My sister at sunset

The mind has its phantom thoughts that are renegades from logic. They are vaporous and disappear as quickly as they arrive. Twice since my sister killed herself a month ago I have been visited by two such thoughts, both of them questioning with a unified voice, "I wonder if Karen will call me tonight?" And poof. Each of the two vanished with an attending slap; "Oh yeah, she is dead."

I haven't been able to get a hold of the fact of her demise, in part I believe, because there was through cremation no stilled body to gaze upon at her wake. Instead at a cushioned spot for kneeling there was, at eye level, a photo of her and an ornate urn. Ashes to ashes and all of that. I gazed upon those tokens of her life and death and felt the dullest pangs of loss. It just didn't seem real that my dear sister was gone for ever and ever, amen.

Her graveside service too with its priest and Catholic invocation of Jesus and the eternal hereafter provided no closure for me. The words of the priest read from a book did not sooth or console. The man did not know my sister, nor did she think herself a Catholic. She'd left that religion years ago. The service however was not for me and as I stood there at my sister's grave site I had only one hope and that was that the priest's words eased my father's suffering from the loss of his daughter, the woman who would always remain his little girl.

There is this grainy 8mm-like film loop that runs in my mind each time my unbidden thoughts turn to my sister. In the loop she is falling. Exactly where she is is murky. I can not place the location. She is falling is all I know. Whether she was pushed or slipped is a mystery. For she is always in mid fall in a space that seems to have no top or bottom. I see her falling through the air without aid of a parachute.

Besides such cinematic thoughts are those born of regrets: Could I have in someway said magic words to my sister, words that had the power to rescind her fatal and final decision? Was there another way things might have been? Could I have in my last phone call to her found the right words to fill her once again with hope of better days to come? But all my questions are for naught. They've not an inkling of power to undo all that's transpired. And to think them I've come to see is a kind of betrayal to all my fond memories of my sister when she was radiantly alive and in remission from that horrible disease of depression.

In time I trust I will adjust to her passing and the film loop of her falling will fade away and be replaced by the images of a fond memory of my sister and I: In that memory the two of us are on the beach at sunset with her beloved dog, Stella. The sun is brilliant in smeared oranges, yellows, and golds and Stella is digging up crabs and barking at porpoises. A slight breeze is blowing and I am feeling content, serene, and in awe of the magnificence before me. The moment is one of utter perfection and Karen turns and looks at me and says, "God. Isn't this great." If ever I had an obligation to her it is to remember her in that light.

A Moving Experience

Yesterday morning I boarded one bus after another in order to get to a company that had responded favorably to my earlier emailed resume and accompanying cover letter in which I'd stated that I was reliable and a hard worker. I didn't really want the job. I mean if I had a choice in the matter I wouldn't have sought it out. But I was at a point and still am today where any job will and must do. So I am applying these days to each and every possibility. For I am broke and my bills still must be met. Thus I took measures yesterday that struck me as a backward step. I grasped at a job I'd once labored at some thirty five years passed.

I was then just out of high school and the job I took was that of a helper for a moving company. It did not matter that I thought the work was not for me. I needed a job and a moving company was hiring so it seemed a no brainer. I ought to apply. It was the same bit of logic that convinced me yesterday to once again pursue the same job. As I rode those multiple busses I thought about my experience three and a half decades ago.

My first day of work back then I was teamed up with a bantam weight driver who could have stood no taller than four foot eleven. He was the driver of our team and he looked like a kid behind the wheel. If I remember correctly he had to sit on a couple of phonebooks in order to see over the dashboard. He also had a bulbous black growth the size of a monstrous zit between his upper lip and nose that had me contemplating jabbing it with a pin. As we rode to our first assignment, a delivery of furniture to a third floor apartment, he searched up and down the radio dial for an oldies station. He did so without any luck. Undeterred he broke into a Frankie Valli And The Four Seasons song. He sang off key with the shrill voice of the chemically castrated.

Two renditions later we were at our destination and I learned on that day a fundamental truth known to every mover. There is no piece of furniture more difficult to move than a hide-a-bed couch. The reason for this is two fold: first off it's as heavy as a bear, and secondly at every pivot, twist, and turn you take while lugging the contraption it rocks back and forth and the bed partially springs open throwing you off balance. Adding to the overall difficulty that day I wound up being the person walking backwards and first up the steps. Because of the differences in our heights and the angle of the steps I had to stoop over and carry the hide-a-bed at ankle level in order to accommodate my coworker. Had he gone first up the steps we could have both carried it at chest level. It was an observation I took to heart and acted upon for the rest of that day's deliveries.

The following morning as I sat up high in the cab of our truck I happened to look out upon our fellow commuters on highway 91. When I did so I saw a wondrous sight. There below us in the car to our immediate right was a woman driving along while reading the Hartford Courant. She had the news paper spread out against her steering wheel. Every so often she blithely looked up from the paper to scan the traffic before her with a lack of concern that would leave me stupefied for many years to come.

A day later the supervisor called me and a driver who was a dozen years my senior into his office for a pow wow. We were to deliver some antique and fragile furniture to a monied customer who was a bit of a nervous Nelly and mightily concerned about the welfare of the pieces. He said he could not stress enough the care that we were to show both the furniture and the woman. We told our supervisor he could count on us.

We were hardly out of the company parking lot when the driver asked me if I wanted to get stoned. I said sure why not. He didn't have the weed on him so we had to make an unscheduled stop at his apartment. After we smoked a joint the driver complained of cotton mouth. He said he needed to stop and get something to drink. He pulled up to a liquor store and before popping inside he handed me his pot and papers and told me to roll another joint. So I did. Minutes later he returned with a six pack of beer. He offered me a one but I declined. He guzzled one down and immediately grabbed another and made quick work of that one too. We smoked the other joint in route and by the time we reached our destination the driver had consumed all the beer.

At the client's house the driver backed down the driveway. At least that was his intention. But he missed most of the driveway and ran over a couple bushes. The driver turned off the engine and abdicated his role of leadership, saying "You better talk to her. I'm too fucked up." That was the last thing I wanted to hear. Besides knowing that my eyes were bloodshot I was quite stoned and in no way wanted to speak with a responsible adult. But I had no choice in the matter. When we got out of the truck the woman was waiting for us. I apologized for running over her bushes and for being late. She was noticeably taken aback that I was doing the talking. I was the obvious underling. It did not help matters either that the driver was staggering around and fumbling with the bay door lock on the back of the truck. Eventually I excused myself from the woman and took over the task of opening the pesky lock. It popped right open and the driver with much effort climbed aboard the truck uncertainly. He told me to do the bulk of the moving while he sat in the bay of the truck. He said he would help me with the pieces that took two people to move.

Each trip I took from the back of the truck to inside the house the woman hovered at my side as if believing herself a guardian angel warding off mishaps. In this way I moved all the small items. Then it came time to move the pieces that required two men. We had a go at a sideboard and as the driver stumbled along behind me I saw a look of abject horror on the face of the woman as her suspicions were resolutely confirmed: That man was drunk.

Although there was much swaying and tipsy fumbling somehow the two of managed to complete the move without dropping or marring any one of the precious antiques. And the look of relief on the woman's face at the end of our labors was exultant.

I'm not sure if the woman ever complained about the driver's drunkenness. Were I her I would have. The driver and I never crossed paths again, and I soon quit out of dislike for the job. The following morning after a strong cup of coffee I looked for work elsewhere.

Fast forward to five years shy of four decades later. Once again I broached the possibility of being a moving company helper. By memory's sake alone you would think I'd be too wary to go down that rode again. Surely once was enough. But, and that is key, any job at this point out shines the very real prospect of being totally broke and subsequently homeless.

The Third Sunday In June

Father's Day with its greeting card provenance falls tomorrow and in keeping with family tradition I just dropped my dad a belated card in the mail scant minutes ago. My father will no doubt take it in stride when the card with my sentiments written in haste arrives some time next week days after the date it celebrates. I'm a last minute guy when it comes to sending the appropriate greeting card. I've always been so. Perhaps this is due to my missing that sentimental gene which leaves me in no rush to gush with written down emotions. Or maybe its the greeting cards themselves that have me reaching for them at the last minute, for they seldom say what it is I'd like to express. Thus forgoing words from the heart I gravitate towards cards with a humorous bent and mail them off way too late to arrive in time for the noted occasion.

I have in the past on occasion created my own greeting cards with colored pencils, magic-markers, glue and glitter, and images cut from magazines. When I've done so I have always had this nagging voice hectoring me; "They'll just think I'm just too cheap to send a real card." Or I've imagined the recipient judging my hand made card as childish and missing artistic skill.

More often than not however I've let the greeting card industry dictate how I mark the occasion with their either or choices of flowery sentiment vs humor. And usually I've opted as noted for the latter while avoiding as best I could pathos and hollow laughter. For the arrival of a day warranting a greeting card was most often met by my family with a tacit agreement of a timeout from any ongoing familial discord. This is not to say that it was a relentless battle royal under my father's roof. But it does strike me now that quite frequently when it came time to tender a card there were unresolved issues and tensions gripping the household that seemed through the giving of a card to loosen their hold for a twenty-four hour grace period.

So there I was earlier today once again in the greeting card aisle trying to choose out of twenty odd cards one that best said Happy Father's Day in an approximation of my voice. And what did I pick? I went with a card that had a photo on the front of a young boy with a finger up his nose and the message inside stating, "You're right dad. Some jobs are best handled by yourself." I added the sentiment that "Unlike your nose you can't pick your relatives. But if I could, if I had the chance, I would still pick you as my father."

It strikes me now that I made the wrong choice. Rather than weak comedy I should have gone for the Hallmark product with its endearments and unsullied sentiments. I should have overlooked that long ago strife that pitted father against son and purchased a card with a rhapsodizing text, "You were always there for me, dear old dad." But the words lacked for me the ring of truth. And I could not go forward. Had the card only said, "We had our troubles, dad, but I love you none the less," I would have gladly laid my money down. But there were no such cards to be found today. There were only those that spoke of a seamless past, one that my father and I never lived.

Perhaps I should have looked onward and elsewhere and found a card with a neutral image and no accompanying text. I could then write happy Father's Day and sign the card with no lingering doubts of whether or not the card was an appropriate one. But I did not. Acting upon what felt like little more than an obligation, I was after all complying with a national holiday and not the will of my heart, I opted to go for the least objectionable card at hand, one with humorous intents.

Maybe some day and hopefully soon before my father's demise I will reach for a card on Father's Day and not feel governed by a past that by all rights should have been laid to rest long ago. Perhaps this smarting I still feel from childhood's discord is immaturity on my part. I won't argue the point. For the hurt does smack of an old wound that rightly should have healed by now. So who knows? Maybe with a little luck and perseverance and perhaps an act of grace I will be one day be able to offer my father a card that conveys what he extends to me, unconditional love. On this I pray.

The Bottom Line

When my brother and Hulihand and I reached the Bottom Line in Manhattan, on that long ago January, night in the early 80s the second of the two bands we'd come to see was finishing up their set. The club's manager took pity on us and our late arrival and told us he would honor our tickets for the later set. The three of us had a quick powwow. We wanted to see both bands. But if we did opt for the second set to catch each band it meant we wouldn't get out of the club until hours after the last train departed for Connecticut. We would be stuck in New York City, on what felt like one of the coldest nights on record. With coin flip logic we decided on catching the second set.

With an hour and a half to go before we would be let inside the club we scrambled off to get out of the cold. At a nearby bar my brother ordered us three brandies on the rocks to ward off the chill. When the waitress returned with the drinks my brother gave her a twenty and told her to keep the change. She replied, "You owe me four more dollars." Welcome to New York City, you rubes.

Clutching our brandies in our cold hands we commiserated with one another over our hapless adventure so far. My brother who was living and working in Danbury, had had to work later then planned. Hulihand and I who had driven a couple of hours to meet up with him were forced to cool our heels. An hour passed. Then when my brother was finally off duty and the three of us went in search of the nearby train station we got lost for over an hour. By the time we eventually found the station and boarded the train we had ten minutes to go before the opening act took the stage.

Some time later we were ensconced in the warm confines of the Bottom Line. Both bands that night, one helmed by Ronald Shannon Jackson and the other by James "Blood" Ulmer, were funky and hot and together they swayed us from any lingering doubts over our choice to catch both bands. After the final applause however the house lights came on we headed for the exit and the frigid night beyond.

We hit the streets with our breaths clouding before us. It was bitter cold and we darted into any doorway that held the promise of heat. At one point we happened upon a street where hookers were parading their wares in high-heels, miniskirts, and tight fitting coats of rabbit fur. I was struck both with pity and awe that they could be dressed so scantily on such a frigid an inhospitable night.

One of us spotted an all night porno theater and we scurried inside. For our ten dollar admission we were offered the choice between a generic can of beer or an eight by twelve glossy black and white photo of a provocatively dressed girl, the kicker being that the photo was autographed by the girl. The three of us went for the beer. (God was it lousy.) Stamping our feet in an attempt to get warm we made our way from the lobby to inside the theater proper and took a seat before the naked and undulating couples on the screen. In no time at all I was sexually aroused, but I was however many dollars short of the going price for the services of one of the come hither girls walking up and down the rows of the theater. I returned to the lobby and took a seat. The hours passed for me in a revved up state of sexual longing without redress. I stared wide eyed at the ceiling and waited for the dawn.

Morning came and we headed for the train station. Back in Danbury, my brother went his way and Hulihand and I went ours. We headed into Hartford. Hulihand wanted to do a little shopping at Capital Records a store with high sticker prices where someone had spray painted in front of their door, Capitalist Records.

The store wouldn't open for over an hour so we headed inside a nearby dive bar worthy of a Charles Bukowski poem or two. Or three. We ordered a couple of beers. It might have been only eight o clock in the morning but the bar was teeming with a lively crowd of drinkers. As I was sipping my beer a guy stepped up to the bar aside me and ordered a glass of the house red. He told the bartender to pour himself one, too. And he did. The guy raised his glass to the bartender. "To your health," said the guy and the two of them chugged down their glasses. When the bartender told the guy the price of the two drinks the guy said with a voice dripping with the obvious, "I don't have any money."

There was this woman there too who was in her forties and the obvious darling of the mostly geriatric crowd of men. She had once been it was easy to see a beautiful woman. Drink however had laid waste to her looks. Back and forth she paced the length of the bar. As she went pass each patron seated at the bar they called her by her name and plied her with drinks. At one point as she was down at the far end of the bar engaged in a conversation I saw a bicyclist who was passing by the bar's front window get sideswiped by a car. When police arrived sometime later to question folks in the bar she came running forward saying, "I saw the whole thing." No one including myself contradicted that fallen beauty's claim. For after all was said and done her allure and our fear of losing her by questioning her veracity held sway over the bottom line.

Karen Elizabeth

Three nights ago my dear sister committed suicide. The news came as no surprise. She had suffered from depression for most, if not all, of her life and had over the course of her years run the gamut from self prescribed remedies to MD written scripts for various doses of antidepressants. Nothing seemed to work for long. The agony of the disease was never far away. It mattered not that the wonders of science enabled psychiatrists to classify her as bipolar. For the naming of her affliction was not a cure. At best she was blessed through their prescriptions with short term relief from the symptoms. Such times were scattered islands of calm in a turbulent sea of grief.

From very early on my sister turned to substances as numbing cures for emotional pain and disquietude. One jovial night in our thirties as we shared war stories of folly in our youth my sister told me about one time when she was around age eleven and had done something that had upset our parents and subsequently caused herself pain. Intuitively she knew at that young age that the cure for her discomfort resided in the medicine chest. She consumed an entire bottle of God knows what with the only results being that her stool was tinted green for her next couple of dumps. Oh how we laughed that night with the telling of that anecdote.

In her teens with frequency she cried out for help through the slashing of her flesh. Her wrists from those years were a crisscross of scars.

By inches then yards she sank ever lower into a morass of liquor and drugs and she sought with ever increasing intake to plug that self sinking hole. But the substances rather than stopping up the hole only served to widen and deepen it and the sucking of that hole became the only sound until finally she was the very hole, a chasm as deep as a beaten down soul.

The subsequent years passed in a self eradicating void of turmoil, chaos, and despair.

Then she found her way into the rooms of AA. Over the next twenty years she adhered to the 12 Step way of life. She surmounted the physical cravings for liquor and drugs and slowly went about the work of rebuilding a self. She made restitution and amends and took to sharing with others what had been given so freely to her. In doing so she became a warmly regarded member of a world wide fellowship. And she knew a life rich with purpose.

Depression however continued to dog her. It was a disease that one doctor had warned her would only worsen with age. I wonder now how that statement contributed to her decision made in the grips of despair to end her life. Was she thinking it's only going to get worse when she swallowed that fatal dose of pills? I think now too how I might have gone about my last few conversations with her. Could I have said something, offered a shred of hope, that might have swayed her lethal hand? In the end I am left with my questions and the dashed hopes that I could have in some way rescued her from the jaws of depression. It was a child's wish I know, one not given to the facts. For no one has power over another's depression.

She was of course more than her afflictions. When she wasn't under the pounding hammer of depression her smile was genuine, warm, and inviting. Her wit was likened to a friendly jab that tickled and her compassion seemed to know no bounds. She was generous beyond her means and an avid and thoughtful listener. She was my most trusted confidant. My secrets I knew never went beyond her. Through her time in the rooms of AA her friends were legion. For she touched many lives with humility, warmth, and grace. Her death leaves a wide vacuum behind and I will miss her until the day I die.

Half A Couple

The day was bright and I was playing with my army men in the sand dunes of Hampton Beach, New Hampshire, in late August, of my eleventh year when we met. She was the teenage daughter of one of my mother's friends and I was instantly smitten. It was my first time being so. Until that moment girls hardly interested me. But she was different. The sun through her hair was burnished a deep yellow and her limbs were lithe and her smile brilliant. Then and there as if in a trance I gave up my plastic soldiers and pretend war games and blundered forward betraying my heart. With winks and nudges the gathered adults made note of my new maturity and my abandonment of toys. Such a big boy they said and my chest ached with the knowledge that I was the object of such scrutiny. Several nights later this golden girl of my first romantic yearnings served as a babysitter for my siblings and I. So struck was I by the prospects of the two of us being together alone upon the bedtime hour of my siblings I pretended sleepiness and went to bed at their bedtime, too. In the safety of my bedroom I stood at my door with my ear pressed against the wood listening as hard as I could to that girl on the other side who I would never in reciprocated passion touch.

When I was fourteen I swooned for a girl named Corrie and I knew an aching that held sway over me with a power that was oppressive and gothic. When she rejected me for another I wept and kept to my bed as a vampire to his coffin. For weeks I grieved and had no taste for life without her. But eventually I had to move on.

Over the next three years I was a dumb animal in regards to relationships. With a grope instead of a caress my attempts at intimacy were more of a wrestling match. Then I met Linda. I was a senior in high school seventeen years old and hanging out at a local bar. We hit it off and she gave me her number. I called her a couple of days later. When she asked me what I felt like doing I told her I felt like going to a motel. She chuckled and said she was game for it. I asked my mother if I could borrow her portable radio and when she asked why I told her because I'm going to a motel with a woman. She was a bit flabbergasted but said Ok. You can borrow it. That night Linda initiated me in the hows of sex and coital satisfaction. We stayed a couple for a few weeks but my age and more to the point my immaturity came between us and pushed us apart.

In my twenties I met Joan. She was a sweet and sensitive girl a couple years younger than me and though by age and definition a woman I thought of her as a girl. I tormented her by driving too fast with only a pinkie on the steering wheel and yelling out lines first uttered by Frank Booth in the movie Blue Velvet. Somehow she was able to put up with me and my limitations. I shared less than equally and remained aloof and dark and brooding. I was in a nutshell a mess and when it came time for me to move to Boston in pursuit of school I parted ways with her.

It was also during this time that I hooked up with Kathy. She was on one of her periodic outs from my band mate, Steve. She and I were carnally one and I experienced in her waterbed exploits and satisfaction worthy of several torrid paragraphs in a Harlequin romance novel.

I did not have another relationship until midway into my thirties. Her name was Laura and she drank more than I was comfortable with. I knew this even before I wooed her. Loneliness is a serpent with an apple. And I bit into that fruit. We shared a rocky year together. Me with only one foot in. I led her on not brave enough to face reality that we weren't really a good match.

My early forties saw me in several Friends With Benefits relationships. None were serious or all that long lasting. Nor did they sate my romantic longings. They were sexual and flat and void of any deep emotional connection.

Now I am in my fifties and have not dated or been in a relationship for over ten years. There is also no one on the horizon of possibility. I am alone. But the hours so no longer drain or cause me to weep. I have grown comfortable with myself and my company. Perhaps at some point a woman will enter my life and I will put down my current toys of escapist thinking. And together we might make a go of it and maybe even take a walk along the beach beneath a burnished yellow sun.

Further Frayed

Somewhere along the way in 7th or 8th grade our gym coach Murph The Surf assembled us in the gym before a movie screen and showed us filmed highlights of his gridiron career as a offensive linesman for the triple A football team the Hartford Knights. It only added to our coach's mystique. He had earlier at one point won us over with awe when we clandestinely watched him, while seated in his office, smoke a Marlboro down to the filter in less than ten drags. Was that cool or what? So when he showed us his 16mm exploits we watched with rapt attention. At one point during the screening Murph The Surf let it be known that this was the play in which his leg was shattered thus ending his career and his hopes for eventual NFL glory.

Our coach had the demeanor of a well regarded uncle. He doled out discipline sparingly and kept us in line with whistle blows and an occasional shout to cut it out. During dodge ball games, easily the highlight of my years in junior high school, he wasn't opposed to taking a throw now and then at someone squirming against the far wall with bunched up thoughts of getting hit.

In 9th grade we got a new coach and his name was spelled phonetically Man-duh-noo-doe. He had a hockey background and a stare I can only describe as icy. He quickly let it be known to one and all that he would not stand for any bullshit. He was the antipathy of Murf The Surf and I did not care for him. That year even though Man-duh-noo-doe was the new football coach I tired out for the team. I had it in mind to impress my father. There was at that time in our household a rift between the two of us that seemed irreparable. And I thought that maybe, just maybe, that my showing an interest in sports might bring us closer together.

The initial thing we had to do that first day of football practice after school was run the quarter mile track four times around. I was a laggard and Man-duh-noo-doe blew his whistle at me and told me to show a little hustle. The next day when I clocked in with a particularly fast forty yard dash he scoffed at my time with disbelief and had me run it again. I ran a second time with impressive speed and the coach regarded me then in a higher light as someone with a little potential. We spent the rest of the afternoon running sprints until the end of the practice when we once again ran four times around the track.

Also trying out that day for the team was a girl in our school named Sue who had a reputation of being a whore. She said she wanted to be a Center for the football team. Man-duh-noo-doe demonstrated how a quarterback held his football waiting hands high and tight against the crotch of the Center and asked her if she was sure that was the position she wanted to try out for. She said it was. The coach gave it some thought serious or not and told her this was no place for a girl. She seemed quite disappointed, as was I'm sure our quarterback.

At this point I should tell you that through out the the practices I joked and kidded and acted as if football was just a lark. I tell you this in order to give weight to what follows. The coach put me in the center of twelve players standing in a circle. What transpired was called if I am remembering correctly, "The bull in the middle." It was an exercise in which each of the twelve players had a number and the coach called them out in no particular order and each time he did so the player with that number charge at me, the bull in the middle. Man-duh-noo-doe called out the numbers with swift speed and did so I believe to show me a lesson. The players rushed at me from all sides some times two in the course of one breath. And I experienced in those minutes in the middle an animal fear as I stood and fought for what seemed my very survival. Each player that rushed me I slung to the ground, one after another, and I found in spite myself that I had a taste for conquest if not blood. By the time Man-duh-noo-doe called an end to the exercise I was gasping for breath and grunting and ready to take on all comers and the coach had a look on his face that said, now you are mine.

Man-duh-noo-doe had a way of getting his message across. At one point in his tenure he decided to teach a lesson to a student who had fallen out of his favor. The student was blindfolded and ordered to get on his back. One kid then held his feet down and another his shoulders. Next the coach told the student on his back to try as hard as he could to do a sit up. But the kid at his shoulders firmly held him down. As he did so the coach pulled down his pants and underwear and straddled the student with his naked buttocks in the direction of the student's face. A moment later the coach called out, now, and the kid holding down the shoulders of the student let go and the straining student completed his sit up with his face winding up imbedded in the crack of the ass of coach Man-duh-noo-doe.

By the second day of training my taste for vanquishing opponents that had been whetted in me through The bull in the middle exercise waned and I was once again goofing around between wind sprints. Coach Man-duh-noo-doe spied me doing so and blew his whistle. He told me to hit the showers. I was off the team. When I got home my father asked me how was practice and I told him I'd been kicked off the team for smiling. He was not amused and the rift between us that I'd hope to mend was further frayed. It would remain so for many years to come.