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Time…

There is no laughter like the laughter shared with an old friend, with your oldest and longest running friend. The guy that’s been there with you through it all, with you and for you every step of the way for over sixty years. So many wars have worked to end us, never succeeding.

I had a moment, this morning, where I realized that no one else will ever know exactly who I am. Only this guy. He’s the one who knows all the secrets, all the dirt, where the bodies are buried. And he’s an old fuck now, like me.

Passing references to some stupidity that happened 40 years ago, one night, in the rain, wrecked and wasted; ex-wives and girlfriends and trucks stranded in snowstorms, in Canada, a hundred miles from anything that could even be called nowhere. Drunk and fights, and chains and knives, dozens of fights; some blood, often a lot of blood. In the morning, eggs and coffee and bolts that needed to be turned. Renegades and mercenaries without cause or alliance, except to each other.

A name crops up, and with it, always, a reference to the car he had, and his mechanical skills, or lack of any particular skills at all. The realization that guy is dead. So many of the guys from those days are gone, some for decades. An impromptu memorial, standing, leaning on the red Craftsman tool box.

A big, dry maple leaf falls all the way down to the dirt, ninety, maybe a hundred feet. We predate that tree. We probably got off our tricycles on that very spot and punched each other in the face. Appreciating we have a unique opportunity to stand where our fathers stood, and to still be standing, long after they have gone to the dust.

Remembering those two men mixing the concrete for the foundation of this garage. A big old rusted cement mixer and shovels and piles of sand and stones. Watching them drinking beer, in the summer sun, and the sound of the can opener ripping open the Ballentine or Schlitz, in the decade that predated the pop top.

Wondering why or how we were never men of their caliber. Or are we the same as them, only we didn’t know them the way we know each other. Did they, too, have their own hidden pages. Pages torn out of and hidden from their books. I hope they did. I hope they knew these things about each other like we know each other. Everyman needs another man who knows his deepest dirt. It keeps you honest and free.

I can’t drive away from that garage anymore without starting to cry, but I’ll be damned if he’ll ever know about that. I just flip him off and laugh as I walk away. “Fuck you, asshole, I’ve got to go…” realizing that one day, maybe soon, or not so soon, it will be the last time.

We all know that our days are numbered from birth, for the most part we refuse to believe it, but the days now, driving away, stomping the gas, dumping the clutch, smoking the tires, seem to have a different quality to them, they carry a weight, as if they were made out of gold, even if they have no real purpose, just bullshitting and ball breaking, same as it ever was, but different. The years themselves seem to have a weight that pushes down making us old and not so upright.

I really wish you’d stop talking about dying and sore bones. Don’t talk to me about deeds to cemetery plots. You’ve made peace with something I’ll never even comprehend. You were always able to make peace. All I ever want to make is war.

Maybe it is because were both old men, or maybe it’s really something else. Every hour I get with you now is a gift, and I will never again take one more minute for granted. These days are all we have left, my oldest friend, in a strange way of all the thousands of days we have spent together, these days are the best, the purest, the most honest. These are the sacred days. These are the days we fought so hard with each other to get to, and now I just want to start all over again, never changing a thing.

Time will kick your ass in a way no man ever could.

The Myth and the Underbelly

This is not to diminish the horrible story of that twenty-two year old woman whose death has become something of a national obsession; I’m in offices all day, many have cable news on wall-mounted TVs. The reporting on this tragedy is well ingrained now into the twenty-four hour news cycle; breathless on-scene reporters sharing each new tidbit of information, at least for this week…

This view has been expressed a few times by others, but I, too, have to wonder would we be be experiencing the same level of near national hysteria about Gabby If she’d been from the hood, or the trailer park, had she been addicted to opioids or meth. If she was last seen leaving the free-clinic, or an abortion clinic and not the majestic Tetons or Yellowstone. If she’d been a little less blond and apple pie pretty; if her hair was a bit darker, maybe a little curlier.

It is a tragedy. Please, I’m not making light of it. But I am sure other young women, and men for that matter, disappear every day without this national obsession. Babies are found abandoned and in dumpsters dead every day, and I hear not a word. People die with needles in veins every day, it doesn’t even make the local news.

Sometimes it’s seems to me we only see tragedy in the reflection of the myth, not the ugly underbelly of the reality of life here in the good ol’ USA.

My Hometown

My hometown was a small city in the north and it always felt like mid-October. A place in-between, like summer just passed and winter not quite yet come, an odd and often uncomfortable twilight.

A warm and colorful and dark and foreboding place. Full of life and lifeless. At times quiet and complex and terrifying as a Halloween night, full of cold full moons and witchcraft and dark corners and knives. A place of things that couldn’t be explained.

It was good to live in a time when everything couldn’t be explained.

We all seemed to live pretty much the same life in that town. Some kids had fathers and families and some had none. Some of the kids were rich and most were dirt-poor. We were all scared of the bomb and the white kids and brown kids and black kids mostly got along, and when we did fight — and I fought a lot, with just about everybody — it wasn’t particularly violent.

Fighting was more a sport than a way of war. We collected scabs and scars as tokens of our collective rage.

My friend Archie and me were deadly scared of the bomb. It seemed like every day we hid under our desks, hiding from the coming blast. Archie said he was pretty sure hiding under a desk wasn’t worth a pinch of shit, but we hid anyway. I figured he was right.

Farms were nearby and we worked them when school was out. We killed the animals we raised as pets and we ate them because the world has an inherent cruelty that needed to be passed down like a torch, and understood and accepted.

There were a lot of rituals of passage in that town. Rituals of terrible importance that have now faded into memory and dust..

And, every brick and cement building had a yellow and black fallout shelter sign on it. If those signs were meant to comfort us, they did not.

Maybe we got along ok because we all knew any minute the Russians would bomb us, so we figured we might as well stick together.

Driving through Middletown now, as an old man, I feel a hollowness, it rattles like a coin in a can.

Trainsmoke

The summer always ended on his porch, the neighbor, Harry McCabe, down the dirt path dead-end by the water.

Feet up on the surrounding stone and cement wall, leaning back in the kitchen chairs we’d drug out after eating the evening meal. Carefully surveying the woods for the skunks. They liked appear as the sun sets, down by the garbage cans and the blackcap bushes.

The wind rushing under the wings of Canada Geese, landing on the small lake, more a pond, truly a swamp. To Harry it was a lake, his lake. The thick woods surrounding us betrayed the sun, the last rays of the day fall and we are borne into a new darkness.

Harry had been my dad’s friend, before my old man died. Together they worked on cars in his driveway. My dad had a job, but he liked to work on cars too. I guessed that was the entirety of Harry’s career, cars and lawnmowers. He must have had a dozen or so old, broken down lawnmowers around the garage out back of his house.

Harry’s wife left him a few years back. I asked about it, but he said she just went to be with her sister and that was it. Word around the lake was Harry was a mean drunk, but he always seemed pretty kind to me. Some nights I helped him off to bed, when he got himself lost in the booze.

A Pall Mall cigarette burning in the enveloping night, he spoke, unintentionally of his insecurities and intentionally the need, come Saturday, to replace the starter in ‘The ‘53’,

the Ford pickup, rusting behind his house. “I should teach you how to pop start that truck, when your legs are longer… it’s something you need to know.” He said with an urgent sincerity, a critical life skill he needed to impart to me…

He got me drinking whisky and sweet soda around the age of nine. Harry said, “What with your old man dead, now I suppose you ought to learn to drink and fight. I supposed nine is as good an age as any for both…” so we started to drink that sweet soda whisky on his porch as the summers ended.

A far off rumble slowly filled the night, every night, right on time, like a clock, then the wail of a train whistle, the rumble to a distant roar. “Diesel motor… when I was your age the steam engines were still rolling. I always had a feel for that trainsmoke in my blood, like a poison. Trainsmoke would make a man feel the need to be away. Not that life ain’t good here, at the summer’s end, drinking my whisky, but it’s that damn smoke that pulls at you. Somedays I walk out by the trestle and look at them boxcars rolling by…”

He stopped, I saw a man between two worlds. The man who loved his home and his porch and pickup Ford and his lawnmowers, and his mud hole lake, and the man who felt the pull of that whistle and rumble.

“Train smoke, boy… it’s in me stonger than this here whisky,” and we’d click glasses in some ritual I still don’t quite understand.

I went back to the lake in my later years and tried to find out what happened to Harry. The people who lived there now say he died, I like think he finally hopped that train.

I’m watching the talking heads justifying everything about Afghanistan. Words about war and deaths and trillions spent and the twin towers and September 11, and Osama Bin-Ladin, and the Soviets, and the Taliban.

My focus turned to the face of a boy, maybe eight or nine. He was standing next to an old woman wrapped in long black robe, her head covered. She looked hot and worried and scared.

Surrounding them were men in beards with guns, probably America weapons, tagelmusts covering some faces and turbans covering their heads, and vacuous eyes.

The boys face revealed only fear, confusion and a broken spirit, as if his eight years had been a long hard eight years, and now it has come to this, ugly and horrible crossroad.

Eight years old, alone and out of options, as the Americans worry about and warn of terrors and attacks. This boy’s eyes betray a world weariness impossible for his years. The terror has already arrived.

I can’t help but think if we’d sent pencils and paper and teachers and books and built schools after the Russians left instead of bombs if this picture would have played out differently. We had that choice as the 1980s, into the 1990s. The American war machine chose bombs.

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