence of a God who loves fools and drunks were our only hope. 

After a ten-hour stint on the road, we stopped for lunch in a southern Oregon backwater called Wolf Creek. It appeared to consist of a restaurant and a boarded-up gas station. If there was more to it than that, it was out where the road disappeared into the trees. We weren't curious enough to find out. Although the restaurant was less than half-full, the American Gothic inn-keepers took one look at us and sat us all the way in the back right next to the kitchen doors, which swung open into my chair. 

The sparsely populated dining hall made it easy to tell when every single one of the children of the corn took their turn staring wordlessly at us. A cultish silence settled on the room, and the ting of cutlery was the only sound as we ate our meal. Our silverware was dirty, the water had floaters in it, the egg-salad was feverishly warm, and the service made it clear that we were as welcome as a couple of bastards at the family reunion. Rather than leave, we made our way into the dingy little lounge kitty-corner to the kitchen to play some pool before getting back on the road.

Like the restaurant side, the tacky, wood-paneled lounge was only moderately full. Maybe a half-dozen good ol’ boys in mesh-back trucker hats and muscle-car T-shirts, all pounding PBR tall-boys at two in the afternoon on a Thursday. But these guests had no compunctions at all about staring, pointing, whispering, and laughing at the two city-slicker goofballs that had obviously stopped in the wrong burg for lunch. The upside to being pariahs in Wolf Creek is that no one wants to join any of your reindeer games, so we had one of the three pool tables to ourselves for the duration.

9-Ball was our preferred game, and Sean and I were about evenly matched, although I got the sense that he let me win a few more than I naturally would have, in deference to my melancholy state of mind.  Especially that day, as I was incessantly mooning over my lost girl with all the subtlety of a chain-saw. The jukebox in the corner of the ratty old joint was braying a continual string of old-school country songs, which wasn’t helping. While Sean was racking for our next game, I went over to see if there might be any more palatable selections available. I wasn't holding my breath. 

To my delight, I saw that mixed in amongst all the Merle, Tammy, Hank, and Reba they had the Bonnie Tyler song "Total Eclipse of the Heart" on tap. I dug for a quarter to put it on. Sean and I played for a bit longer, and then I went back and put the song on again. And then again. There's nothing subtle about it, as it is perhaps the most effective companion for self-pity ever penned. It's also seven minutes long, and I had a bottomless appetite for more.

The tension and annoyance in the room ratcheted up noticeably each time I went to the jukebox, until every move we made was tracked like a ballistic-missile early warning system. It became clear from their glares that if I put it on one more time them good ol' boys was gonna open a can of whoop-ass up on us city-slickers. Still, only when we were damn good and ready did we make our way to the door. On the way out, I dumped every last quarter I had into the juke, calling out "Total Eclipse of the Heart" a dozen more times. 

 

"I don't know what to do and I'm always in the dark

We're living in a powder-keg and giving off sparks"

How ya like me now, Wolf Creek?!

How Can You Think Otherwise?

“...all we need to do to fix the world’s problems is adjust the feelings attached to them and open up the floor for various identity groups to have their say. All the old, enlightened means of discussion and analysis—from due process to scientific method—are dismissed as being blind to emotional concerns and therefore unfairly skewed toward the interest of straight white males. All that matters is that people are allowed to speak, that their narratives are accepted without question, and that the bad feelings go away.

No one can rebut feelings, and so the only thing left to do is shut down the things that cause distress—no argument, no discussion, just hit the mute button and pretend eliminating discomfort is the same as effecting actual change. So it’s not just that students refuse to countenance uncomfortable ideas—they refuse to engage them, period. Engagement is considered unnecessary, as the immediate, emotional reactions of students contain all the analysis and judgment that sensitive issues demand.”

The above is from an article in Vox magazine published in June of 2015. I read it at the time and copied these two paragraphs, because the line of thinking represented therein really bothered me. Three years later, the paragraphs were still sitting in the Notes app of my iPad, literally the first thing I ever used the app for. Three years later, and I work at a University and have seen first-hand that this line of thinking is alive and well. But yesterday, for the first time, I finally got told to stop Mansplaining (which my autocorrect recognizes as a legitimate word) and that my position as an older (ouch!) white male discredited my argument as to the importance of defining terms correctly when engaging in public debate. The original topic was terrorism vs. mass murder, when is it one or the other? By the time I was shouted-down, it had morphed into whether or not speech itself was violence.

My two primary opponents were a PhD and an attorney, who both made sure I knew the authority that their intellectual pedigree imputed to their otherwise shaky arguments (dissembling, changing the subject, parsing the difference between assault/battery in an analogy I used), before ultimately resorting to a categorical dismissal of my argument based on my identity as a white male. And an old one, at that!

It was disturbing, because we weren’t debating topics like sexism or discrimination, where I would naturally defer to someone’s life experience, rather than rely on simple rhetoric to tell people what they have or haven’t lived through. We were debating the definition of words. Which, theoretically, should have virtually as fixed a value as a mathematical equation, and in any case be unaffected by my cultural identity. The sky is blue, 2+2=4, and violence means violence. If the mouth that those truths comes out of affects a person’s ability to recognize the truth, all is lost.

The title of the Vox article was “I’m a Liberal Professor, and My Liberal Students Terrify Me.” When I went back to read it again, I found that the article has been blacked out by Vox, and you can no longer read it on their site, which I found kind of chilling. But the genie was already out of the bottle and the text of the article, as well as scathing rebuttals to it, are scattered far and wide on the internet. I’ve since read a half-dozen responses to the essay, which excoriated the anonymous professor who wrote it, which I’m sure is why Vox shut it down to begin with. I have been unable to discover who the real Edward Schlosser—the anonymous professor—is, but I’m betting he’s glad that he wrote it under a pseudonym at this point.

Further into the now-censored Vox article, the anonymous professor goes on to analyze a piece in New York Magazine by Liberal commentator Jonathan Chait called “How the Language Police Are Perverting Liberalism,” wherein Chait asks if "the offensiveness of an idea can be determined objectively, or only by recourse to the identity of the person taking offense." Anonymous Vox Professor had this to say in response:

“Here, he's getting at the worry that our judgment of a person's speech hinges more upon their identity signifiers than on their ideas. A sensible response to Chait's question would be that this is a false binary, and that ideas can and should be judged both by the strength of their logic and by the cultural weight afforded to their speaker's identity. Chait appears to believe only the former, and that's kind of ridiculous. Of course someone's social standing affects whether their ideas are considered offensive, or righteous, or even worth listening to. How can you think otherwise?”

When I first read this reply, I was agog. It had never occurred to me that people could even think this way. I can’t believe that I have to say this, but feelings and facts are not the same thing. They do not hold the same weight in debate, education, or the public forum. “But my feelings,” is not a valid response to anyone other than your mother. And it doesn’t matter whether you’re tall or short, skinny or fat, rich or poor, gay or straight, cisgender or non-binary, black, white, yellow, red, brown, or chartreuse.

“…that ideas can and should be judged both by the strength of their logic and by the cultural weight afforded to their speaker's identity. Chait appears to believe only the former, and that's kind of ridiculous… How can you think otherwise?”

I’m sorry, I keep thinking that if I repeat these words over and over again their preposterous nature will become self-evident and self-indicting. Donald Trump may have introduced us to the idiotic term “alternative facts,” but no one gets to have those, any more than they can have an opinion on the boiling point of water. Words mean things. And those definitions don’t change their meaning because you’re triggered, traumatized, or they give you icky feelings.

Now let me be the first to admit that getting shut down in debate because of my race, gender, and age was more than disconcerting. It was more than irritating. It enraged me. But stewing in that rage, I’ve had time to reflect on how others not as “privileged” as me (for lack of a better term) have felt many times throughout their lives. I’m not so tone-deaf as to believe that this is a new or unique experience, and it’s certainly not the first I’ve noticed of it happening in the world. It was just the first time it’s happened to me. Of course I’ve been told to shut up because I was impertinent, inexperienced, or not in possession of all the facts. But never because of who I am.

A couple of days ago, I was in a regularly-scheduled construction planning meeting at the University lead by a woman named Maggie. Having worked with Maggie for two years now, I can say that not only is she accomplished, capable, and educated, but she’s probably the most practical voice in the insane asylum of University politics. She really knows her stuff. Not just the ins and outs of her profession as Head Designer, but the intricacies of negotiating inter-departmental politics and the nuances of interpersonal office relationships. In spite of that, I notice how often she is interrupted or talked over during the meetings she’s leading. 

Now in a room full of construction-types, which is almost exclusively made up of men, there is always going to be jostling and brusqueness, it’s just endemic to the species. You always have to be prepared to stand you ground, and assert yourself to be heard. It’s no place for the thin-skinned. But among themselves, the words of these construction-types bump-up hard against each other with room for nary a breath to pass between, but rarely ride roughshod over the top, like they do with Maggie. She’s a gracious person, and always finds a way to humorously shepherd the conversation back onto track, but the difference between how they treat her and how they treat each other is pretty stark to someone who is paying attention. And this in a room full of men schooled in the rules of PC, which is no doubt mitigating the effect. Nonetheless, it’s still pretty bad.

That people can, with no fear of consequences, tell someone not in a protected group to be quiet because of their identity is proof enough that we’ve swung the pendulum past its tipping point in the other direction. If you can replace the word white with black in a sentence and make it offensive, it must logically be offensive either way. Logic is either a sword that cuts both ways, or else it isn’t logic at all. And the fact that conveniently selective application can now be passed off with a straight face as though it were objective is a sign that the cancer of this line of thinking has metastasized in front of our eyes.

So yeah, it sucked. But it didn’t change the logic of my argument, any more than silencing a person changes their mind. It doesn’t make the silenced wrong, it demonstrates others' fear of what they have to say. It used to be that people insisted on the right to their own opinion. Now we’ve arrived at a time and place in history where people insist on the right to their own facts. How can you think otherwise?

“On hearing their answer, we witness how a civilization begins its collapse. Postmodern academics use the license of the mightier and more insistent to have their way. How often do we hear this mantra?: “I’m a fill-in-the-blank, and I’m very passionate about this issue.” Such declarations have the effect of warning all with a different opinion to shut up, lest they be accused of insensitivity to the other’s feelings. Passion prevails over impotent reason.”

                            —2015 Forbes article “We Have Met the Enemy, and He is Us.”