Deep Cuts Part Three: Father Facade

Okay.  Let’s wrap up this depressing history lesson and get on with some truestoopidshit.

I wasn’t really a fully formed asshole until I came back from living with my father for the second time, so this last little bit of history will get us all caught up to that point.  Before then, I was a product of my environment; and afterwards, my environment was a product of me.  I did wrong again and again.  Knowingly.  Willfully.  Joyfully.  Not because of anything that happened in my past, but because I wanted to do wrong.

This post is going to be about losing my last little bit of the innocence, but don’t worry, it’s not that bad.  I really didn’t have a lot of innocence to lose at this point, and to say I “lost” it might be a bit disingenuous.  I’d have sold it for drugs had anyone been willing to pay for it, but instead, I just threw it away.

I started having mental breakdowns around the time we moved from Le Nez and roughly coincident with my decision to start stealing drugs and alcohol from my mother.  I only stole a little at first.  It doesn’t take much to get a twelve-year-old kid high.  When I started having panic attacks, insomnia, and bouts of depression, I never thought to connect these with the chemicals I was ingesting.  Not until just now, writing these words, did I even consider the possibility.

Funny little blind spot, that one, huh?

Anyway, these breakdowns got worse through middle school and high school, and eventually, I learned to incorporate them into my mythology.  I learned to give into the paranoia and enjoy the fear my panic attacks brought.  I learned to chemically amplify the delusions with booze and to enhance my insomnia with meth.  But that was later.  At first, my breakdowns scared the living shit out of me.

My mother took me to a free clinic a few times, and the psychiatric doctor gave me a couple prescriptions that I abused.  I used to go without sleeping for so many days in a row, that I’d actually hallucinate or fall asleep in the middle of sentences.  And this was before I’d ever even tried speed.  I saw other doctors and other therapists, but they all had different theories about what was wrong with me, and no one ever diagnosed me with anything solid.

I met Rudy at around this time, (Rude Dog Blog) and I started doing even harder drugs.  This, of course, led to increased breakdowns, and since I never told anyone that I was stealing my mother’s pot and alcohol, or my grandmother’s pills, no one ever made the connection.  And let’s not forget that I’d been hiding behind a reputation for instability and brutality for quite a while.  Now I had an actual mental condition!  It made for a handy excuse once I started getting suspended for pushing cabinets over onto kids, or stomping on them with my steal toed army boots.  (See Deep Cuts Part Two).

And then I went to middle school.

Within minutes of starting my first day of middle school, I knew I was going to get in a fight.  My instincts told me to establish myself within the pecking order quickly — somewhere near the top would be fine — and thereby avoid future fights.  So I picked a biggish Mexican kid who acted tough, and I called him out.

Yes.  We still did that back in my day.

I said something like, “Meet me after school at the bike racks, pussy.”

He flipped me off and said something in Spanish.  For the rest of the day, I got myself all worked up and prepared to fight.  I told all my friends to come watch.  I told people in my gym class, people I barely knew, to come watch.  I wanted big word-of-mouth buzz, and I got it.  Half the school must have been there, waiting for me and the Mexican.

At the time, I preferred the blitzkrieg fighting style.  I’d wait until my opponent started talking trash, and then, without warning, swing my fists wildly at his face until he started to run.  Once he began his retreat, I’d kick him with my boots, hopefully tripping him and knocking him to the ground where I could kick him some more.

The kid opened his mouth to talk some trash, and I didn’t even let him get a word out before trying to shove my fist down his throat.  Get this out of the way, I was thinking.  Stomp this guy and get some respect.

Only this kid didn’t run when I hit him.  Instead, he tucked his chin, lifted his hands into a boxer’s stance, and punched me back.  A lot.  And hard.

You see, ever since I’d been kicked out of Smithridge for attacking some kids with a hammer, I’d been fighting people who didn’t really want to fight me.  I’d fought guys who’d talked like they wanted to fight, and guys who’d looked like they wanted to fight, and even guys who’d thrown a punch or two, but I’d never fought anyone who’d really just wanted to fight.

And this kid wanted to fight.

He kicked my ass in front of everyone, and the protective coloration of my bad reputation was gone, just like that.  I felt like a turtle pulled from its shell, totally exposed to the environment and unprotected.  Now everyone knew that I was just a small and frightened little kid.

I wish I could say I returned to The Dojo in search of myself, or in search of my heritage, or in search of martial arts even, but that would be untrue.  I went home so I could learn to fight, so I could exact some revenge.

I hadn’t seen my Uncle Herb since moving out of The Dojo, seven years earlier.  I’d been told bad things about how he’d screwed our side of the family, and some members of my family actually considered me a traitor for going back, but I decided to make up my own mind.

Since I’d last set foot in the dojo, Herb had turned it into a martial arts commune and had it legally listed as a church.  No longer did the corner house have a porch or a front door that opened to the street.  High, wicker wrapped fences made the whole place seem like a military compound from feudal Japan, complete with a rock garden, sliding doors, and a little Buddhist shrine.  Classes were free, but most folks paid the suggested $30/month donation.  Herb told me not to worry about paying a donation, but that I should try to do something around the dojo to help out.

My very first class, I discovered that I already knew how to do many of the rolls and falls beginners find so daunting.  I don’t remember ever going to classes when I was a little kid, and I don’t even think they taught kids classes back then, yet I had apparently gone to a few, and my body still remembered some of what it had learned.

So every Tuesday and Thursday I rode the city bus from Trainer Middle School to the dojo.  I did my homework in the communal kitchen, swept the sidewalk out front, and vacuumed the mat and stairs.  I went to a one-hour children’s class, then I’d eat a snack and go to the two-hour adult class.  Afterwards, I’d sometimes eat dinner with Herb, his wife, and maybe a few students.  Then I’d ride the bus back to Sun Valley.  Eventually, I started helping teach children’s classes.

During this time, I excelled in school, didn’t get into fights, and cut my drug use down to almost nothing.  I hit the weights and ran.  I read books on martial arts, philosophy, meditation, military strategy, and magic.  In addition to Jujitsu, I practiced techniques for lucid dreaming, astral projection, and pain tolerance.  Everything seemed magical again.  The dojo has always been like that for me, and remains so even today, despite the defiling it suffered at my hands later.

Once, when I was just hanging around the dojo, I put an acupuncture needle against the back of my forearm, about two inches below my wrist, and slowly worked it back and forth until it stopped hurting.  Out of curiosity, I continued twisting the needle and watched as it painlessly slid further through the meat of my forearm, a full inch and a half, at least.  Eventually, twisting the needle began to hurt again, only this time, it hurt on the underside of my arm.  I looked, and, sure enough, the skin on the bottom of my forearm had begun to tent around the emerging acupuncture needle.  I figured I was pretty committed to the experiment by then, so I backed the needle off just a bit, set my arm down on a paperback book, and returned to drilling.  After a few seconds, I picked up my arm, and the paperback came with it.  I pulled the book off my arm and looked at the acupuncture needle.  The plastic cap of one end stuck out the hairy side of my forearm, while the pointy part stuck out of the soft underside.  When I flexed my hand, the ends of the needle bowed up and down.

“Quit doing that,” my uncles wife said, when she came into the family room and saw what I had done.  “You’re going to break that thing inside your arm.”

“Sorry,” I said.

She squinted at the needle.  “You should go show your uncle.”

So I went upstairs where the actual classes were held, and waited for my uncle to finish teaching black belt class.  When I showed him the needle protruding from both sides of my arm, he seemed very pleased and called some of his students over to see.  I loved making him proud of me and adored the attention.

I enjoyed the celebrity of being “Sensei’s nephew,” and for the most part, I did well in school and life while I attended classes.  So what happened?  Where did I go wrong?  What pulled me away from the dojo?

It was a couple things, actually, but the biggest reasons were definitely jealousy and girls.

First off, I was jealous of Uncle Herb’s children, or to be more precise, I wanted to be one of them.  Sometimes, like when I put the acupuncture needle through my arm, he was very proud of me and told everyone how I was his nephew and how I looked like Bumpa (his father).  Most of the time, however, I was just a kid that hung around the dojo.  Eventually, I came to the conclusion that I would never be as important to him as his own children, and even though that is the way it should be, the disillusionment took a bit of the glow off my training.  I told myself I was better than his kids, because I didn’t even need a father, and in doing so created a new myth: Bastard Leon.

Then there were the girls.  I’d messed around a lot by the time I went to middle school, but mostly it was clandestine midnight groping and secret screwing around.  No one wanted to be my girlfriend, and though I’d gone down on girls and gotten blowjobs and done lots of stuff, no one had ever really let me kiss them.  Then I got a nice girlfriend (See Helicopters Over Leon Street), and suddenly all the other girls started noticing me.

Of course, I dumped my nice girlfriend and started dating fast and dangerous girls.  One of those girls broke my heart a bit, and I decided to go live with my father.  The night before I moved to Oregon, I entertained two girls from school.  We drank stolen whiskey and smoked my mother’s crappy weed.  We messed around and traded blowjobs.  They promised to write me while I was in Oregon, but I never heard from either of them again.  I don’t even remember their names, but I remember one of them had extremely long and soft hair that, when I looked closely, seemed to contain every shade of brown, red, and blonde ever invented.

So I moved back to Oregon, to a father I barely remembered, and spent my 8th grade school year there.  The endeavor was doomed from the start.  Since last time I’d lived with my father, he’d become pretty bitter about my mother and her side of the family.  He took the stance that anything any of them said was a lie, and that I had been raised entirely by deceptive and manipulative white trash, and therefore, I must be a liar as well.  For my part, I’d given up on the idea of a father figure when I realized Uncle Herb wasn’t looking for any more kids.  I’d become attached to the persona of Bastard Leon, and actually living with my father made maintaining that myth difficult.  My father and I clashed early and often.

My father’s assumption that my family was dishonest was not without basis.  On Mom’s side of the family, the code of ethics had two distinct parts: the way we treated family, and the way we treated outsiders.  Family was to be defended at all times regardless of right or wrong.  Outsiders were lied to whenever it was convenient.  So I was stuck living with a man who’d become hostile towards my family, albeit with good reason.  Though I considered him an outsider, he was also my father, so I couldn’t live inside my myth of being a hard-case, bastard, ghetto-child while living with him.

Also, with my long hair, cigarettes, attitude, and aggressiveness, I was the ultimate misfit in the little hillbilly middle school.  By the time I left Oregon, at the end of the school year, I’d made some friends and been marginally accepted, however, the situation with my father had gone about as far as it could go without major violence.  I was nearly man-sized by then, and every night I went to sleep after long and detailed fantasies of killing him.

It was in everyone’s best interest that I not stay.  That first time I went to Oregon, when I was in second grade, things could have worked out, but by the time I went to stay with him in eighth grade, things had gotten too far out of hand.  I was proud to be a bastard, and he was a father who’d been misused.  I went back to Reno hating my father, and though we have a cordial relationship now, it took me a long time to forgive him for trying to be my dad.

The Nevada I returned to was not the same state I’d left, however.  A strange transformation had taken place while I’d been stuck in Podunk Fields, Oregon (a.k.a Brownsville, Oregon).  Nevada had discovered NWA.  When I’d left, everyone I knew had been smoking pot, fucking, and listening to glam rock.  When I returned, less than a year later, everyone was snorting speed, fighting, and listening to gangster rap.

The new world order suited me just fine.  Before Oregon I’d been hedonistic, but I returned with a sadistic streak.  I’d already learned to fight at the dojo, half of my family was dealing drugs, and the bad friends I’d left had done nothing but get worse.  Also, I’d accepted my status as bastard, returning from Oregon with the world’s biggest chip on my shoulder.

Fuck fathers.  Fuck my mother’s murdering husbands and junkie boyfriends.  Fuck Uncle Herb for not loving me as much as his own children.  Fuck my real father for trying to fill the hole he’d left in my life when I was two.  Fuck em all, because the bastard was coming home.

Deep Cuts Part Two: Preteen Wasteland

Grandma Gabrielle

In my last Deep Cuts blog, I wrote about the part of my childhood where I felt small and weak and helpless.  It was not a very large part of my life, but it was important, because I learned to hide behind a reputation for brutality and instability during that period.  I learned to create and maintain the myth.  This time, I’m going to write about the part of my life when I lived inside that myth, when I believed it.

So, picking up where we left off last time: I had just garnered a reputation as a pint-sized psychopath after attacking a gang of older kids with a hammer, but my neighborhood still scared the hell out of me, so my sister and I moved to Oregon to live with our father.

My mother and father split up when I was two, shortly before my little sister, Olivia, was born.  I have no memories of my parents being together.  As a mater of fact, I can’t remember a single thing about my father before I went to live with him in second grade, so when my sisters and I packed up and went to Oregon, we were really heading into the unknown.

I don’t have any bad memories from that first time living with my father.  I remember getting teased in school because I wrote some of my letters and numbers backward, but I wasn’t a pariah or anything.  I met a kid named Eli, who became my friend and has remained so to this day.  In the school musical, I got the “Sneezes the Clown” solo, and my stepmother made me a clown outfit complete with a never-ending handkerchief.

My father tried to teach me fatherly lessons.  For example, he bought me a bike for my birthday, but it was a jankety piece of crap that didn’t even work.  For weeks, he guided and assisted me as I sanded rust, oiled sprockets, and made repairs.  He helped me paint the bike with glittery blue paint, and his wife upholstered the banana seat with denim.  I was very proud of that bike, even though I wasn’t allowed to go further than the end of my block while riding it.

I probably should have stayed with my father, but I didn’t.  I went home to my mother and grandmother, to Reno, to Neil Road and all the terrifying crap that came with it.  I didn’t leave Oregon because I hated my father, or because I couldn’t meet his expectations, or because anything was wrong.  I just missed my mom.

My father brought Olivia and me down for a Christmas visit, and we just didn’t go back to Oregon.  This is a serious source of hurt for my father, as I discovered just recently while researching this part of my past.  Sorry about that.  I don’t have any good excuse.  Like I said, I just missed my mom.

And I really must have missed her bad, because Neil Road sucked.  My mother was still living with her friend, Sherrill, and Sherrill’s family, and they still smoked pot like it was a full time job.  We still bounced around from apartment to apartment a few times a year, always on Neil Road, however.  Once we lost our cat, Tiger Man, when we moved.  Later that year, we moved to an apartment a couple blocks from where we’d lost him, and there he was, just waiting to move back in with us.  I guess he missed his mom too.

After splitting up with my father, my mother dated a few dumbshits I didn’t like, married an asshole who turned out to be a pederast and a murderer, and married another guy who beat her from the day after the wedding until the day he died of pneumonia brought on by a cocaine overdose.  Not all of this happened while we lived on Neil Road, but I seem to recall a fair amount of conflict inside our household at around this time.

My best friend was a kid from the apartment building across from ours.  I don’t remember his name, but he was a year younger than me, and he never went to school.  During the weekends, we liked to play on the construction equipment in the lot beside ours, and once we even fired up a tractor when we found the keys inside.  If we played in the construction site before noon, however, a crazy black guy who worked graveyard would sic his Doberman on us.  One day, shortly before I left Neil Road, my friend told me in graphic detail how he’d molested his little sister, but I’d been too young to really understand.

Once, when my friend and his little sister were staying the night, we heard some shouting coming from the hardpack dirt courtyard outside.  Just as Sherrill’s husband, Frank, lifted the curtain to take a peek, a black woman clutching a baby to her chest burst through the front door of our apartment screaming about how her husband was going to kill her.  So my mother, Sherrill, and Frank brought this strange woman and her child into our home, locked the doors, and turned off all the lights.  We huddled in the kitchen as she explained the situation.

The woman said her husband had come home drunk, taken out his gun, and told her he was going to give her and the kids a ten second head start before he released his dog.  So the chick just snatched up both her kids and ran, barefoot, through the apartment complex, banging on doors and screaming.  Somewhere along the way she’d dropped her oldest child.

“Does your husband really have a gun?” Frank asked.

“Lots.”  She nodded while her baby cried.

Frank popped a banana clip into his big black machine gun, took a one-knee firing position, and aimed at the window.  Twice, a gun-toting silhouette crossed in front of the window, and Frank kept his barrel trained on it.  The front door handle jiggled a couple times, and someone kicked the door.

Despite the drugs in the house, Sherrill called the cops.  Apparently, the police dispatcher was not being responsive enough, and Sherrill screamed into the phone, “You’d better hurry up because we’ve got a machine gun aimed at the door, and if he comes in, we’re going to blow him away.”  I think she was trying to say it loud enough that the guy outside would hear it, but the police were not amused.

When the police finally arrived, they had all the adults in our household come outside into the lit up courtyard to be frisked.  As the oldest, I was left in charge inside.  I remember Frank handing me a .22 caliber rifle and telling me to shoot anyone who tried to come in without identifying themselves, however I’m not so sure about the veracity of that memory.  It seems highly unlikely that anyone would give a kid my age a gun, so perhaps I made up this memory, part of my personal mythology.

Anyway, the police caught the woman’s husband in the construction zone beside our apartments.  He had his dog and a hunting rifle in his car with him, and his daughter was tied up but alive in his trunk.  It turns out he was the same guy who used to sic his Doberman on me and my buddy, so the cloud had a silver lining after all.  With him in jail, me and my fucked up little friend could play in the construction site as early as we wanted and no one would try to kill us.

Well, not that guy at least.

My family moved to an apartment complex called, Le Nez around the time I was in fourth grade.  Le Nez had a pool, and it was actually in the Roger Corbett school district, so I wouldn’t be a transfer student anymore.  The name Le Nez is French for “The Nose,” but my whole life I thought it meant “The Nest.”  I still think of it as The Nest, because I always felt safe there.  For instance, we were now the worst family in the complex, which meant I could play outside without fear of getting beaten up.  Also, I’d been going to Roger Corbett long enough to make some friends and get a reputation as a fighter.  Even my sisters remember people saying, “Hey, don’t mess with that girl.  Her brother’s a psycho.”

The biggest reason I felt safe in the nest, however, was my grandmother.  When my mother, my sisters, and I moved to Le Nez, we moved back in with Grandma Gabrielle, whom we had not lived with since we’d lived in the dojo.  No matter what kind of crazy crap might be going on outside our apartment, or even inside the rest of the apartment for that matter, Grandma’s bedroom was always calm and quiet and safe.  She listened to classical and opera, jazz and blues.  She watched PBS and Star Trek.  She cooked “graveyard toast” and Malt-O-Meal on a little burner.  She is the reason I love music, science fiction, and myself.

Le Nez also seems like a nest in my memory due to how crowded we lived.  My grandmother, my aunt and her newborn son, my mother, my two sisters, and I (all seven of us) lived in a three-bedroom apartment.  Grandma got her own room, while Shelly and her baby got another room that they sometimes shared with Shelly’s boyfriend.  That left one room for my mother, my two sisters, and me.  As I recall, we shared that room with a couple of Mom’s boyfriends/husbands as well.  Like I said, it was crowded, but for the most part, I liked it.

I remember sneaking off my balcony on the second floor, and climbing down the support beam to the porch of our downstairs neighbor, a girl named Melissa.  Every Saturday night, we’d sit on a little bench seat fondling each other under the covers while we pretended to watch Saturday Night Live.  Once, her friend came over and all three of us messed around.  It was all innocent bullshit, but I remember thinking I loved Melissa for a very long time.

I used to steal my mother’s alcohol and pot and get messed up with a neighbor kid named Mike.  I saw his sister fifteen years later in an Oregon supermarket, and somehow, she recognized me.  I used to hang out with a kid downstairs named Travis just because I liked to peep his teenage sister while she was showering and changing.  His sister got cancer when she was still in her twenties, and I heard Travis committed suicide.  I was also arrested and taken to juvi for the first time while I lived in Le Nez.  For years afterwards, I told people I’d been arrested for trying to steal a television.  In truth, I had been trying to steal a pack of little plastic toys called MUSCLE men that cost something like a dollar at the time.

Then, sometime around the middle of sixth grade, Mom married a very old black guy named Norman and we moved into a new, double-wide trailer in Sun Valley.  We left Le Nez.  We left Aunt Shelly and her son.  We left Roger Corbett Elementary.  We left Grandma.

Sun Valley was — until very recently when they got a few houses on foundations and put sidewalks on a few of the bigger streets — the world’s largest trailer park.  It was like hillbilly heaven, right outside Reno, and I loved it.  My sisters, my friends, and I used to roam the desert hills all day, catching lizards and bunnies (See Rude Dog Blog), climbing rocks, playing war, and otherwise endangering our lives.  We once lowered Rudy down a mineshaft on a bunch of old plastic rope we found dry-rotting in the sun, and I’m still a little surprised we got him back up alive.  In the Valley, my sister, Olivia, burned down a very large hill of sagebrush.  Don and I tested homemade grenades on abandoned cars.  Rudy almost got killed by a horse he was trying to catch.

I don’t recall disliking Sun Valley Elementary School, but I did get suspended twice in just half a year, so maybe it was worse than I remember.  The first time I got suspended, I’d pushed a metal filing cabinet over onto a kid who’d been whispering mean things to me from the other side of the cabinet.  Since I was new, and the other kid was a notorious troublemaker, I was sent home for a day or two.  The second time I got suspended from Sun Valley, however, they nearly kicked me out.  Some kid was talking trash about my mother, which didn’t really bother me, and he made the mistake of expanding his area of insult to include my grandmother.  So I kicked him in the gut with the steal toed combat boots I’d saved all summer to buy, and when he fell, I kicked him some more.  I’m pretty sure they moved me on to middle school just to get me out of their hair.

And as soon as I went to middle school, things changed again.  My “big bully” routine I’d been hiding behind stopped working, and I found myself in fights with guys who actually wanted to fight back.  I started drinking more, smoking cigarettes, and doing drugs that didn’t agree with me.  Girls took up an ever-increasing percentage of my thoughts, and I would soon loose what little I had left of my virginity.  But all that shit’s for another time.  Next time maybe.

This time, I’m still writing about a fairly innocent version of me — a teenage bully so in love with the space program he skipped school to watch the Challenger space shuttle take a teacher named Christa McAuliffe into space.  The kid I’m writing about got nervous after repeated delays to the launch schedule and rode his bike to school.  When he walked into his classroom, no one noticed he was late.  A small television on a tall stand had been wheeled in front of the blackboard, and on the screen, crazy contrails of smoke twisted away from a ball of fire while the newscaster talked about an “unimaginable tragedy” in a voice thick with tears.  Everyone in the classroom looked stunned, including the teacher.

The kid I’m writing about this time knew immediately what had happened, and though it embarrassed him greatly, he sat at his desk, hid his head in his arms, and sobbed until his shoulders shook.

Later that year, I wrote an essay about it.  My teacher produced the essay during the only parent-teacher meeting I ever remember my mother attending.  I remember my teacher telling my mother: “Leon is obviously very talented.”

No one had ever said anything like that about me before, and I’d certainly never thought it myself.  Still, it took a long time to make myself believe those words, and sometimes, I still can’t make myself believe.

[NSFW] The Missing Links: Showing Off Your Genitals

[NSFW (but it should be)]

This Missing Links is dedicated to the genitalia of average men and women.  Though naked bodies shouldn’t be considered Not Safe For Work, you probably shouldn’t get caught looking at this on your lunch break.

You should, however, take a look.  It’s good for you.

I’ll Show You Mine.  A book of female genitalia that should be part of everyone’s high school sex ed class.  If you want to find pics from the book, buy it.   http://www.prweb.com/releases/2011/03/prweb5131214.htm

Lest we forget the boys, here is a link to an internet database of dinkies photographed in the flaccid and erect states.  Some willies actually triple in length when they become attentive.  Others basically just stand up, without changing size at all.  http://www.erectionphotos.com/softHardGallery/SoftHardGalleryP01.htm

Lions and Tigers and Drugs … Oh, My

Over the nearly forty years of my life, I’ve quit more drugs than most people have even tried.  I wasn’t addicted to most of them, though some were easier to put down than others.  Ironically enough — or not ironic at all, depending on how you feel about our government’s drug laws — the drugs that were the hardest for me to give up, were the legal ones.  I must have quit cigarettes two dozen times, sometimes for as long as a year, and quitting alcohol nearly killed me.

While Marijuana is psychologically addictive, it is not physically addictive, or not to me, at least.  When I quit, I didn’t get the headaches and shakes and body pains the way I did when I quit drinking.  I didn’t crave pot the way I craved cigarettes.  I just got grumpy for about a week, and I found myself less interested in . . . well, everything, for about a month.

Oh, yeah.  And the dreams.

Smoking a lot of marijuana suppresses my dreams, but those dreams don’t just vanish.  Instead, they back up inside my skull, waiting for me to stop medicating myself, and then they all try to get out at once.  Speed dreaming.  I call them dreamswarms.  They are intense and vivid and indiscernible from reality, the way I imagine a babies dreams might be.

This is a story about one particularly persistent dreamswarm involving tigers.

In my first dream, I’m driving when I see something big and yellow in the road.  I get closer and realize it’s a tiger.  It’s as large as my car and beautiful, and even though it doesn’t act aggressive, just the size of it freaks me out.  I wake from the dream, walk through my house to make sure there are no tigers, and go back to sleep.

Then I’m telling my wife about the tiger dream, and as soon as I get to the part where I wake up and find that it was all a dream, she interrupts me to say, “That’s not a dream.  Remember?  That house at the end of Marshal has tigers in the yard.”

I say, “No way.  How can it be legal to own tigers?  It had to be a dream.”  So we walk down to the end of Marshall, and sure enough, we find tigers.

At this point, I wake up again and realize that only a few minutes have passed since the last dream.  My wife is still sleeping in bed beside me, and has not even rolled over since falling into bed four hours ago.  She certainly didn’t just walk down the block to Tiger House with me.  But the dream is still so vivid, I’m laying in bed thinking, “did I just dream that, or do we really have tigers in our neighborhood.”

Eventually, I fall asleep, and dream that my daughter and I are walking past the same house, and I tell her, “I dreamed there were tigers in this house.”

Of course, just then, my daughter points and squeals all excited, “No Daddy, there are tigers here, look.  There’s one sleeping right under the mailbox.”

I look, and not only is there a tiger sleeping under the mailbox, but there are like five more of them, just lounging in the yard.

I wake from this last dream and lay there staring at the darkness.  Am I dreaming about tigers because that’s what I dreamed last, or am I having a bunch of tiger dreams because some crazy ass neighbor is keeping tigers in their yard?

No way.  That’s crazy.  Go back to sleep.

So I do.  I go back to sleep and dream that I’m laying in bed explaining to my wife about my dream.  She assures me that if someone owned tigers in our neighborhood, we would know about it.

“It would be on the internet or something,” she says.

“Yeah,” I say, “you’re right.”

She goes back to sleep, but I’m too nervous to sleep in my dream, so I check the house again and turn on my laptop.  I look at our neighborhood on Google Maps.  I check the street view of Tiger House, and sure enough, there are fucking tigers all over these people’s yard.  Then, as dictated by the logic of nightmares, I realize that my son is coming home soon, and he’s going to have to walk right by a yard full of hungry tigers.  It scares me so much, I startle myself awake and have the following conversation with myself.

Why am I dreaming about fucking tigers of all things?

It must be because my subconscious is really worried about something.

But why would my subconscious be worried about tigers?

It must be because I’m worried about those crazy fuckers down the block who have all the tigers . . .

Wait a second.  That part’s not real . . . right?

I do this again and again throughout the night.  Sometimes the dream seems funny, and sometimes it’s so scary I wake up drenched in sweat, but it’s always tigers.  So around 4AM, I’m laying in bed trying to puzzle out weather or not I really have a massive tiger infestation in my neighborhood, and I’ve pretty much lost track of where the dreams stop and reality starts.

My wife wakes up and asks me what’s wrong.

“I’ve been having these awful dreams about a bunch of tigers in our neighborhood.”

“Come here,” she says sleepily opening her arms.

I hold onto her, and the line between reality and fantasy snaps into focus again.  The dreams all seem funny now.  I tell her about them and she laughs.  I laugh.  It’s all better, and I feel myself dozing off again.

She laughs a little.  “I know why you had that dream.”

“Me too,” I say.  “It’s because I just quit smoking pot.”

“No.  I mean, I know why you’re dreaming about tigers, specifically.”

Something about this conversation is bothering me.  “Why?” I ask suspiciously.

“It’s that one house we drove past today, remember.”

My arms and legs suddenly feel cold.  This can’t be a dream.  Sure.  They’ve been totally realistic, but this just can’t be a dream.  If it is, I’m going crazy for real.

“What house?” I finally choke out.  “A house with tigers?”

“No,” she laughs.  “The house with the lions, remember.”

Holy shit.  I sit up in bed and actually yell, “Are you telling me there are fucking lions in our neighborhood?”

It takes her a little while to explain because she’s laughing so hard she’s crying.  I don’t see what’s so funny about a neighborhood full of man-eating tigers and — now apparently — killer lions.

“It’s the house with the lion statues on the fence.”

Yesterday we’d driven out Royal Avenue and passed a house with a bunch of lion statues on the brick fence around the property.  So, according to my wife, my subconscious had seized upon the big cats and tormented me with tigers all night.

Either way, I can’t get back to sleep after that, so I get up and make some coffee.  I turn on the computer and start writing, taking down the notes that will become this blog.  But before I do that, I go online and look up my neighborhood on Google Maps.

Nope.  No tigers.  Only lions.

Deep Cuts Part One: Sympathy for the Backstory

I’ve figured out why everything I write on this blog makes me seem like an asshole.  I think it’s because the story of my life, as told in 2000-word installments, has no plot and no character arc.  I never really change.  In order to rectify that, I’m going to do a couple blogs on my childhood.  Maybe seeing the relative innocence I came from, and knowing that I ended up all right in the end, will make the depths I reached as a teenager and adult resemble some sort of inverted plot arc.

Or maybe I’m just an asshole.  Feel free to judge.

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, my sister had a boyfriend who used to work for a telephone psychic company.  He had a special line in his bedroom to take those calls, and we’d sometimes watch him drunkenly toy with the lives of strangers.  I asked him how he made people think he was psychic, and he said he just told them things they already wanted to believe.

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like the most common thing I say when I’m feeling out a new customer is: ‘I can see from my cards that you’ve had a hard childhood.’”

“But what if they didn’t have a hard childhood?”

He just laughed at that.  “Everyone thinks they’ve had a hard childhood.”

He was right.  Here’s the hard part of mine.

Before I was born, my family had a lot of money.  They owned gold and copper mines, warehouses, carpet installation companies, martial arts studios, and a house in an upscale part of town.  Of course, I never saw any of that shit.  Shortly before I was born, a series of unfortunate events occurred that left my family broken and mostly destitute.

First, my Uncle Herb was arrested for possession of automatic weapons.  While he was locked up, the family businesses faltered, and fighting his court cases cost a lot of money.  Depending on whom you talk to in my family, you’ll get a lot of different opinions about where the guns came from, whom they belonged to, why the businesses faltered, and where the money for the court cases came from.  For instance, Herb claims that my grandfather set him up to take the fall for the guns.  I don’t know any of that shit, and I honestly don’t care.

Then the house on Lodestar burned down.  I’ve been told Grandpa John burned it down to collect insurance money, but Grandpa denied that till the day he died.  Pretty much everyone else in the family seems to think he did it, though.  However not everyone agrees about why Grandpa burned the house down.  One side of the family says Grandpa did it to pay for Uncle Herb’s spiraling court costs.  The other side claims Grandpa did it to pay off the IRS.  I’m not even sure if any insurance money got paid out, and again, I honestly don’t care.

The gold mine was still in the family when I was born, but not for long.  Before I learned to walk it had been lost to some sort of shady land deals with religious zealots and KKK members.  (See Grandpa’s Ashes)  All that was left was the martial arts studio and the property adjacent to it.  Uncle Herb says the Dojo was never family property.  Other family members say he snatched it away from them.  Once again, I don’t know the details, and once again, I don’t care.  My whole family has been torqued on dishing out blame for the family downfall for so long, it’s like a poison in our blood.

Anyway, I spent my toddler and early childhood years in the house next door to the Dojo.  All my earliest memories are from there, and it was a magical place to be a little kid.  I remember a student with no legs everyone called Spider, who used to walk everywhere on his hands.  I remember the annual formal classes and dozens of Gi-clad students doing rolls and falls outside on the sidewalks, while neighbors watched in shock out their windows.  I remember love-in type dinners after the big formal classes, where those same students flitted from the sauna to the hot tubs to the massage table and back in a long line of naked flesh.

I also remember sitting on the front porch of the corner house with my grandmother and my great grandmother — back when the corner house still had a front porch — sipping tea, and watching the sky go dark with dragonflies.  We didn’t seem surprised.  In fact, I think we’d been expecting them, what with the tea and all.  When a few of the monsters landed on the porch railing, I watched them creep along the wood on spindly legs.  I noticed their huge faceted eyes and the way their blue bodies seemed to catch the light like living metal.  This memory is one of the most puzzling things I’ve discovered while trying to remember my past, because, despite the vividness and detail of the events, I’m pretty sure it never happened.  Dragonflies of any kind are pretty rare in Washoe Valley, and I have never seen another of the big blue monsters from the swarm.  Not one.

I remember some bad stuff from my time at the dojo too, but nothing specific.  Mostly, I just remember this vague feeling that me, my mother, and my sisters where not wanted and that we were somehow inferior to Uncle Herb and his students. Eventually, we moved.  I don’t know why.  I don’t care why.

After the dojo, my mother, my sisters, and I lived in a lot of different places.  We stayed with my grandmother’s boyfriend for a while.  He was a quiet guy who played jazz drums and lived in a little singlewide trailer outside of town.  I don’t remember my mother ever being there, but I remember Aunt Shelly.  She was nine or ten years older than me and therefore often got stuck watching me and my little sisters.  She had a friend who used to ride horses through the trailer park.  I followed them out into a field one time because I had a crush on the girl with the horse.  They were passing around what looked like a small cigarette.  They offered the joint to me, and when I told them I didn’t want any, they slathered on the guilt.

“Well, if you aren’t gonna have any fun, then I guess we can’t have any fun either,” Aunt Shelly said.  “We don’t want you to tell.”

“I won’t tell.”

“The only way we can be sure is if you do it too.”

So I did.  I took a hit, and I coughed smoke, and I pretended to be high, but as far as I could tell, it had no effect.  Or maybe little kid brains come pre-altered, and we only sober up as we get old enough to stop believing in Santa.  Regardless, I learned to stop being afraid of drugs at a very early age.

After Grandma’s boyfriend, we lived with Aunt Bonnie, one of Uncle Herb’s ex-wives, out on the old Stead Air Force base.  She had no reason to take us in, my mother and her three kids, but she did, and for that I never thanked her properly.  I have very few memories of living there.  I recall getting beat up a few times at the elementary school, sneaking into the air races with some neighbor kids, and sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night with my older cousin.  My cousin had heard from Aunt Shelly how funny it was to get me high, so she used to take me along to all her clandestine parties, where half a dozen teenagers would feed me beer and weed and laugh at me when I stumbled around.  I liked the attention and the thrill of sneaking out.

Eventually, Mom, my little sisters, and I had to move on.  Don’t know why.

Our little family ended up bouncing around, staying in a lot of different apartments, mostly in the Neil Road area, and mostly with the family of one of my mother’s close friends, Sherrill.  My sisters and I shared a bedroom with Sherrill’s son and daughter, who were about our age, and we were expected to stay in the room and play for most of every day.  In the living room, our parents kept the bong going from the time they woke up until they went to bed, and I doubt if the metal bowl on that bong was ever cold for more than a few hours.

Outside our perpetually smoke-shrouded household, the neighborhood was Darwinian.  Neil Road wasn’t exactly Compton, but after the insular and self-contained reality of the dojo, it felt like Hell to me.  Shortly after moving there, I saw two young, drunk guys fighting in the street.  After the fight, I watched the loser crawl around leaking blood from his mouth as he searched for his missing teeth.  I remember feeling like I’d never be tough enough to live in a world where people had to bring their teeth home in their pockets.

Another time, a guy tried to kidnap me.  He pulled up in a mini truck and parked at the curb a couple houses in front of me.  I got suspicious when he didn’t get out of his truck.  When I got close, he leaned out of his window and asked if I’d seen a puppy.  The guy actually tried the old missing puppy trick; I shit you not.  Even as young and sheltered as I was, I knew better than to fall for that.  I shook my head and kept walking.  But continuing along the sidewalk towards home would mean I’d have had to walk past the guy and his truck, so instead, I turned immediately into the next driveway and walked up onto the porch like I lived there.  When the guy in the truck didn’t drive away, I opened the front door and walked into a strange living room where a Mexican family sat watching television.  The parents didn’t speak a word of English, and their teenage kids had to translate.  When I was done sobbing my story, the father of the household walked me home.

I got picked on by other kids in the neighborhood, and at first, I was too frightened to fight back.  But that couldn’t go on forever.  My life had become a lot harder, and eventually, I became harder in response.

That’s where the ball peen hammer comes in.

For weeks, my sisters and I had been terrorized by a group of older black kids.  My mother may have been dating a black guy at the time, and that might have been the start of the problems.  These kids threw rocks at my sister, Olivia, and me as we walked to or from school.  As soon as the first rocks started skittering past us, I’d tell Olivia to run home without me.  At first, she argued, but eventually she learned to run home on her own.  Then, with my sister safely away, I would turn around, lift my hands into the boxing stance my mother’s boyfriends had taught me, and get the living shit beat out of me.

Beating my ass seemed like a lot of fun for these kids.  I could tell they were really bonding and having a good time.  Once, when they knocked me down, I fell against an old fence, and the flimsy wood bounced my head like a diving board.  They took turns punching me into the fence, and then trying to punch me again on the rebound.  Like I said, lots of fun.

My family called the school, but nothing could be done because the older boys never did anything to me on school property.  We called the cops, but they just sent a patrol car to follow me to school . . . once.  Of course nothing happened that day, and the next day they kicked my ass even worse.  I got so terrified of going outside, I’d throw up my breakfast every morning, but staying home wasn’t an option.  Someone had to walk Olivia to school.

“You’re the man of the house now.”

People need to quit saying that shit to little boys.

I stole the little hammer from the junk drawer in the kitchen, slipped it up the sleeve of my jacket, and went to school.  I remember the walk to school very well.  Not surprising really, because it took roughly ten million years.  I shook violently the whole way, dropping the hammer and breaking into tears every block or two.  By the time I finally got to school — without incident, of course — my whole body had become physically exhausted.

I remember feeling like I was going to pass out, and I remember seeing the kids who’d been tormenting me on the playground.  I don’t remember much of the fight, however.  I’m pretty sure I got one of them in the cheekbone and was going for another when the teachers disarmed me.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t put anyone in the hospital or anything, however, I did get expelled from school.

Which was fine with me, because I’d hated it there anyway, and Roger Corbett Elementary was a lot nicer.  (See: Don Armitage: Happily Ever After).  And, the fight had another unforeseen benefit.  From that day on, I had a reputation around the neighborhood as an unstable and violent kid.  Other kids my age gave me a wide berth, and even the older kids started waving or nodding their recognition when they saw me.

This reputation bought me a little peace, but not enough.  Inside, I was still a terrified little boy, and I just knew something was going to happen to let the whole world see past my new facade.  My sisters and I went to live with our father, in Oregon.  It didn’t last long, but by the time I came back, I’d grown more confident, and stepping into the bad reputation I’d left behind was easy.

So, that’s the end of my traumatic childhood.  Boo-hoo-hoo.  Poor me.  Poor you.  Poor all of us.  But maybe it’s true.  Maybe we’ve all had traumatic childhoods, because childhood is, itself, inherently traumatic.  Think about it.  When you’re really young, you can’t communicate well, you can’t understand anything going on around you, and everyone in the world is big enough to kick your ass.  Sounds pretty traumatic to me.

And that might be the moral of this retelling of my early adolescence: Childhood sucks.  It sucks for almost all of us, and sometimes it keeps sucking for a very long time.  But, if you don’t let it all overwhelm you, and if you can hang in there long enough, eventually, it gets better.

Till next time . . . hang in there.

You Broke Into the Wrong House, Buddy

So, this is a link to a newspaper article written before I was born, about a guy breaking into The Dojo.  The Dojo is the place where I lived when I was very little, and the place I went back to live as a teenager.  Pretty funny little article, however.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=2002&dat=19710902&id=4WwlAAAAIBAJ&sjid=_7IFAAAAIBAJ&pg=3510,587449

Don Armitage: Happily Ever After

“You wanna play war?”  The kid was skinny and pale, with very light blue eyes.  He wore a camouflage jacket and hat that I thought was very cool.  He was a second grader, just like me.

And of course I wanted to play war.  I wanted to play anything with anyone, because I was the new kid.  I’d been at Roger Corbett Elementary School for what felt like a very long time, and no one had even talked to me.  Not surprising, really.  I wore hand-me-down clothes two generations out of style and two sizes too small, shoes that had developed holes in the toes large enough that I could take off my socks without removing them, and my too long hair in a nerdy bowl cut.  And to top it all off, I was a bit of a hyperactive spaz.

“Yeah,” I said.  “Sure.”

For the next ten minutes Don and I ran around the sandy schoolyard, pretending to shoot each other and defending our playground equipment headquarters from imaginary attackers.

“Sean and some guys want to beat you up,” he told me when the end-of-recess bell rang.  “They told me to make friends with you and get you to go out by the football field during lunch recess.”

“Why’re you telling me?” I asked.

“Because I like you now.”

So, during lunch, Don and I avoided the football field.  We stayed near our headquarters and played war.  Eventually, a gang of second and third graders cornered us there, beneath the play structure.  They shouted, and pushed us, and pumped themselves up for a little ten-on-one fun.  Don had obviously been their full time whipping boy before I’d transferred into the school, and they were used to picking on him with impunity.  I, on the other hand, had just been kicked out of a much tougher school for hitting a bully in the face with a ball peen hammer.

I’m not going to tell that story here, but it was a pivotal moment in my life.  I learned I didn’t have to win a fight to get respect; that I just had to hurt the other guy bad enough to make them never want to fight me again.  I learned the value of a violent reputation.  I learned that, in schoolyard brawls, the aggressor almost always wins.  I learned a lot of things, wrong things mostly, that took me a long time to unlearn.

But back then, in second grade, with a pack of spoiled and soft Roger Corbett kids surrounding me, I knew exactly what to do.  I screamed and let loose berserker-style: wild punches, flying kicks, throwing sand, and pulling hair.  At some point, Don became inspired by all the violence, and he dove headlong into the battle.  Watching him finally open up on his bullies was like watching a dam burst, or a religious epiphany.  It was like watching myself when I’d finally brought that hammer to school.

Obviously, we were bullied birds of a fucked feather.  Only now there were two of us, and we were giving it all back, with interest.

We still got beat up.  After all, we were severely outnumbered and didn’t know how to fight.  But the ass-kicking these guys gave me didn’t even qualify as a friendly wrestling match when compared to the beatings I was used to getting.  Don only got a few little cuts and bruises.  And we gave them more than we took, so I felt pretty good about the whole thing.

Second grade.  Don and I have been friends ever since.

Don’s parents had lots of guns, cool cars, and a nice house.  They took me shooting out in the desert, and let me sleep over a few times.  During Hot August Nights, the annual classic car roundup held in Reno, they took me cruising in their beautifully restored Model T Ford, and I got to see what it felt like to be a part of the cool crowd.

I transferred in and out of Roger Corbett three times, and every time I returned, Don was always there, waiting for me.  When I finally got expelled in sixth grade for pulling a knife on a kid, Don vowed to steal the Careflight helicopter from the hospital and break me out of juvenile hall.  Even after I left Roger Corbett Elementary for good, we stayed in touch.

Then, in the summer of 88, Mr. Armitage, Don’t dad, got real sick.  Don spent most of his time out at my mom’s trailer in Sun Valley because Mrs. Armitage didn’t want him to see his father getting weaker.  Don and I played D&D, hiked in the mountains, and dodged the gang of Vatoes who lived down the street from me.  (See Helicopters over Leon Street.)

For the next two years, Mr. Armitage fought the acute amilodosis that eventually took his life.  He was a strong, proud, hard-working man that I didn’t get to know half as well as I’d have liked.  Don, during those two years, spent a lot of time hanging out in my world of drugs and fighting, and it had a corrupting influence on him.

After Mr. Armitage’s funeral, I started hanging around the Armitage household a lot more, and eventually, I just moved in with Don and his mother.  This was a very happy time for me, but I have to concede that it was probably a mistake for Mrs. A to let me move in.  The problem was not necessarily that I was a bad influence on Don, or visa-versa, but that together we were fairly volatile.  Together, we did bad things we would never have done on our own.

Sometimes, when Mrs. A took us to church, Don and I would sit in the very back pew and have long detailed talks about what it would be like to murder someone.  I actually liked going to church though.  When I was fifteen or sixteen, I met a nice girl there and dated her off and on for a few years.  I introduced her to meth and gangs, and she ran away from home to be with me, but we eventually split up.  By the time I saw her again, when I was twenty, she had a serious crank habit.  She was selling dope and sleeping with her dealer.  I’m probably responsible for that.

Don and I also liked to take his 1975 Firebird out for midnight drives.  We’d troll around looking for things to steal, cars to race, or people to fight.  If we couldn’t find any other trouble, we’d head out to the dark streets beside the airport, turn off the headlights, and drive as fast as we dared, screaming with the windows open.

While I lived with Don, we both went to Wooster High.  We spent most of our lunches in the parking lot of the Sac-and-Save across the street, drinking from a stolen, one-gallon, plastic bottle of Brother’s Choice Whiskey and picking fights.  Now that we were in high school, however, our psychotic reputations were considered cool, and we were no longer alone.  We were part of a crew of kids, mostly black and Hispanic, who all lived in the Neil Road area.  We weren’t exactly a gang, but we were close enough for most cops and school officials.

Don and I finally got kicked out of Wooster for “inciting a riot.”  The details are still a bit foggy in my memory, but this is the way I remember it:

The day before the riot, a friend named Danny approached Don and me while we drank whisky in the Sac-and-Save parking lot.  Danny said his girlfriend had just been given a bunch of gory abortion pictures by “that abortion car freak,” and that she was now hysterical.  The abortion car freak was a guy who drove around in a long brown sedan with a bunch of anti-abortion signs and religious quotes on it, handing out tracts and pamphlets that could easily be classified as psychological terrorism.  I hated the fucker on principle, and the idea of doing him some harm appealed to the antihero in me, so we set out to find him.

Before we found the abortion car freak, however, we found a guy who’d been putting the moves on Don’s girlfriend.  We’ll call him Tony F for the purposes of this blog.  He hung out with the long haired biker gang wannabees.  Anyway, when we saw Tony F, Lamont jumped out of the car, chased him down, and knocked him cold with one punch.  We drove off laughing, dropped Lamont at school, and continued our search.

We found the abortion car freak not ten minutes later, stopped at a stoplight in his shit-brown hate-mobile.  I can’t remember everyone who was with us, but we all rushed the freak’s car, and tried to yank him out.  He rolled up his windows and locked his doors before we could get hold of him, so we kicked in his door panels, tore the signs off his car, and broke his window.  He finally ran the red light and escaped.  I went back to school, and Don skipped out so he could hide his car at home.  That night, the assault was in the evening news, as well as a description of the car and attackers.  I’m pretty sure Mrs. Armitage knew Don and I were responsible, and I’m also pretty sure she was at least a little proud.

So Don and I left his car at home the next day and caught a ride to school with some neighborhood friends.  At lunch, I jumped in the back of a mini truck with about a dozen other guys, and we all went looking for fights, as per usual.  Don, however, stayed on campus with his girlfriend.  We didn’t find any fights that lunch, and when we rolled back onto campus five minutes before lunch ended, we were spoiling for something ugly to go down.

That’s when Danny ran up to the overloaded mini truck shouting.  “Tony F and his dirthead buddies just ratpacked Don!  They jumped him like ten to one.”

Shit went downhill fast.  Me and a dozen other Neil Road thugs ran through campus in a pack, looking for anyone who might have been affiliated with Tony F.  We found Don, and he joined the pack.  Innocent people we passed got hit just because they had long hair or leather jackets.  When we found one of the guys who’d actually been responsible for jumping Don, a friend of ours picked him up and slammed him on the concrete ala professional wrestling, putting him in a coma.  Another guy got hit with one of those big metal trash barrels and went to the hospital as well.  Lots of people got hurt.

The principle, vice principle, and school security guards found our little wolf pack just as we found the rest of Tony F’s friends in the courtyard.  By then, however, shit was already out of control.  People were fighting all over the place, and I didn’t even know half of them.  These weren’t our friends or Tony F’s friends.  These were just kids caught up in the mob mentality of the moment.  I was grabbed in a bearhug by security, and I didn’t actually get to participate in the impromptu mosh pit we’d created.

Cops appeared from out of nowhere, and Don and I were handcuffed and taken away.  I would like to point out that during this whole mini-riot, I honestly did not hit anyone, or even threaten to hit anyone.  I’m pretty sure Don didn’t hit anyone either.  But the school authorities knew we were at the heart of the problem, emotionally if not physically, so they kicked us out of school.  It might have been the first time for Don, but it was just the latest in a long list of suspensions and expulsions for me.

Mrs. Armitage had finally had enough.  She asked me to leave, and I returned to my mother’s house for a few months, until I joined the Army.  I love Mrs. Armitage like a mother, and I don’t blame her for putting me out.  Had she done it earlier, maybe Don wouldn’t have done some of the stupid things he’d done.  But I kinda think Don was gonna loose it eventually anyway, with or without me.  He had a lot of guns, a volatile temper, and a cruel streak that put mine to shame.  If he hadn’t learned to nut-up and fight his bullies in second grade, he might have taken a few of those guns to school and fragged the whole student body by the time he got to high school.  Or maybe he’d be the next president of The United States of America; what the fuck do I know?

I do know that in the years since high school, when Don and I have had much less contact, he has continued to fuck up.  Here are some examples:

When I was about twenty, I went to Don’s house and found a dozen guys watching a home video of Don beating the shit out of a nearly naked guy who’d been tied to the living room recliner.  (Note: the guy I’m talking about was, and still is, one of Don’s friends, so I guess this doesn’t technically count as torture.)

Once, Mrs. Armitage called and asked me to try to talk some sense into him because he’d shot the bookshelf off the wall.

On June 23, 2003, Don got brought up on charges of “armed robbery with a deadly weapon,” and was given four years of probation.

A year later, he got hooked on heroin.

In August of 2005, he violated his probation and was sent to prison, where he spent the last 4 to 4.5 years.

He’s doing much better now.  He doesn’t spike heroin or break the law.  He just rides and restores motorcycles, works and lifts weights.  I might be responsible for some of his downfall, but I know I’m not responsible for any of his recovery.  He’s walked that road all by himself, and I hope he continues to do so.  After all the bad news coming from back home — Rudy back in prison, Tom on the run, old friends lost to dope and depression and death — it’s nice to say “happily ever after” once in a while.

You hear that Don?  My bullied brother?  We’re all growed up now, and you are my storybook ending.

Don’t fuck it up.

Sounds Like the Trains are Making Baby Trains

I put a new page on my website, and this is why:

I always seem to end up living next to trains.

When I was in my twenties I used to hop on the slow moving trains and ride through downtown Sparks, Nevada to reduce the length of my walk to work every morning.  I was chased off the property often, once by a Humvee full of military police as well as the usual railroad police.  (Did you even know there were such things as railroad police?)

When I lived in Salem, Oregon several years later, the Railroad Killer, Angel Maturino Resendez, used the freight train lines to evade arrest, and my back yard abutted the train tracks.  I stopped sleeping for almost a week.  Then, one day I looked out my back window, and I saw a train parked on the tracks with the word SLEEP, spray-painted on the side in eight-foot tall letters.   I stopped reading so many true crime books and started sleeping again.

The home I lived in before this house was actually in a neighborhood called Trainsong.  The name was highly euphemistic to say the least, as the entire neighborhood was basically a massive switching yard for freight.  Even though my wife and I had grown accustomed to sleeping through train noise, we both shot out of bed our second night in the house, because it sounded like a train had actually crashed through our front door.

“What the fuck was that?” I asked as I pulled on my pants.

“The trains?” my wife said uncertainly.

“Doing what?”  I couldn’t imagine anything but a full scale derailing and wreck making that much noise.

My wife peeked out the window.  “Sound like they’re making baby trains.”

We eventually grew accustomed to the noise, even in Trainsong, but it was always funny to watch the reaction friends and family had the first time they experienced the trains “getting it on.”

At some point, (probably around the time the trains started telling me to go back to SLEEP because the Railroad Killer wasn’t going to get me), I became interested in train graffiti.  I started driving around the rail yards and snapping pictures of the names and pictures I saw on the trains.

Once, after being chased off railroad property for taking pictures, my daughter asked me if what I was doing was illegal.

“Well,” I told her, “I guess I’m usually, technically trespassing, and that’s illegal, but I don’t think anyone would take me to jail for it.”

She thought about it for a moment, and still seemed worried.  “But what if they DO arrest you for taking pictures?”

“Then it’ll be the funniest thing Daddy has ever gone to jail for.”  I smiled at her.  “And I’ve been locked up for some real doozies.”

I’ve always collected pictures of graff more for the information content than for the artistic value.  I train watch the same way I bird watch, like an obsessive-compulsive collector or cataloger.  I look at it as just another way to become aware of my environment.  I’ve learned a lot since I started paying attention, and some of what I learned you can find in the pictures on my Graffiti page.

Some graff writers are poets.  Some pay tribute to their favorite Dadaists.  Some spray paint a message on the side of a train and send it out along the rails, like putting a letter in a bottle then throwing it out into the ocean.  Other people ride the rails in order to see the world in the tradition of Jack London and Woody Guthrie, and occasionally, they draw maps on the sides of the trains they hop, complete with dates and stops and destinations.

There is a whole world out there you might not have ever noticed.  Take some time to check out some of these pictures, because they might change your mind about graffiti and the people who do it.  Even if they don’t change your mind, it might make the next time you get stuck at a train crossing a lot more enjoyable.

Tom Fried: Too Weird to Live, and Too Rare to Die

When I was seventeen, a couple friends and I got jobs installing flooring tile in a California school.  Despite the crystal meth powered twenty-hour workdays, we always needed more help, so I shanghaied guys from the old neighborhood and made them sleep at my apartment when we were not working.  Despite the obscenely large paychecks we took home, most of the shanghai-ees escaped within a week or two, the one exception being a guy named Tom Fried.

Tom was short, loud, and funny.  He worked like a dog, and our household diet of coffee, crank, and beer seemed to agree with his metabolism.  When the work ran out, Tom just didn’t go home.  He and I decided we didn’t like twenty-hour workdays, and that we actually didn’t much like working at all.  So we quit doing dope and started selling it.

For five or six months, we were the most mythical of all make-believe creatures: dope dealers who didn’t do dope.  We had rules our customers had to abide by, hours of operation, and a code of ethics that didn’t allow us to sell to kids or pregnant women.  We didn’t take food stamps or stolen things.  By the standards of our neighborhood, we were ghetto saints.

We were not, however, above selling to old friends, family members, or handicapped people.  Other than my own mother, my best customer was a wheelchair bound woman with a condition that made her shake like a highly caffeinated Chihuahua, and every weekend I’d bring her enough dope to overdose a small elephant.  Tom’s best customer was his uncle’s friend Randy.  Randy lived only a few blocks away from our apartment and bought dope every other day at least.  He was only about four feet tell and whenever Tom and I got drunk, which was every single night at around six o’clock, we’d start in with the Randy impressions — acting like speedfreak dwarfs trying to cop a little extra dope for free.

Eventually, of course, we ended up doing the dope we were selling, and shit spiraled out of control.  We started going out on the weekends, looking for fights.  Then we started fighting three or four times a week, always too anesthetized with booze to feel pain and too high on speed to think about consequences.  We called it “tripping the ultraviolent,” in tribute to our favorite movie of the time, _A Clockwork Orange_.  When we deliberately tried to overdose ourselves on dope or booze, we called that “riding the outer limits,” though I have no idea where we’d picked up that particular saying.

At some point, someone in our circle of psychotic friends got the idea to rob drug dealers.  This was much later on, when I was about twenty-one or twenty-two.  Tom and I were living with a bunch of friends in a little trailer park off Fourth Street, where the hookers too ugly or strung out or diseased to work out at the Bunny Ranch tried to eek out a living.  One of our roommates was a Polish wanna-be-skinhead, named John, who had about as much brains as you’d expect from a Polish guy who wanted to be a skinhead.  The three of us were not exactly criminal masterminds.

The first guys we tried to rob were a bunch of bikers staying in a hotel in downtown Reno.  I can’t even remember how we found out about them, but they were sufficiently far enough removed from our circle of friends that we did not fear repercussions.  At the time, none of us had guns.  We decided to do the robbery with just knives.

We knocked on the hotel room door and covered the peephole.  When they opened the door with the safety chain still attached, Tom and I kicked the door in.  There were three guys in the hotel room: one in the process of coming out of the bathroom, one sitting at a desk doing lines of meth, and one who jumped up on the bed and started begging as soon as we entered.

I grabbed the guy sitting at the table by the back of his jacket, threw him to the ground, and held him there with a knee in his back.  John yelled at the guy on the bed to “Get down.”  Tom grabbed the guy coming out of the bathroom and held a knife to his throat.

“Where’s the dope?” Tom asked.

“It’s not here yet,” the guy said all high-pitched and hysterical.  “They just went to get it a little while ago.”

At this point, Tom and I realized that John still had not gotten control of the man standing on the bed.  John kept yelling at him, but the guy just kept yelling back at John.  When I actually listened to what the guy on the bed was saying, I felt a big stab of guilt.

“Please don’t hurt my baby,” he said.  “Please don’t hurt my daughter.”

“Shut up!” I yelled, because beneath the sound of John and Tom yelling at the guy to get down off the bed and the guy crying about his daughter, I heard something else: a little kid, crying.

The blankets were all bunched up beside the man’s feet, and I saw something moving beneath those blankets.  The movement was synched to the sound of the kid crying.

I pointed my knife at the guy on the bed.  “Get down and cover your daughter,” I told him.  “You hold your baby and keep her safe.”

Talking about his child must have flipped some sort of switch in his head, because he stopped yelling and did as I told him.  We tied everyone up, searched the place, and found a couple teeners in the desk drawer.  We’d been expecting about twenty times as much dope.

“Fuck it,” Tom said.  “Let’s bounce.”

Just as we opened the front door to leave, two big bikers and a skinny biker bitch tried walking in.  Tom shouldered past them, and John ran.  I was still in the room when the skinny chick started screaming, “We’re being robbed.”

As soon as I heard her yelling, a shoved past the guys at the door and ran for the stairs.  I tried to jump down half a flight of cement steps, but one of the guys chasing me shoved me as I jumped.  I ended up crashing into the wall at the bottom of the stairs, and the rough stucco texture grated the skin off my arm.  I felt someone grab the back of my jacket, so I spun and slashed and felt the knife catch.  The grip on my back went away and I jump-ran down the rest of the stairs.

Out on the sidewalk, I saw Tom racing back towards me.  He and John hadn’t even noticed I was gone until they started piling into the car.

“Run, run, run, run,” I panted as I passed him.

We piled into the car and peeled out, just as we heard a bunch of motorcycle engines starting up in the hotel parking lot.  I checked the knife in my hand and found blood, but the stucco wall had turned my arm to hamburger, so maybe the blood was mine.  Just in case, however, we cleaned the knife and ditched it.

I have actually fictionalized this event in a short story called “Concrete Promised Land,” but the characters in that story actually have morals and brains.  We, on the other hand, were the kind of daytime talk show dimwits who took knives to gun fights.  As a matter of fact, I saw John many years later on an episode of Jerry Springer.

Even after I moved away to Oregon, Tom and I got into trouble together.  He’s one of the only people to ever come visit me after I left Reno.  Once, when he came up for a visit, we drove around shooting the lights out of warehouses.  Another time we used ten gallons of gas to set a building on fire right in the middle of downtown (town name redacted).  At one point, after he’d started to settle down a bit, Tom moved his whole family to Oregon, and both our families spent weekends camping at the lake and wakeboarding on his boat.

In just a few years we went from arson and drive-bys to family camping trips and PTA meetings.  How?  Well, Tom’s got a good heart, but he also has no idea how to self-manage.  When he lived with me, he followed my plan.  When his father got out of prison for setting someone on fire, Tom followed his father’s plan.  When Tom got married, he followed his wife’s plan, and it looked like he was going to finally settle down.

Then the economy went belly up, and Tom lost his job.  Four years ago, he had a wife and a family, a job, a five-bedroom house, a camper trailer, dirtbikes, new cars, and a boat.  Now he has no job, no wife, no place to live, and his only possession is his Harley, which is in danger of being repossessed.

It looks like all his friends have turned their backs on him, some with good reason, others just because he’s currently in a position of weakness.  Right now he’s visiting me, sleeping on my couch, trying to get his head on straight.  Unfortunately, I got sick the day he showed up, and he got bored waiting for me to get healthy again.  He went out to a bar, and four hours later called me from jail: DUI and possession of a controlled substance.  I’m not sure why they let him out of jail, but they did.

Which is good, because his son, Dominic, needed him here in Oregon.  Dominic has been living with his maternal uncle for the past seven months but, for reasons that will not be discussed on this blog, the arrangement was not working.  So Tom brought Dominic here, and for the past week or so they’ve stayed with me and my family.  We go skating nearly every day, and at night we practice gymnastics or dance moves or stretch in the living room.  Yesterday, despite every muscle in his body aching from all the exercise, and despite sharing a frigid garage with my son, Dominic said he wishes he could live here.

I wish we could let him, but he and his father are leaving tomorrow, riding out of town on a motorcycle despite the rain.  Tom says he plans on coming back for his court date, but his future seems pretty fluid right now.  Four years ago, Tom and I, and all our friends, were grown-ups.  We had jobs and houses and futures.  Now Rudy is in prison, Tom is wanted in three different states, and everyone I know has lost everything they so recently learned to work for.

It seems like we are all trying to find ourselves nowadays.  So maybe Tom is a good mascot for these fucked times, a high speed drifter-freak on a flat black Harley, running from his past and towards some ill-defined sense of self.  Or maybe, like the rest of us, he’s just human flotsam, broken by relentless waves of change and tossed up on a cold shore by an ocean that never even noticed him.  Either way, I love him, and I hope he finds himself before the authorities do.

I feel like this is incomplete.  I feel like I should have written about the time Tom killed himself by wrecking his first motorcycle just minutes after getting his motorcycle license, or about the time he accidentally drove his Geo Metro under an eighteen wheeler, or about the time he had his pinky finger torn off.  But I’m out of words for this installment, so I’ll just leave you with a picture of Tom and a Hunter S. Thompson quote.

“There he goes. One of God’s own prototypes. Some kind of high-powered mutant never even considered for mass production. Too weird to live, and too rare to die.”

–Hunter S. Thompson

Grandpa’s Ashes

We drive down out of the mountains, through Susanville and south across the pine dotted scrub desert around  Highway 395.  I’m going back to Nevada for the first time in years, to spread my dead grandfather’s ashes and get my son, Gatlyn, who’s been living with his increasingly unstable mother.  The sage smell coming in through the open car window reminds me of my teen years living in Sun Valley, Nevada, the world’s largest trailer park.

We arrive at Paul and Joy’s trailer about 1:30AM.   Paul is sleeping, and his wife, Joy, lets us in.  Their little terrier barks while Joy and my wife laugh and talk as if they’d seen each other just yesterday.  Apparently, Paul sleeps deeply nowadays.  Back in the Bad Ol’ Days, he’d go four days without blinking, take a two-hour nap, then go four more.

Next morning, I get up around 6:30, smoke a bowl with Joy, and sip some coffee on the front porch.  I love the smell of the desert in the morning, especially when I’m stoned.  My best friend, Tom shows up around 8AM and we make plans to spend tomorrow on the lake with his dad and a buddy of his.  He gives me his cell phone so Jamie, Gatlyn’s mother, can contact me.

I use the four different numbers Jamie gave me, but no one knows where she is.  One guy says he’ll try to get in touch with her and give her a message.  A half hour later she calls me, and we make plans to meet at my Aunt Shelly’s house.

Shelly’s trailer is nearly the same model as Paul’s, but it’s much more “lived in.”  The yard is mostly weeds, dirt, and busted vehicles, like all the other yards on the block.  I’ve never seen less than a dozen people there, and today is no different.  Faith and Dave are there with a couple of their kids.  Since I’d seen them last, back in the Bad Ol’ Days, they’d lost a child and quit doing dope.  I’m pretty sure the two events were related, but I don’t have the details.

Aunt Shelly and her husband cleaned up about 9 years ago, after the DEA crashed their house, and the government almost took their children away while they were in jail.  They’re doing great now, don’t even smoke cigarettes.  Their youngest child, who could barely walk when the agents found him in a dirty crib and a shitty diaper, just went to Florida for some national football awards.

Jamie shows up with Gatlyn.  She’s skinny and looks ten years older than me, though she’s actually a year younger.  Some longhaired guy is driving her car, and an old lady sits in the back seat, beside my son, chain-smoking cigarettes.  Gatlyn seems upset when his mom leaves, but he looks fine.

Grandpa’s widow, Lil, and his two sons finally show up, and we’re ready to go.  Twenty years ago, when my grandmother first discovered my grandfather’s affair with Lil, she’d smashed the windshield on Grandpas Cadillac, put a garden hose through the hole, and filled the interior with water.  Now our family looks after Lil, who’s been certifiably insane for a few years.

We drive, caravan style, to the family mine, outside Portola, California.  The mine has been almost a myth to me my whole life, a Shangri La only recently recovered after being lost to shady business deals and back taxes, back before I was born.

I’d been here one other time, two years ago, with Grandpa, and he’d spent the whole day telling me stories about the Golden Days.  He told me about how Bumpa, my Great Grandfather, got his head pierced.  Bumpa had been one hundred and ten feet down a mineshaft when a rock chisel fell from a bucket being lowered to him.  The chisel pierced his hardhat, his skull, and his brain, coming out the roof of his mouth.  He was rushed to the hospital, while the fourteen-year-old boy who’d been working with him at the time was left alone in the bottom of the dark shaft for several hours.  I guess the kid had all kinds of mental problems later on in life.

I fucking bet.

Grandpa told lots of stories that day, two years ago, stories of snowstorms that completely covered the cabins, of hunting deer, of finding gold, of armed standoffs with claims jumpers and once even with the local Sheriff’s Department.  Now, we gather on the side of the cliff and share stories about Grandpa.  Mostly about how strong he’d been, what a hard worker, how he’d loved to rebuild cars and cruise his creations on the blacktop.  I tell a story about Grandpa I’d heard from Uncle Herb, probably entirely fictional, but illustrative of Grandpa’s personality nonetheless.

The story starts with a long winter, one of those storms that buried the cabins and made restocking impossible so that, when the snow began to melt, Herb was thrilled to see a deer.  He shot it with a rifle right from his cabin door.

Grandpa snorted, unimpressed, though he ate his share of the meat.  The next day, he went out in the still cold and icy morning with only his pistol, and came back by noon with another deer.

“Now that’s a deer,” he said when he dropped it on the porch.

The gauntlet had been thrown down.  Herb, who is now a sixth degree blackbelt in Jui-jitsu and holds other black belts in other martial arts, took his bow and arrows out into the mountains, and hunted all day, bringing another deer back to the cabin by nightfall.

Grandpa didn’t say anything, just took his knife and hung it by the door.  The next day he left and stayed in the woods for two days.  He came back wild-eyed and ragged, a deer with a cut throat over his shoulders.

“Fuck it,” said Herb.  “You win.”

Like I said, it’s probably not a true story, but it’s true enough for the occasion, and everyone seems to like it.

I take a handful of bone shards like chalk and toss it out over the cliff.  The wind catches some and blows it back in my face, hair, and clothes.

My nephew finds a metal filling in his handful and puts it in his pocket.  I feel oddly jealous, and I wish I’d have saved a bone flake or something.  My daughter, Paige, sings a song, and a lot of people cry, but my eyes stay dry.  A little later I find Gatlyn crying alone, hiding his tears.  He knew Grandpa better than my daughters, and he’s taking the death pretty hard, but I feel like there’s more going on for him than just the funeral.

The whole ride home Gatlyn describes the wonderful night his mother has planned for him.  They’re going to the state fair, he says.  He’s getting his ear pierced.  His mother’s getting him a puppy.  He invites Paige to come with him.

Back at Paul and Joy’s trailer in Sun Valley I call all the numbers I have for Jamie again, and can’t find her.  She shows up around 8:30, looking the worse for wear, and tells Gatlyn, “We’ve got packing to do.  Let’s get busy.”

He says, “what about the fair?  I told Paige she could go with us.”

“We can’t do it right now,” she says.

“You promised.”

“It’s okay,” says Paige, backing out of the room.

I hug my son tight and don’t want to let him go.

Jamie sighs at me.  “He’s going to be all right, Leon.”

After she takes Gatlyn and leaves, I take a shower.  I wash the last of my grandfather out of my hair and down the drain and suddenly I’m crying.  The tears surprise me, and I sit on the edge of the tub.  I stay up all night worrying about my son, about how his world is probably falling apart around him, about how helpless he probably feels.

I remember that shit from when I was his age.

The next day, bright and early, Tom shows up.  He doesn’t like it when I tell him I’m not going to the lake.  I feel physically weak, exhausted, wrung out.  He tells me to drink some coffee, smoke some pot, and wake up.

I drink some coffee, smoke some pot, and decide to go.  It beats sitting around worrying about Gatlyn.  Tom picks me up and we drive to his father’s house.  I met Tom’s dad once, back in the Bad Ol’ Days, before he’d gone to prison for setting a guy on fire.  Tom, his wife, and their four children are staying in a fifth-wheel trailer parked in his dad’s front yard.  Tom’s not good with credit cards, and he’s just recently discovered the fact.  Two or three weeks, he should be back on his feet, but for right now he’s “living bad,” in his own words.  He laughs and jokes about it–because that’s what Tom does–but I can tell it’s eating him up.

Out on the boat, Tom’s dad and the owner of the boat drink beers and do fat white lines of cocaine.  I drink carrot juice and eat a little pack of doughnuts.  They don’t offer me any of the coke, and I’m glad, because I might say yes.  I smoke more than my fair share of pot, however, and by the end of the day, I can barely keep my eyes open, which is good, because I really need to sleep.

The next day starts slow, with a trip to my mother’s house.  Her two best friends are there, Auntie Rotten, and Sherrill.   Auntie Rotten is an old biker bitch, and she’ll be proud of the title if she ever reads this.  Sonny, her son whom I’d played with as a child had recently been shot to death by a preacher for breaking into a church.  She shows me a color photocopy of a picture of her and Sonny just two year ago.  He’s a tall guy, longish blonde hair and a shirt that says, “Never Trust a Bitch.”  She’d written the words: “Except Your Mother” on the picture.

Sherrill tells me about her daughter, Trish, who is doing heroin.  Trish and I spent a lot of time growing up together, playing dolls and soldiers and “doctor” in our room while our parents smoked mountains of pot in the living room.

I remember one night, when I was about six, a lady came bursting into our apartment with a baby under her arm screaming, “My husband has a gun, and he’s going to kill me.”  Trish was there for that, huddled in the bedroom with me and my sisters while the psychotic husband circled our house until the police caught him in a dark field, his other daughter in his trunk.  But that’s another story, from a long time ago, even before the Bad Ol’ Days.

Jamie calls and says I can pick up Gatlyn from her ex husband, Joey’s house, where he’s visiting his half brother.  I remember Joey, from when he was embezzling money from McDonalds.  In fact, Jamie had an affair with him while she and I were together, before Gatlyn had been born.

Now Joey lives in a posh neighborhood, in a home worth a million dollars, with two new cars out front and a giant plasma screen television.  The ugly green rug under their leather couch probably cost more than my car.  I’m out of my element and uncomfortable until we leave to pick up Gatlyn’s stuff from his mother’s “house.”

They’ve been living in a hotel in downtown Reno, above a strip club.  The downstairs lobby is a liquor store, and trash is piled beside the elevator door upstairs.  Jamie’s obviously on dope when I arrive, all bugging eyes and grinding teeth.  I pack my son’s stuff and leave as fast as I can, because I can feel myself gearing up to do something violent to her boyfriend, something ugly like I used to do back in the Bad Ol’ Days.

Once we’re all packed and ready to go, I ask Gatlyn how he’s doing.  He says he already misses his mom.  I bet he does.  I missed mine the same way when I was his age, even though I lived with her.

I hope, one day, he’ll forgive me for taking him away from her.