On the cusp of Spring

Spring is an uncertain time in Minnesota. The whole world seems to oscillate hourly between raw freezing cold, and the warm promise of summer. Walking the dogs tonight, the March sun was setting into a glowing orange pool on the horizon. Above it, a thin fingernail of moon was just starting to appear in the darkness. As I hustled along the quiet streets, the houses were shut up tight, shades still drawn against the night. The silhouette of geese passed overhead in the cobalt sky, their honking the only sound rising above the snapping wind.

One of the funny things about memory, is you never know what will trigger it. It can be a scent, a sight, a sound, or sometimes just a word said in passing by a stranger. Walking the dogs through the dark tree lined streets tonight I stumbled through such a portal, back into 1985. The springtime of my life, when unbeknown to me everything was about to change.

It was on a night similar to this one, when winter came clawing back in response to a warm spring afternoon, that my good friend Chris and I were headed to a dance at Batavia High. I was flying solo that night, having just broken up with my girlfriend, and lusting mightily after the girl next door. I was sixteen years old and the night seemed full of promise.

My parents were working Bingo at ND that night and had taken the car, and my big sister was out with friends, so it took a little creativity for us to get our hands on alcohol. Discussing our plans over the phone, we decided to each try to raid whatever we could get from out parents and meet at 7 pm, outside of Platten’s North Side Deli.

Surveying the options before me in the empty house, I decided to fill an empty 16 oz bottle of Sprite with some White Lake Niagara jug wine that my Mom kept in the fridge. It seemed to be the least likely stuff to be missed. Walking down Richmond Ave to meet Chris I wondered what he would be able to score. I don’t think I had ever seen his folks drink, but being Catholic, I’m sure they were required to keep booze somewhere in the house just in case of an emergency, like a death or an unannounced visit by a priest.

He did not disappoint. Meeting up on the street in front of the corner store, he informed me he had managed to fill half of an empty coke bottle with some rum. We surveyed our options for how and where to go about drinking our booty. The wind was blowing last years leaves down the gutters of Bank Street, and the sky was beginning to spit light rain at us. We decided to try the old stone picnic pavilions in MacArthur Park, out beyond the outfield fence of Dwyer Stadium. Still, the thought of trying to drink straight rum, wasn’t sounding too appealing to us, so we lit upon a plan to buy a bottle of Coke to mix it with.

After that, it was just a simple word problem to figure out how to get the Coke into the rum, and the rum into the Coke in even amounts. I think we decided the easiest thing to do was to drink the wine first, then use the empty bottle to mix the rum & Coke. It was that sort of quick thinking that helped us score high enough on our SAT’s to get into the colleges of our choice. Oddly enough though, the SAT never presented questions on the best way to mix Rum & Coke in a park at night.

Shivering in the cold rain, we walked to the stone pavilions, and warmed ourselves with the cloying cheap wine, and the tangy bite of the rum and Coke. Taking swigs from the bottles, and holding them inside our burning mouths just heightened the numbness of my cheekbones, and nose. Then, feeling sufficiently fortified to face the lovely young women of Batavia High School, we made our way across the parking lot to the school.

As any clandestine high school drinker will tell you, the key to getting through the chaperons at the door, is to keep from exhaling. There’s a real art to being able to say hello to teachers, and parents, without letting any air escape your mouth. I’m sure ventriloquists practice something similar.

Successfully making it past the bouncers, we hung up our jackets, and started down the long hallway to the gym. The alcohol was just beginning to make its way fully into our bloodstream. I could feel the color rising in my cheeks. Passing the brightly lit glass windows of the school cafeteria we ran into Jennifer and her friends, who immediately squealed “You guys have been drinking, haven’t you!?!”.

There is no more grown up feeling in the all the world, than being 16 years old, and drunk. If I’d have known that then, I probably would have been sorely disappointed. The lights in the gym swirled, and the DJ played all the greatest hits of 1985. We found the group of Junior girls we’d come looking for, and began doing the white guy shuffle to the music, in a big circle of kids. It wasn’t long before the alcohol was making the whole scene seem like a kaleidoscope of sound and light.

The girls seemed more beautiful in that dimly lit gym, than they ever did in the florescent hum of the classrooms. Taking turns dancing slow songs with them, I was able to revel in their scents, and the fuzzy warmth of their sweaters, clinging to their small of their backs. At that moment I was in love with each and every one of them, which is to say that I was mostly in love with myself.

It was all so new. We seemed like the first teenagers on the face of the earth to discover the warm sticky embraces of dancing together. I felt like the night could have lasted forever, but before I knew it the DJ was announcing the last song of the night. I managed to grab the girl next door, and hold her close as the last slow song played, my hands slowly inching down the scratchy wool of her sweater, over the tell tale clasp of that forbidden bra somewhere underneath it. I had no thought or plan for what if anything would happen, I was purely living in the moment.

The song ended, and before I knew it, our coats were on and she was hustling off in a crowd of friends to catch her ride. Chris and I stood outside on the sidewalk, saying goodbye as they left, then turned our collars up against the windy drizzle, and started the long sobering walk home. I thought there would be so many other nights, and so many other chances to experience such bliss. I had no idea how fleeting it would all prove to be. We were growing up so fast, and time was accelerating.

How quickly it would pass. That was over 25 years ago. Stumbling back into that evening tonight was like finding a rare coin whose true worth is not in its value, but the warm reassurance it gives, as you turn it over and over in your hand.

Hamlin Beach

It began as a very ordinary day at the tail end of May. I’d been home from college for about 2 weeks, and had just begun my quintessential summer job mowing grass around the electrical substations of Western New York. It was a high paying job ($8.90 / hr) that my Dad had managed to get me working at Niagara Mohawk, his employer of 35+ years. It would be a hot, dry summer in 1988, the temperatures would set records, and the creeks would dry up. I would spend my days driving in circles around Western New York, from the hills of Cowlesville, north to Medina, east to Brockport, and south to the shores of Hemlock Lake. It was an enormous expanse of country to cover in a company pickup truck with 2 others, pulling a trailer loaded with mowers, gas cans, trimmers, and the tools of our trade. By July the grass has burned out to straw gold, but our work continued, making the rounds of rural back roads from substation to substation, tending to the weeds, and holding back nature from the electron laden arteries of civilization.

In some ways it was the best job I had ever had. At first I had considered the painting crew as the pay was around $12 / hr, mostly due to the inherent danger of climbing the electrical towers. But in the end, my fear of heights got the better of me, and caused me to chicken out. It’s just as well. My friends on the crew complained about the long hot days in full coveralls, burning in the sun and “bitch-a-mastic” paint, as they worked their way through the mosquito infested swamps of Bergen and Alabama. By contrast, my days were spent driving the idyllic farm roads of Western New York, familiarizing myself with every short cut, and coffee shop between the waters of Ontario, and green hills of Wyoming County. I learned more about my home during that summer, than in the other 19 summers combined, and fell in love with the place. But I digress…

The evening of my birthday was not intended to be anything special. I had made some plans with Dan’l to get together and hang out, and he was due to pick me up shortly after dinner. To my great, and ever lasting surprise, when he pulled into the driveway of 20 Prospect in his 1978 Chrysler Cordoba, the front and back seats were full of my 5 closest friends in the world. When I jumped into the back seat, I noticed a case of Molson Golden sitting on the floor, and was informed that we were heading to the lake.

It was a gorgeous, warm summer evening. The sun was slanting in golden rays across the landscape as we drove due north through the muck lands of Elba, across the fabled canal at Albion, through the orchards of Orleans County, and on up Route 98 like an arrow for the shore of Lake Ontario. Six of us laughing in the car, with the windows down, and the moon roof open, and Steve Miller’s greatest hits playing on the radio. We arrived at the beach, and sat on a break wall, looking out at the Lake, drinking beer, and talking until well after the sun had gone down.

It was a simple evening, and one that we would repeat many times over the course of the summer. A group of kids, a case of beer, and a remote rural spot where we could share a laugh, and some stories, and discuss our dreams for the future. We were a cocky bunch, like all 20 year olds are. We were chafing at the restraints of being stuck in Batavia for another summer, and looking forward to the day we moved away to somewhere important, and exciting, and did “real” work. I look back and laugh about it now. If we’d been told how lucky we were, we’d have never believed it. We were convinced that somewhere “out there” important things were happening, and we were somehow missing out on them. We were so eager to get out there and stake our claims in the world.

The time would come soon enough. It was the last free summer we had. The next summer was the interim between our Junior and Senior years of college, and most of us had moved on to internships, or “important” summer jobs in our fields that would prepare us to land that all important post college job when we graduated. It would be a time to lay the first brick for the foundation of that all important resume. But the summer of 1988 was one last fling. A summer to be spent in idleness, drinking in the cool of dusk, leaning against the warm hood of a piece of Detroit steel, watching the swallows dart through the twilight, chasing mosquitoes like so many dreams. I loved those days, even though I wished them away, and I miss those dear friends. And despite the times and distances that have grown like weeds around us, I love them still. God bless them all, wherever they may be.

Wolverines!

“All that hate is gonna burn you up kid.”

“It keeps me warm”

It seems hard to believe now, but back in the day when Red Dawn came out, we really did think the world would end in some sort of World War III scenario. Being a teen during the waning days of the cold war we pretty much assumed that we were all doomed one way or another, so when we saw a movie about a bunch of kids taking to the hills to fight a guerrilla war against the Russians it resonated. What teen doesn’t fashion themselves to be fighting a guerrilla war against the adult world? After all, the thought of camping out in the woods with a bunch of guys, and gals, with lots of red meat, and firearms is as American as hotdogs, baseball, apple pie, and Chevrolet.

In our own little world our enemies weren’t as clearly defined as European actors with bad Russian accents, and no one parachuted into the school yard to gun down our teachers, so we never did find a good excuse to arm ourselves and take to the hills. Instead, we substituted cases of tepid Old Milwaukee, and we took to the woods behind the Blind School. Sitting there on the old broken concrete rubble of construction waste, and learning how to shotgun a can of beer, we decided to christen the place “Wolverine Rock”. Rebels without a cause indeed. Even now I’m not exactly sure what we were rebelling against. Small town boredom most likely.

Like all kids in a small town, we couldn’t wait to shake the dust of the place from our shoes and leave for somewhere exciting. We were a bunch of overachieving working class kids, who were all on the college track. The “good” kids, that never got into much trouble, and did well in school. I don’t think you could have found a more straitlaced group of “rebels” if you tried.

It was the end of our Junior year, and we were all dying to get out of town. It was time to start looking at schools, and making plans for life outside the safety of our little bubble, and we couldn’t wait to start. We had no idea just how good we had it. 30 years later, I think most of us would gladly trade a few weeks of real life for another few weeks of life in May of 1985.

We are scattered to the four winds now. Of the 9 people that sat around drinking that night, not one of us is left in B-town. Only 3 are still in Western New York. The rest in Massachusetts, Maryland, Virginia, California, and Minnesota. A Diaspora of Batavians, boring people from other states with our sordid tales of small town life. I cannot tell you how much I wish we could all get together again for just one night. No spouses, kids, or adult responsibilities, just hanging out in the woods drinking beer and acting stupid. Was life ever really that simple? Will it ever be that simple again?

So instead, as the sun slips below the edge of the world tonight, and the stars blink on overhead, I will sit on my back porch and raise a toast to you all, wherever you may be. Then looking up at the sky above, I will howl in my best Patrick Swayze imitation, “Wolverines!”

Another trip down memory lane

It’s spring. Heart achingly beautiful spring. The lilacs are poised to bloom any day now, and as we all know, I’m a sucker for lilac time. While spring may not be my favorite season,there is something about the cool, fresh evening air that transports me back in time. So climb aboard the Tardis, and lets go for a ride…

They say that the most potent of all of the human senses is our sense of smell. While sight, sound, taste and touch can all evoke memories of our past, there is something unique about the sense of smell that makes its connection to our memory stronger, and more vivid. I have experienced this many times. Put me within 20 yards of mothballs, and I am immediately transported to my Grandmother’s house. Put me near fresh cut grass during the dusty days of late August, and I can almost feel the pain of football 3 a days. So I find it highly distracting when a co-worker of mine douses himself with Polo by Ralph Lauren, and proceeds to fumigate the office with memories of 1985. Like a red shirted character on Star Trek I am suddenly beamed down to a hostile planet where I know I am doomed.

The year 1985 could have been the high water mark of my life. In fact, it had all the makings of it. When it began I was in the 2nd semester of my Junior year at ND, and had suddenly found myself in the midst of a flowering social life which seemed unattainable a mere 6 months earlier. I had a steady girlfriend, more close friends than any man deserves, and access to alcohol that only increased with each passing month. By spring of that year every week seemed to promise a new experience, and a new coed with whom to become acquainted. By all rights I should have spent the rest of my days in Batavia living in the long shadows of my life at 17. How I managed to escape that fate, and wind up happy, and somewhat well adjusted, on the frozen prairies of Minnesota is still a mystery to me. In fact, attempting to solve that mystery by retracing my steps backward to the very beginning is half the point of writing this blawg.

So these periodic blasts of a dated cologne result in a flood of memories that send me off in a reverie trying to grasp the essence of what I felt at the time. The spring of 1985 was an early one that seemed to linger deep into June. With each passing week the temperature inched upward, the world became greener, and began to vibrate with life. My braces had come off after 6 years of suffering and pain, and my self esteem soared. Never before had anyone ever considered me to be “good looking”, but suddenly it seemed as if there was a different, maybe even handsome, face staring back at me from the mirror. The same could be said for all of us that year. We had turned the corner from gangly teens, to young adults, and we were thrilled to get out and try out our new equipment.

I am a born pessimist. For as long as I can remember, I have viewed every good event in my life with the suspicion that it was fleeting, and would soon be followed by Faulkner-ian loss. If ever there was such a thing as Western New York Gothic, I embodied it. But that spring of 1985, for the first, and maybe the last time in my life, the future seemed boundless. My heart still aches remembering it.

Photo copyright atsjbosma @http://www.flickr.com/photos/87185102@N00/2436554995/

It was a spring evening, with the first breath of summer sighing through the trees. It was a Friday, and after school we had borrowed one of our parent’s cars, and driven a classmate who could pass for 21, out to a convenience store on East Main to buy beer. With thrilling success we had managed to acquire 2 cases of beer. Well, if you can classify Old Milwaukee, and Old Milwaukee Light as beer, but at the time we weren’t exactly selective drinkers. Being 16 and 17 year olds, we were limited in our range and mobility. Getting a car after dark, was pretty much out of the realm of possibility, so we had to do some quick planning to figure out where to store this beer, and where to drink it after nightfall. After some discussion, we decided on the woods behind the Blind School. It was a central location, accessible by a short walk from most of our houses. So we drove the dirt driveway back behind the school that afternoon, and stashed our illicit treasure under some upturned concrete blocks, in a pile of dirt and construction waste from a recent construction project. Then we returned to our homes for supper hoping that no one had spotted us.

That evening, shortly after supper, we began to gather in small groups at various houses. The guys started showing up at 20 Prospect on their 10 speeds before, ahem, “going to the movies”. The girls began to gather at Bella’s house on State Street for the same ostensible purpose. Then as the shadows began to lengthen, we started making our way to the woods to rendezvous. The spot we had chosen was a wooded hillside that sloped down towards the north, and an undeveloped area of scrubby growth that extended to the Thruway. The nearest homes were on Burke Drive, over a hundred yards to the west, through a wooded area thick with undergrowth. It was unlit and very secluded, well off the beaten path for any passing kids, or adults.

Looking back it all seems so innocent, but at the time we felt like hardened criminals committing a felony. Retrieving our warm Old Milwaukee, we began passing cans around the circle, and talking in hushed, conspiratorial tones. Being kids it didn’t take more than half a can for us to begin feeling the magical effects of alcohol beginning to tickle our consciousness. I had never felt more mature in my life than I did sitting around that circle, talking and laughing with 8 other guys and girls. It was the first real clandestine “party” we had ever thrown, and it would not be the last.

Sitting there in the gathering dusk, the city began to disappear around us, until it was just the nine of us there in the dark, our senses alive like never before. Goosebumps appeared on my arms, as much from the excitement of the moment as it was from the coolness of late May. The girls huddled close to the guys, and we began to look at each other in a new light. Up until that point the friendships between us had been reserved and platonic. But as the night went on, and the cans piled up, we became aware of each others presence in a visceral way that we hadn’t ever noticed before. Like blind kids, the dimness and the alcohol had suddenly magnified our other senses. We could feel each others presence, even in the indigo darkness. It was an awakening for us all.

As summer came on, we would repeat this scene many times, in many places, but our relationships had begun to change. With each progressive step, our familiarity increased, and romantic intrigues developed. Over the course of the next 5 years the couplings, and breakups would become too numerous, and intertwined, to keep straight. But sitting there on the edge of 17, the future stretched out like a trackless wilderness. We had no idea what lay before us, and we tingled with anticipation, poised and ready to step forward into the virgin woods and begin blazing our trails.

That was 25 years ago. We had no idea of the twists, turns and the dead ends that we would wander into. One by one our paths would diverge into a forest of our own choosing, and slowly the path behind would be overgrown with weeds and burdocks. But the memories are still there, somewhere far in the back of our minds, until something, say a colleagues bottle of ancient cologne, flips a switch and it all comes flooding back. When it does, there’s not much that can be done except to pause, smile, and marvel at the journey.

a stone, a leaf, and unfound door…

. . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of loss, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this most weary unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When? O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

– Thomas Wolfe

As the date stamp in the picture says, Christmas Eve 1990. I was home for the first time since leaving college to start working on the road. After summer in the South, and autumn in the Midwest, I was home again.

I’ve said before, I had always felt that bittersweet longing to leave Batavia behind and get out into fresh air. A place where no one would know me, or have me fixed and pinned to the wall like a bug in a museum case.

"Twentus Prospectus" - A Melancholy Species of mop haired, over achieving, shyness.

Home had become a prison that I longed to escape. The previous six years of my life had been focused on achieving just that. The sole purpose of my final two years at N.D. and my time at Clarkson, had been to get a degree and secure a job that would get me out. I had wanted it so long, I had forgotten why. Perhaps because in the world that I inhabited, leaving home behind for somewhere else was the definition of success.

So here I was, Christmas Eve 1990, the conquering hero returned. Yet I felt no joy. No victory had been won. No, the town, and life there had moved on without me. In fact, it didn’t even seem to notice that I was gone. This is perhaps the greatest irony that faces all of those who work their whole young lives to leave their small town behind. The town was bigger than them all along.

It’s been a long time since I read Thomas Wolfe. I can remember reading “You Can’t Go Home Again” during the long hot summer of 1988, as I spent countless hours riding the back roads of WNY in a Niagara Mohawk pickup truck. Sweaty, dirty, bored, sitting in the shade of a tree at some remote electrical substation during my lunch break reading. At the time I felt the truth that Wolfe was trying to communicate was that once you have grown beyond the provincial, and expanded your self in new and different ways, ways impossible without leaving home behind, that you could never fit back into that home. It was a theme that was no stranger to fiction, and has been mined for ever, dating back at least to the Greek Tragedies. The hero leaves home on a journey. The hero grows. The hero returns to find that he no longer belongs.

But coming home myself that Christmas of 1990, something felt different. It wasn’t that I no longer fit through the door, it was that the door had closed behind me. Whether I wanted to return or not, there was no way back in. The door was locked, and the keys lost. Poised there on that doorstep as a stranger for the first time, I realized that the door that led out, was not the same as the door that would lead back in.

”]

Why do chicks dig hockey players?

I have been on this earth for 43 years now, and I like to think I am an astute observer of the human condition. Well, as attentive an observer as any male can be. Ooo! Look! Shiny objects!

Where was I?

Right. I am an astute observer of the foibles and paradoxes of this strange mammalian beast we call man. What I have learned of this creature could fill volumes of scientific essays. However, what I have learned about his partner on this earth, this strange creature called “woo-man” would only fill half a page. If not for this great mystery I would have lost interest in life a long, long time ago. So rare are these insights that when I do uncover a truth about the behavior of the female of the species, I hold it up like a prospector finding a pure nugget of gold, and shout EUREKA! Then I feel a sudden urge to share my great discovery with mankind.

Thankfully I have a blog to share these pearls of wisdom. So today I would like to contribute this one great truth for the betterment of mankind.

Are you ready?

Are you sitting down?

OK, here goes.

Chicks dig hockey players.

Shocking, I know. But trust me on this one. Hockey players are second only to rock musicians on the scale of womanly desire. Please, don’t ask me to explain it. I leave that to greater minds than mine.

It was the Junior year of High School when I first discovered this. As hockey season rolled around, I noticed that half of the girls in class would talk about the previous night’s Sabres game with the same sort of interest usually reserved for Rainbows, and Unicorns. Wondering what this was all about, I asked The Girl Next Door why she followed hockey, and she made it abundantly clear. Hockey players were H-O-T.

This revelation came as a bitter blow. Not only had I dropped out of guitar lessons in the 6th grade, but the Ice Arena in Batavia hadn’t even opened until I was 12, and our school did not have a hockey program. Somehow I had missed out on the two best ways of picking up girls before I had even known what was at stake. Fate is a cruel mistress.

So I decided I would make the best of a bad situation, and become a hockey fan so that I would have something to talk to girls about, other than helping them with their Trigonometry homework.

As that winter progressed beneath the gray permaclouds of Western New York, I began to watch as many hockey games as I could so that I could get in on the conversation with the gaggle of hockey mad girls in school. Before long, The Girl Next Door and I were calling each other between periods to breakdown the game like Don Cherry and Ron MacLean. Who knew talking to girls could be so easy?

But my discussions about hockey weren’t just limited to my puppy dog infatuation with The Girl Next Door. I soon struck up hockey friendships with half of the girls in my class. And to make things even more remarkable, NONE of these relationships involved either beer, or make out sessions in clandestine locations. What was happening to me? How could I suddenly relate to women so easily, and frequently that I could choose to be selective about which girls to lust after?

Amazing days indeed.

As much as our mutual love of hockey brought me closer to The Girl Next Door, I had no illusions. The root of her interest was the inexplicable, carnal desire that cute hockey players created in the loins of teenage girls. Yes, I may be able to talk for hours about a Sabres game with her, but I could never turn her on the way that Phil Housley, or Tom Barrasso could.

As for my platonic hockey relationships, I actually learned more about the game of hockey from Maria and Dina than I did from any guy I knew. When I went to a game during Senior Year it was with them, and not any of my supposed “guy” friends. These girls not only lusted after players, they also were walking encyclopedias of hockey knowledge.

When the game was over, we walked down the dank, smelly caverns of the Aud, to stand outside the Sabres locker room so Dina could introduce us to Mike Foligno, as she babysat his kids. In retrospect, going to a hockey game with 2 girls has to count among of the highlights of my teenage years. When Maria almost killed us by driving under a Semi in a snow squall, the epic nature of the night was cemented in my memory. Not many men come close to having their obituary mention you died while on a date with two girls.

Sigh… if only I had been a hockey player.

Risky Business revisited

I had a presentation to make to the board of directors of my Dark Corporate Overlords this morning, so I was too preoccupied with worry to write a proper blog post. So instead I will recycle another story from my misspent well spent youth. Enjoy while I clean out my desk…

If there are two constant themes in all of my stories, I think we can agree they are “Drunkenness” and “Sexual Frustration”. The two always seem to go hand in hand. Well class, today’s story is no different. Imagine the coincidence!

It was late winter of 1985, and my teenage social life was taking off. For a brace-faced, acne-riddled, wallflower with a bad Beatles haircut, I had somehow stumbled into a steady girlfriend, and circle of coeds with amazing access to alcohol. Surely all those years of serving as an altar boy were paying dividends, because God was smiling on me now.

For the first time in my natural born life, I was the only child living at home. My Bratty Big Sis was living in Oneonta with her husband, my Big Bruddah was working at the Buffalo Bar in Idaho Springs, Colorado and the “Middle Child Sister” had moved out of the house again, and was in her own apartment. As the Golden Child of the family, I had already enjoyed more than my fair share of my parents attention, but now I was positively swamped with it. It was all about me, all the time, and with 2 cars in the household, and no siblings to have to share them with, I had the freedom to take my girlfriend parking whenever I could slip her out of her parents’ sight. My friends, life was about as good as it could get, but then it got better.

My Bratty Big Sis living in Oneonta just had her first baby the previous summer. My folks were suddenly finding reasons to drive to Oneonta about one weekend a month. Not only did I have wheels, I soon found myself left alone like Tom Cruise in that movie with the awful Bob Seger song. I know, I should be more specific as ALL Bob Seger songs are awful, as are all Tom Cruise movies for that matter. You know the one the one with Rebecca De Mornay? Yeah, THAT one.

I found out on a Friday that they would be leaving the next morning, and coming back on Sunday night. The Middle Sister was over for free dinner on Friday night, and I was able to pull her aside, and give her the $30 from my secret cache to buy me a couple of cases of beer. I could have elected to go cheap, but I wasn’t that sort of guy, yet. I specified a case of Molson Golden, and a case of Michelob dark, and whatever else she could find that looked good at Angotti Beverages.

It only took a few clandestine calls on the old rotary dial in the upstairs hallway to set plans into motion. I called my friend Tim, and told him to come by Saturday afternoon to help set up then plan on spending the night, then I was on the phone with Bella making sure that she could gather the Girl Next Door and other female friends. Chris & Dan were a given. Now I had been drinking for a little less than a year at that point, but in all that time I had never been able to bring my girlfriend to a party. She spent most weekends babysitting for a couple down the street, or cleaning house for a little old lady in town. But on this particular night, the stars had aligned and she was free to come to the party. She arranged a cover story of going to the movies with her best friend so as to hide the fact that she would be drunk and half clothed by 9pm, from her strict parents. Things were shaping up.

My parents left bright and early on Saturday morning, and the game was on. My sister dropped by after lunch with the two cases of beer plus a six pack of some Philippine Beer with a grass hut on the label. (Ooo exotic!) Tim arrived at the appointed hour, and we proceeded to carry my Big Bruddah’s stereo downstairs from the bedroom, and set it up in the living room. I put on my best long sleeve Ocean Pacific T-shirt, we grabbed some dinner from Burger King, and by 7 pm the guests started to arrive.

I had only invited a small circle of 12-15 trusted friends, as the last thing I wanted was for my party to turn into a scene from John Hughes movie. We kept the shades drawn, and nobody drove to the party, walking instead after putting together suitable alibis. We were amazingly responsible for a bunch of hormone addled 17 year olds.

My girlfriend was one of the first to arrive. As people showed up by ones and twos, we started playing quarters around my Mom’s huge kitchen table. I kept jumping in and out of the game, to change the tape, or answer the front door, peeking out each time half expecting to see Johnny Law standing on the front porch.

The party was going great, everyone was in fantastic moods, and the beers were going down easy. This was so much better than drinking warm Old Milwaukee in the woods behind the blind school. Once everyone had arrived, there was little thought or worry about getting caught. Now I could turn my attentions to entertaining my guests, looking forward to later in the evening when I could slip upstairs with my girlfriend. In the mean time I was suavely working the crowd like Sinatra in Vegas, making sure everyone was having a good time.

I’m not sure when I first noticed it, but at some point my girlfriends best friend came up to me, and told me that they had a problem. My girlfriend was about to pass out. Now, this was shocking news to me, and I had just been talking to her not 10 minutes earlier, and she had only had half of a beer. I followed her into the kitchen, and sure enough, there was my girlfriend, her eyes rolling around in her head like pinballs as she slumped against the table. This was definitely not on the agenda.

I helped her up, and tried to figure out what was wrong. She smiled at me, slurred something about how much she loved me, and fell against my shoulder sobbing, “I’m sorry I’m so druuunnnnk. You’re going to hate me aren’t yoooouuuuu.” None of the John Hughes movies I had ever seen had prepared me for this.

I cut her off from drinking, and her best friend started freaking out about how we were going to take her home in this state. Someone suggested she drink some coffee like they did to sober people up on TV, but this being 1985, none of us had ever considered actually drinking coffee. Ick! Then her best friend had the brilliant idea that she should take a cold shower. This seemed to make sense at the time. Perhaps we confused the TV remedy for horny husbands, for the one for drunks. In any case, we helped her upstairs, and her friend took her into the bathroom to help her undress and get in the shower. This wasn’t exactly the way I had hoped to get her out of her clothes that night, although, I may have been amenable to the part about her best friend helping get her undressed.

I went back downstairs to the party, but my mood was pretty much ruined. I proceeded to get myself drunk, muttering under my breath. Then I began to turn my attentions to the Girl Next Door. We had been flirting pretty heavily in school lately, and she seemed to be enjoying the attention I was giving her. I had almost forgotten that my girlfriend was in the shower upstairs. It might have been minutes, it might have been hours, but eventually she came back downstairs, looking sleepy and remorseful. This only ticked me off more, because now the drama began.

“You’re going to break up with meeeee…..”
“No, I’m not. I’m just upset that you got so drunk.”
“You hate meeee….”
“No, I don’t.”
“Yesssss….yoooouuuuu……..dooooooooo………”

It was at this point that I decided that maybe she wasn’t really the girl I wanted to be giving my class ring to. Maybe I should have stuck with the Catholic girls from ND. They could handle their liquor, AND had no issues with fooling around. I guess this was what you might call one of those “teachable moments”.
The rest of the night I spent convincing my now inconsolable girlfriend that I did indeed still love her, despite the fact that I wanted to break up with her more with each passing minute. Eventually the beer ran out, and I missed the rest of my own party. One by one people left for home. I managed to step out onto the porch to say goodbye to the Girl Next Door, and tell her I would give her a call the next day. Then I went back inside, and help my girlfriends BF to walk her home, stopping at the corner of North Street and Bank, so that I wouldn’t be seen by her parents.

I went home and cleaned up. Tim spent the night on my couch, and in the morning we discovered that someone had puked all over the floor of the downstairs bathroom. He denied doing it, and I know it sure as hell wasn’t me. The morning was spent mopping the bathroom, and getting the smell out before my parents came home. He never did own up to it either.

Needless to say, it was a memorable experience. I learned several lessons that night that would serve me well in later years.

1.) Never date a girl that couldn’t handle her liquor.

2.) Parties are WAY more fun when they are at someone else’s house.

3.) There’s no point spending money on good beer, when cheap wine coolers or Franzia will get the girls every bit as drunk.

4.) When a girl is crying hysterically about how you are going to break up with her, keep your mouth shut and go along with it.

5.) Catholic School Girls Rule

I must confess that I knew #5 already, but the party did drive the point home.

Stay Gold Ponyboy

Sorry about yesterday’s super serious, faux-intellectual post. Yeah, sometimes I am full of krep, and even I know it. Most of the time I’m just full of it, and totally clueless to that fact. So I owe you all a good story.

Unfortunately, I don’t have any good stories, so here’s an old one instead.

No sunlight is more golden than the light through the branches of the weeping willow tree. Whenever the June sun shines clear out of the cerulean sky I think back to the last few days of High School. ND was surrounded with weeping willow trees. (still is for that matter). Those last few days of the school year, as we were taking our Regents Exams, the drafty old windows would be cranked open, and the breeze through those willow branches would taunt us with the promises of freedom. Look up from your desk for just a moment, and the illuminated willow branches outside the window would wave to you like sirens calling sailors to their watery graves. “Forget the Geometry Exam!”, “Come out and play!”, “Summer is almost here!”.

 

When the yearbooks were signed, and the bell sounded for the final time, the ties would come off, and we had all we could do to keep from grabbing the nearest plaid skirted girl, and making out in the bushes. (That didn’t happen until after dark usually)

 

I read once that the average teenage male thinks about girls once every 5 minutes. I think that is woefully under estimated. Put the average teenage male in close proximity to the plaid skirted female, and it pretty much dominates his every waking thought. The mere sight of certain knee caps in my Religion class was enough to make some of us unwilling to stand up without a strategically placed textbook.

 

June was the season of parties in the woods, or at the end of dirt roads. It was the season of drinking outdoors without freezing your ass off. It was no longer necessary to have a backseat at your disposal. Any shrub, or shadowy park would do. (The frugality of the Nuns taught us how to be resourceful.)

 

As I have said before, if you only knew me from the stories on this blog, you’d think that my adolescence was spent purely in the pursuit of girls and alcohol. It wasn’t. However, for the life of me I cannot remember what else I did. I think those were the brain cells that I sacrificed in college.

 

I can distinctly remember one golden June afternoon when Bella and I made a trip to buy beer in her parents rusty Safari Station Wagon. We lovingly referred to it was the Deathmobile, as much for the handling, as for Bella’s driving. She somehow managed to put it into a cornfield after seeing a hot guy in a convertible once, but that’s a story for another time.

The sunlight streamed through the trees, and the wind rushed through the open windows as we listened to 97 Rock, or some such lousy WNY Classic Rawk station. We had picked up Sheila Welch, and were on our way to buy beer from the one convenience store on East Main Street that would sell to minors.

 

Well, I should say “the one store that would sell to Sheila”, because they were under the impression she was 21. (It would be another 10 years before someone mistook me for a 21 year old). It was awful nice of Sheila to buy the beer for us as she wasn’t invited to the party where we’d be drinking it. To this day I don’t know how Bella sweet talked her into helping us. Hopefully, no sexual favors were exchanged. At least, they weren’t exchanged with me unfortunately.

 

For such a fleeting moment in life, these clandestine drinking parties take up a disproportionate amount of memory. Surely there were just a handful of them, although it seems like they all blend together into one golden evening in my mind; an evening full of the promise of the sweet, malty buzz of cheap beer, and the soft, flowery scent of girls. Even 25 years later, it’s hard to ask for a lot more out of life than that. Maybe that’s a sad thing, but I prefer to think of it as a happy one. It’s a sign that some things in life do transcend time, and space, and can offer us a taste of that immortality that surely hides behind the veil of our material world. The promise and hope of greater things to come, when you know that great things have already arrived. The way I felt sitting at a desk, looking out a window at the sunlight illuminating the leaves of a willow tree on a June afternoon. A golden light showing me the way into a world full of possibilities.

 

So interweb friends, right now I would like nothing more than to invite you all over for a bonfire, and party at my place. Sadly, my status as a 300 lb. serial killer requires a certain degree of anonymity, so that will not be possible. Instead, consider the comment box to be our virtual spring fling. The tunes are on, I just tapped the keg, and there’s a box of Franzia in the fridge. Help yourself! I only ask that if you get sick in the comment box, you be so kind as to clean up after yourself. Experience has taught me that if you leave a puddle of sick on the floor overnight, it’s damn hard to get the smell out before the folks come home.

 

And as a friend once pointed out, the blog comment is the 21^st century equivalent of signing a yearbook.

 

Peggy Sue Got Married

Last week Mrs. 20 Prospect received a note in the mail that stopped us both dead in our tracks. It was an invitation to her 25 year High School Reunion. Now Mrs. 20 Prospect doesn’t have a nostalgic bone in her body. She saves very little, and does not cling to the past. I, however, squirrel memories away like nuts for the coming winter. This is what we call balance. This is also what we call conflict. So a truce has been reached whereby I am allowed a small allotment of space to save whatever flotsam and jetsam of my life that pleases me, so long as it fits in 5 cardboard boxes.

Now two of those boxes are devoted to books that I have been unable to sell, or give away because of my attachment to them. Books that for whatever reason, either what they say, or who I was when I read them, hold a special place in my heart. Another box contains shoeboxes full of every letter and greeting card I received from ages 13 to 26. I’m not kidding. They are all there. Even the little pink slips of paper that Marianne passed to me in 8th grade.

Each piece of paper bears the cursive script of the sender in blue or black ink. They may very well be my greatest treasures. Proof that people did indeed love me enough to take the time to sit, compose a thought, right it out longhand in cursive script, fold it into a matching envelope, place a 13 cent stamp on it, and walk to the mailbox. Can you imagine actually taking that amount of time and effort to send someone a note today? Knowing full well that it might be weeks before you received a reply, if they even sent one? Mind boggling I know, but such was the world in the days before email, text messaging and Facebook.

Most of these letters contain nothing but mundane details, but somehow, over time, it is these little details that can speak the loudest. They are a Rosetta stone that reveals the parts of my life that has long since been buried beneath desert sands. Read one, and the brain whirls and clicks like a one armed bandit, until it settles upon 3 cherries and the memories spill forth like a torrent of coins.

In the same box with my letters, is the stacks of journals that I kept for the 4 years that I traveled the country. I can’t even begin to bring myself to open them up. Nothing ages quicker than your own “deep thoughts”. Better to leave them in the box for my biographer to read someday.

Then there is a box containing trophies, and awards that I accumulated over the years. From Pop Warner Football (Sylvania Chargers – 1978 Batavia Pop Warner Champions!! Woot!!) to High School graduation. I worked so bleeping hard for those things that I have never been able to bring myself to throw them away. So there they sit for all eternity, gathering dust in the dark of a cardboard box, like some golden treasure in a Pharaoh’s tomb.

And finally, there’s the box that holds my Notre Dame High School Year books, and other assorted clippings, and mementos from my high school years. Pointless things like the Ferry Schedule to the ferry we rode from Rotterdam to England when I was 16. Matchbooks, and garter belts, graduation tassels, ticket stubs to the 1984 Christmas Dance, and other assorted trinkets from “special occasions”.

What made me think about this stuff? Well aside from my natural inclination for nostalgia, it was the shock of realizing that it has been 25 years since I graduated from High School.

Twenty

Five

Years.

I don’t feel that old. Hell, at this pace I can easily imagine living for another 25 (God willing and the creek don’t rise)

Nore Dame High School Class of 1986

This is the Notre Dame High School Senior Class of 1986, in all their pastel glory. It was taken the night of our senior prom, in the ballroom at the Treadway Inn. It was the 80’s man, we didn’t want no stinking gymnasium, we wanted tuxedo’s with tails, and limousines, and fancy mauve carpet! So we spent a good chunk of our class money to rent out the room, and go out in style.

Well, if you can call that style. It definitely is a kind of style. I would call it “redneck, Western New York, ethnicky melting pot style.” Looking at those faces, brought back memories of kids I haven’t thought about in over 20 years. Just about the entire Senior Class showed up at the prom, and I’d say, that only about 5-6 of them went with a classmates. I’m not sure what it says about us but almost all of our dates were from other schools. Oakfield, Pembroke, Pavillion, BHS, Byron-Bergen, Leroy, they are all represented. What did we have against each other that kept us all from dating?

Well, to be honest, we knew each other. That alone was reason not to date. I struggled with it at the time, and it took years, but I finally embraced my Damerhood. For most of High School I tried hard to be someone I wasn’t. I wanted out of Batavia in the worst way. I didn’t want to get “stuck” there. I had big plans to go to college, to travel, to live somewhere important.

Looking at the faces in that picture I see the same kind of big dreams. I also see fear, loneliness, hope, sadness, and loss. Mostly though I see something I never thought I would ever see for those 62 kids. I see love.

It only took 25 years, and a couple of months, but looking at that collection of Italian, Irish, Polish, German, and Sicilian (it’s distinct from Italian, trust me) kids, I see the stoners, the jocks, the brains, the wallflowers, the Cheerleaders, the clowns, the Joe Cools, and the hipsters, and I feel love for them. A more motley collection would be hard to find. And yet, this picture could be just about any Senior class from any rural school in Upstate New York. This is what we looked like. This is who we were. It wasn’t the cast from some damned John Hughes movie.

There was nothing wonderful about it. It hurt like hell to be a teenager, just as it hurts like hell to be a teen today. How we ever survived ourselves, each other, and the world around us is a mystery, but we did. Looking through those faces we have all been kicked hard in the groin by life at least once since those days. Some, more than once. We have lost parents, siblings, friends, and children. We have struggled with addictions, and depressions. We have lived through arrests, and divorces. These events have not been out of proportion to any statistical average for kids from W.N.Y. Hell, kids anywhere.

What matters isn’t the pain, but the fact that we have kept pulling ourselves back up off that floor for another kick. If there’s one lesson I learned in my 4 years at Notre Dame, I think it is this. Get up. Keep getting up. No matter how hard they kick you, don’t ever stay down.

How, when, and where we learned this lesson, I have no idea. Perhaps it was “the workshop way”. Looking at those faces tonight, I can see it in each and everyone. Tough little bastards we were then. Tough old bastards we are now. So Class of 1986, I raise this glass of Surly to you tonight. May we always keep pulling ourselves off the floor for another round.

Our Lady of Perpetual Suffering, please pray for us.

The Prodigal Returns

An old post. One that probably explains a lot about me.

Photo copyright @ http://www.sccs.swarthmore.edu/users/06/adem/pictures/hickory/images/campfire%203.jpg

The first awakening began with a discussion. Well, a drunken argument really. I was 19 years old, sitting in the woods with a circle of friends and acquaintances when Michelle spoke up with a declaration that we were all working class really, not middle class. I have no idea where she came up with a statement like that. She was always trying to impress us with her intellect, and intimidate us with her 6-2 blondness, and she bugged the hell out of me. We weren’t friends, but we weren’t enemies either. We just happened to run in the same circle of kids that got together to drink and complain about spending another summer stuck in Batavia. So it was no surprise really when I took the bait and argued back that she didn’t know what the hell was she talking about. We were middle class. We were college kids, with parents that had jobs, and houses, and cars, and took vacations. Sure, maybe a generation or so earlier our grand parents had eaten ethnic foods, spoken foreign languages, and worked in factories, but it was the 1980’s now, and we were middle class.

I forget how the argument ended. With more beer probably, and with me losing interest, and instead focusing on whichever unattainable preppy girl happened to be sitting around the fire, and Michelle having a few more beers and becoming aggressively amorous to some poor unsuspecting male, as she was wont to do. But needless to say I did not forget the argument. Her assertion that we were working class bugged me in a way I couldn’t articulate. Mostly because I began to realize, slowly at first, that she might have a point.

It was many more years before I could accept the fact that she was indeed right, and understand why it had upset me. But before I get to that I have to explain the background of who it was seated around the fire that night, drinking in the woods at the end of a dirt road, in the countryside outside of Batavia.

Photo Copyright Blondieyooper @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/blondieyooper/3505262361/

I grew up on Prospect Avenue, the 4th child of a family that had only moved to town a few years before I was born. We were new to Batavia, having moved there from Tonawanda when Dad’s job with Niagara Mohawk gave him a chance to transfer for more money. I grew up as the tag along child, 6 years younger than my nearest sibling, and I was spoiled for it. The family took its first real vacations when I was 5, and began to have the money to spend on extravagances like Color Television, and new cars, when I was so young that I took such things for granted. When I went off to school Mom took a job doing secretarial work, and my ailing Grandmother moved in with us. I went to St. Joe’s, and came to develop a circle of friends that are still with me today, almost 40 years later. We were Catholic, and all came from big families. But even then, I knew that something set us apart from the other kids on the street. They went to public school, and didn’t wear the uniforms that we did, or leave for church on Sunday mornings dressed in their itchiest clothes.

I didn’t know what set us apart, and wouldn’t for a long time still. Our names had funny combination’s of consonants, and vowels at the end that other kids lacked. Still, we got by alright in little league, and on the Pop Warner football teams. I began to be aware of other kids from different parts of town that went to other Catholic schools like St. Mary’s and St. Anthony’s and Sacred Heart. We had 4 of them, not bad for a city of only 16,000 souls. But that ethnic stuff didn’t exist at 20 Prospect. We had a German name, and our parish lacked the Irish, or Polish, or Italian identity that those other schools and parishes had. Heck, we used to tease the St. Anthony kids (mostly Italian and Sicilian) by calling them greasers. Still, we knew that we were all marked with an unmistakable sign of being different, our uniforms, that made us all targets for being picked on, or chased by kids from the Junior High. But these were just the accepted facts of life, and seemed incidental. My big brother and big sisters didn’t seem to have any problems with kids from the public schools. They were at Notre Dame H.S. by then, and in my eyes, surely the BHS kids were jealous of them. After all, to go to ND and play football was the pinnacle of my pre-teen aspirations.

When 8th grade ended, we split up. Most of my friends went to BHS for reasons that seemed entirely foreign to me. Arriving at ND, I had to build new friendships with the Irish, Sicilian, and Polish kids from Batavia, Leroy and farther points in WNY. I became exposed to “Pisano’s” for the first time, and oddly began to feel like an outsider within the walls of ND. So I kept close with my St. Joe’s friends at BHS, and became a kid with a foot in both worlds. That was the first step that led to that circle of firelight, and that argument. The second step, of course, was girls.

I was shy, still am really, and talking to girls was something that was excruciatingly painful for me in the boastful Pisano culture at ND. After 2 years of effort I had established a friendship with a girl from St. Mary’s who would go on to become the closest and dearest friend I would ever know, but I still couldn’t find a date. So when the summer before Junior year came around and I met a BHS girl during the summer soccer season, my two worlds began to come together. When my friend from ND also began to strike up a friendship with a girl from BHS, who ran in the circle of BHS soccer players frequented by one of my old St. Joe’s friends, the worlds became closer still. The final knot in rope was the access to beer, and booze, that this BHS crowd brought to the table.

At first these BHS kids seemed to be not much different from us. They weren’t at the center of their high school social scenes either. Just kids with marginal interest in extracurricular activities, who excelled in school and were on the college track like my ND friend and I. In fact, in many ways we felt more like them than our classmates at ND. We fancied ourselves “intellectuals” and went out of the way to act differently than the Pisano’s. But there was something that these BHS kids had in common that we didn’t. And it was clear the first time we went to their houses for a party. It was money. Real money.

They lived at the East end of town, in the Naramore Drive neighborhood, where the houses were newer, and bigger, and far nicer than the hundred year old homes on tiny lots we lived in. Their parents were Doctor’s, or business professionals, and didn’t work in a Union, or carry a lunch box. They didn’t make us feel unwelcome, though as “Damers” it was clear from early on that we would not be invited inside of their clique. It was a friendship of convenience, tied around some internecine hormonal attractions, and access to alcohol. But despite the underlying difference between our backgrounds, we all stood facing a path towards college, and that yellow brick road out of Batavia.

So that was how we came to sit around that campfire in the woods that summer evening, drinking cheap beer, and having pretentious conversations. When Michelle made her comment about being working class, it was like a cold glass of water being thrown in my face. It startled me, and woke me up to a fact that I had spent the previous 4 years trying to deny. There was a difference between us, and it ran deep. Michelle was wrong, most of the kids around that fire were Middle Class. But I wasn’t and neither were my Catholic friends. Try as I might to ignore that fact, it remained. We were different, and that made me question why I tried so hard to deny it. Was I ashamed? Was I jealous?

Photo copyright saxonfenken @ http://www.flickr.com/photos/saxonfenken/505450112/

It pains me to say it, but I was. I knew I didn’t belong around that circle, and I knew that the one I did belong in, I had run from. I felt like St. Peter, and half expected a cock to crow three times. Instead, I just buried it deep inside me as self loathing, and took it out on anyone and anything that reminded me of the truth. I would get out of Batavia, no matter what. I would get a job that paid better than them, and I would live in a better house, and be a bigger success, than they would. I didn’t walk away from them at first. It took time, but walk away I did. I began to despise them almost as much as I despised myself for trying to be like them. So I ran, and I ran. In some ways I am running still. Only now I collect my paycheck from my dark corporate overlords with the same self loathing, and contempt that I had when I drank their beer.

It has been over 20 years since that discussion, and I feel so much differently now. I embrace who I am, and who I was, and I am ashamed of the years I wasted trying to be someone, and something that I wasn’t. Regrets are a part of life, and nothing to be ashamed of. It’s all part of our road to redemption. There was an Eden once, and for reasons we cannot remember, we were kicked out of it. Now we wander, looking for a way back in. Some walk the path of the prodigal, spending their inheritance on things they wrongly assume will restore what they have lost. Others stay behind as the dutiful son, resenting the things they have given up to hang onto a paradise they could never keep. In the end, they both must surrender to the fact that the purgatories they live in were built with their own hands, and their redemption cannot be bought. It can only be given by the one whom we run from. The one who knew us, before we knew ourselves.You’d think I’d know that by now, yet I still return on my knees, again, and again.

The return of the prodigal - Rembrandt