Cross country

When I was a freshman in high school I ran cross country for a very short time.I did it because you did not have to try out and because I thought this is what you did in high school - joined stuff and got involved and eventually you became enveloped and accepted.

Cross country practices were held right after school and consisted of running, just plain running. A group of skinny high school kids would take off from the front of Immaculate High School in Danbury, Connecticut and run a pre-determined course that would take you precisely 2.5 miles in a huge circle around the school. It was the same course they would run for meets - through tree-lined middle class neighborhoods with wet brown leaves in the gutters.

The course ended when you would enter the school from a little auxiliary side road which led directly to the football field. The last 100 yards of the run would be the 100 yards of the field, end zone to end zone. At the very end would be the coach, a short muscular guy named Coach Joe who wore his hair in a black crew cut and had a face like a frog, like his head had been smashed down which made his lips protrude slightly.

Every day at practice I would dog it. I would linger at the start and let all the serious runners go well out ahead. Then i would jog. As soon as I got out of sight of the school I would stop jogging and walk. Then I would jog and walk the rest of the course, alone, listening to my own breathing, folding my thumbs into my fists when I began to get short of breath.

I knew Coach Joe would be there though at the end of the run with his Immaculate windbreaker and stopwatch, passively glancing down as you heaved your way into the end zone then doubled over at the waist and gasped for air.

I did that too, only I really didn't need to. Truth is, even though I was, even then, a smoker, I was never very winded when i got to the football field since I hadn't really expended a whole lot of energy on the idyllic streets of Danbury the past two-plus miles. I would come on the little road and see the football stadium and when i figured Coach Joe could see me I would suddenly run like I was being chased by muggers, my blue Tiger Onitsuka running shoes chewing up yards like a running back on memorable touchdown run. I figured Coach Joe, on seeing me streak across those final 100 yards would think I was giving my all for old Immaculate
High.

But he didn't He saw right through me, the same way others always have. He was just one of the first.

One day after practice he called the whole team together, Long white legs and shiny shorts gathered around. "I see too many guys coming in here at the end sprinting," he said, his brown eyes looking at me, his frog lips pursed. "That's not how it's done. If you got that much left then you're not giving it everything you got on the course. You should be dragging your ass in here, not sprinting."

Guy had nailed me. Little did he know he'd nailed my whole damn life - not just then, a confused little 14-year old trying to get one over on a dumbass coach, but my whole life from conception to that moment to this. It was my MO - let the crowd pass, dog it, then when I thought someone was looking work like a dog to make a good impression. It got me nowhere with the coach, and nowhere with anyone else. It was like splashing my face with water to make believe I was sweating my ass off. But he knew I was taking it easy, he knew and he said it.

For the rest of my life I would continue the same pattern, walking when i could, running when I had to. The difference was, I would always know from that moment on, that I wasn't fooling a damn soul.

Rhode Island Part I

The strangest part about moving from New York to Rhode Island was that we did not exactly leave everything behind. It was more like that old saying "no matter where you go, there you are."

So there we were.

We moved into our swell new middle class neighborhood over a weekend, my mother and father priding themselves on their ability to unpack or store every single box from the move in one day. My mother would not even let us go to bed until she had hung curtains in every window. This would become a habit - a point of pride every time we moved. "We've hung curtains the first day in every house we ever lived in," she would tell awed friends and acquaintances, as if this were a significant issue. I suppose that first time in a new house she wanted everyone in the new neighborhood to wake up that first morning and be jealous of her and her pressed chintz curtains and little stylized bric-a-brac on the window stills. Why waste time?

That very next Monday I started school alone for the very first time. Unlike St. Helena's which covered the full educational womb to tomb of K-12, in Rhode Island they broke things up. You went from kindergarten to sixth grade in one place, seventh and eighth in a "middle school" and then off to Coventry High School - Home of the Oakers.

My brother was in the seventh grade and so he was assigned to middle school, which seemed to me to be a huge move - like going to the big house or shipping off to college. He would come home that first day with tales of gym classes where you actually had to shower with other boys, and a wood shop class with saws and vises bolted onto tables. Bottom line was that he would no longer be walking to school with me or home in the afternoons. It was going to be me by myself on the "cheese" - the yellow-orange bus that would pick me up and drop me off a few blocks away from the house every single day.

I have no recollection of what school my sister went to. She may have been with me or maybe stayed home as a pet for my mother for all I remember. Really, it's as if she was left in a closet in the Bronx and some years later someone remembered it and drove down released her and she would reappear in my consciousness years later walking down the street smoking a cigarette one afternoon.

My personal assignment was Hopkins Hills Elementary, a typical 1970s-model school, a stamped out long and low red-brick building with chairs of silver tubular legs and primary colored plastic backs and seats. This was not St. Helena's, which was old, which happened to be the way I liked it. St. Helena's was a throw-back place with a 50s sensibility. Everything there was solid and ancient, the floors endless aisles of dark brown deeply-scuffed tiles, the walls thick muscles of plaster and dark crosses above doorways, and the urinals in the boys room were the old kind that reached all the way to the floor, not those short ones you have to stand on tip-toe to reach when you're young. I swear in the bathrooms at St. Helena's you could still smell your grandfather's piss in there from when he missed at age 10.

That first day my mother took me to school. She was dressed impeccably, young and kind of hip and new York, like a go-girl girl with a little class. She only went as far as the office where she filled out papers and talked to the secretaries with a phony smiled plastered on her face - the smile she used when she wanted something from someone, the charming smile. Finished with her business she ditched me. "I'll see you later, honey" she said well within earshot of the Rhode Island school secretaries who, I'm sure she wanted to nod and smile and make a mental note "classy New Yorker, good mother too. We must sign her up for the PTA."

Someone (a principal, an assistant principal, an office worker?), led me to my class - my "Home Room" which was to be the room I'd start and end my day. Other classes were apparently held in other rooms. At St. Helena's there was only one room - you stayed there all day at the same desk with the same teacher who would switch subjects like an actor in a one-person play, "okay now get your mathematics books out..."). Much simpler to deal with.

I recall being introduced to the class by the teacher. "This is Kevin Thornton, he is new to our school. He is coming to us from New York City, please welcome him." Jesus, she had to mention the New York thing. I was hoping to just slide into a seat in back, keep my mouth shut and kind of check out the lay of the land before sharing any personal details. Little did I know I had brought with me an already damaged persona and a Bronx accent so thick you could have sniffed me out as a foreigner in a syllable anyway.

That first day I kind of saw what Hopkins Hill Elementary School was all about and I was not thrilled. In late morning the teacher let us out onto the school grounds after lunch. Hopkins Hills had a huge lawn with big brown patches where the grass had worn away, and a basketball court with the nets missing. Within a couple of minutes of our "recess" there was a big noisy gathering at the edge of the hoops court. A thin blonde-haired kid who I found out later was named Casey Dykins, was on top of a fat red-haired kid named Mike Sponik. Casey was beating hell out of him, kneeling on his chest and wailing punches at his reddened face. Casey's jeans rode up on bent legs. He was wearing short black velvety Beatles boots and short white socks that peeked out between his pants and shoes. I stood at the edge of the shouting crowd and watched the beating, wishing I was miles away from Coventry, Rhode Island and making a mental note never to piss- off the blonde-haired kid with the Beatles boots.

Rhode Island actually turned out to be okay, at least on a personal level. In time I met and began hanging around with Casey Dykins and his next-door neighbor Ritchie Noel, both of whom lived in tiny run-down white clapboard houses close to the school. I met a girl named Heidi Galinski, a buxom sixth grader who waited every morning at the same bus stop as mine wearing a shortie parka that did nothing to hide the matured body it encased. Once when we were ice skating on a nearby pond Casey took Heidi inside a big drainage pipe at the edge of the frozen pond and claimed he sucked on her middle school tits. I wished at that moment that I had been Casey Dykins.

I think Rhode Island was where I began to find my place. Back in the Bronx you chose friends by age and location. All the kids I'd hung out with were in the same grade, went to the same school and lived on the same street. It was damn near impossible to avoid or dislike them - you were constantly with them. Rhode Island, though was a new experience. There was no one on our street - Lawnwood Road - who was my age, and the kids I went to school with were scattered around for miles in little neighborhoods and houses all over Coventry. The boundaries of my childhood had definitely grown.

Meanwhile my parents were less and less engaged in my life. My dad had his great job and worked late a lot. My mom seemed to slip pretty easily into the 70s suburbia scene. She made some friends right away - a woman across the street, Mary, a young skinny blonde with an overactive five-year old son whose husband was in Viet Nam, and Kay Vernel our next door neighbor. He was a mechanic who wore a dark blue shirt with his named stitched on it, and she was a buxom 30s housewife who wore he hair in a huge beehive hairdo. My mom would occasionally go out for drinks during the day with Mary and at night with Kay. I supposed she was showing them her New York stuff.

With my parents fairly absent I started finding my own way and made two friends I ended up spending most of my Rhode island time with, kids who were as opposite as the Bronx and Coventry. One was Bobby Card, who was actually a year or two older than me but was still in my grade since he'd been left back a couple of times. Bobby lived close to Hopkins Hill and came from a strange family with married sisters and a step-dad and a house that looked more like a shack with carcasses of cars abandoned in the yard.

Bob and I met because in seventh grade after I'd made the leap to middle school we each began "dating" girls who lived in Wood Estates, a subdivision of colonial houses a couple of miles from Lawnwood Road in distance and a couple more in social status.

Every few days Bobby would walk past my house (my parents had forbidden me to hang around with him calling him "trash"), and I would meet up with him on Hopkins Hills Road. From there we would hitchhike up Tiogue Avenue to the entrance of Wood Estates announced by a low signs, the wooden letters painted brown like wood, then we would separate. I would disappear into the first house on the street where my girlfriend Nancy Barber lived. He would go up a few houses Donna Martin's. I would sit with Nancy in her unfinished basement on a ratty old couch french kissing for hours while listening to an eight track tape with one song on it - Janice Joplin's Me and Bobby McGee. It just played over and over again. At an appointed time, Bob and I would meet again for the hitchhike home. It was a perfect relationship.

Bob had other friends besides me, and other activities besides hitchhiking to Wood Estates. He was, everyone in the seventh grade agreed, the toughest kid in school, which gave me instant status as his friend. Bobby was short but muscular with bulging biceps and bowl legs. He was part American Indian and proud of it. He wore his long black hair to his shoulders and worshiped the Paul Revere and the Raiders song 'Cherokee Nation" as if he'd once sat in a sweat lodge and painted his face like a warrior. Bobby also had little strands of chest hair and had to shave. I remember him walking along Tiogue Avenue with his thumb out wearing a bright blue silk shirt with puffy sleeves like something Errol Flynn would wear for a sword fight. I was a lost kid, misplaced and struggling to find my own identity, wondering what I was going to be, how things were going to play out. Bobby had no such issues. He was Bobby Card, and if you were in seventh grade, you definitely wanted to hang out with him.

When Bobby and I weren't hanging around he was running with the remainder of the school toughs, kids like Gary Barnett and Tommy Munroe, kids with missing parents who unbuttoned several buttons on their shirts and carried boxes of Marlboro red cigarettes in their socks and pockets. When we were waiting for rides, Bobby would regale me with tales of drug deals and highs - mainly speed and acid, as well as sexual encounters and the occasional joy ride in someone's car.

The other kid I spent time with was jay Morrison. Jay lived just a few blocks from me in a long white rancher with aluminum siding and a stockade fence on the sides so high you had no idea if there was backyard behind it. Jay's parents had died in a car accident when he was very young and he was being raised by his grandparents, a settled, tough old couple who seemed to take on the responsibility of raising a young boy like a chore that had been added to their work on the farm.

Jay's grandparents had three boxers, the kind of watchdogs dogs that would only listen to their master, so when I would knock on the garage door looking for Jay I would have to wait until he or someone came out and held the big animals before I could enter. They never bit me but I never went near them either.

Jay's grandparents were characters. His grandpa reminded me of my own. He wore green mechanic-type pants and a white undershirt shirt every time I ever saw him. The two grandparents would always sit at the kitchen table with the windows closed chain smoking Salem 100 cigarettes and drinking coffee. When you were in their house you had the feeling that time had stopped, that maybe they been alive and young once but something had happened and it all suddenly came to halt, never again to move forward. Jay and I rarely went outside. His grandparents were very protective, scared, I'm sure that something could happen to the only link they had left to their dead child. They had the boxers and Jay and their cigarettes. They was all they needed.

I guess in a way I found comfort in that. At least they were always around. At least they wanted to know where Jay was and what he was doing. It was a little creepy, but it was comforting to know that they cared, that someone was always looking over Jay and thinking about what was best for him.

A major move

I am in the back seat of a dull red Renault Dauphine. It's a small car. Really, a minuscule thing with a rounded roof and perfect round headlights that stick out like the eyes of a cute bug. My father covered all the seats in clear plastic so the inevitable soda and ice cream spills could be wiped away before staining the faux light brown leather interior and the Dauphine would remain spotless.

Three of us are crammed into the back seat along with various items from our now empty apartment, and Mitzi the orange and white-striped cat. There is a mop, the bushy white head jammed beside my legs, the long blue stick of a body hanging out the window, like a bony finger pointing the way to an uncertain future. The mop was the last thing my mother had packed. She had relentlessly cleaned her way out of 2001 Newbold Avenue, apartment 1A , closing the door that last time on immaculate emptiness.

It was winter, but winter in New York City isn't so much a dramatic change from summer or fall. There's no trees to shimmer in their sad bareness, no green grass to turn a lifeless shade of white. It's just colder and fewer people are on the street.

My brother and I being the two oldest are sitting at the windows on either side of the car. My sister, the baby, is stuck smack in between for the three-hour drive up Interstate 95. My brother and I on opposite ends of our small world have each rolled our window down to catch the last little bit of what we are sensing we are losing. The slight smell of car exhaust and ancient sewers that for years have swallowed our pink Spauldeen balls, the muted light of late afternoon, blocked as always by buildings; the smooth black street, the speckled tan sidewalks. These have been the borders of our reality, the lines drawn around our little lives. Now are leaving them.

This is a big moment, and even at the tender age of 11 I know it. We are jammed into this can of a car pulling out of a parking space heading away to a place I've never seen for reasons I don't quite understand. But we are leaving. That much I know.

My mom and dad had already been to Coventry Rhode Island a few times and they'd come back talking about a safe and comfortable place, New England but not New England, backyards and grass, a house, a real house with a separate bedroom for my sister, and another one for my brother and I to share. I pictured it like Lucy and Ricky on 'I Love Lucy' when they'd moved from New York out to Connecticut to a sprawling but warm house with bushes and closets and neighbors in kerchiefs and sunglasses who dropped in for ice tea.

I was in the sixth grade when my father came home from work and announced to the family at dinner one night that we were moving. Metropolitan Life Insurance was opening a regional office in Providence, Rhode Island and he was going to be the Assistant Manager. Big stuff, big promotion, he was going places. We were to follow.

Until that moment as the car eased out of the parallel spot on Newbold Avenue it had not seemed real to me. Of course I'd told all my friends we were leaving but it didn't seem to have much of an impact on them. They weren't leaving so what did it matter? No one cried or wailed, there were no parties, no secret plans for me to sneak away in the night and hitchhike back to the Bronx. Just "that's cool, sounds like a neat place," and we'd go back to whatever it was we'd been doing - playing hide and seek or Red Rover or walking to the candy store for a moon pie and an RC Cola.

I was just a kid so I hadn't really had to do anything to prepare myself. I didn't pack anything (my mother would never allow it anyway since I could never do it neatly or well enough), I hadn't had to sign papers for the school or break leases or buy new furniture. My dad had just said we were moving and I watched as the activity at our house changed from furtive to excited and mom cleaned and threw out or gave away nearly everything we had including my beloved collection of matchbox cars (with my permission to a little kid in the apartment house more pathetic than me), and one afternoon it just became time, and my dad told us to "wrap it up and get in the car."

I am staring at everything, searching the street for a familiar face, someone chasing down the car with tears streaming down their face. My dad punches the push button drive and we slide out onto the street. I watch his fat, freckled hands grip the mini steering wheel, his gold wedding band a perfect accoutrement for his scrubbed whiteness. There's no traffic. I am aware of the apartment building, our windows facing the street, the red mouth of the tunnel where we park our bikes. We're easing past the houses, Mary Fragaile's brown two-story with the steep stairs and the creepy basement where her grandfather hung himself. The tires, weighted down, roll over the taut sewer covers, past anonymous station wagons and Mike Messina's yellow Road Runner with the horn that sounds just like the cartoon. "Meep meep."

There's Johnny MacALeavey's grey-shingled house. No one there. Silence.

We're at the corner of Newbold and Olmstead Avenues, the corner where the yellow brick Presbyterian church sits. What does Presbyterian mean? Isn't everyone a Catholic? I've never been inside the church but there's a massive stained glass window perfectly round that looks out over Olmstead. I sense it is a holy place, duller and more somber than our St. Helena's, with a small but fiercely loyal following.

This is the corner too, a block away from our apartment house, where we can spot the Mr. Softee truck on summer nights. He parks here to sell parfaits and cups of soft vanilla to the people in these apartment buildings, people we don't know because they live a whole block away. When you see the Mr. Softee truck idling and hear the calliope-like music you know you have just enough time to run inside and ask your parents for a quarter for a cone. Sometimes you get it, sometimes you don't.

My dad turns left to head toward the highway.

"Well, we're off," he says. And that is that.

This is our first big move, the separation from the only things any of us have really ever known. My parents are leaving the neighborhood where they spent their entire lives, a crowded, lower middle-class collection of brownstone apartment buildings and two family homes with men sitting in chairs out front sometimes with beers and women leaning out the windows in black dresses year-round. The places moves to the rhythm of the subway trains thrashing on elevated tracks a block away. In front of the apartment building the Cross Bronx Expressway is the front yard.

For mom and Dad I figure this move is something special - an escape from all things Bronx, from their own pasts of drunken fathers, abusive mothers and teen pregnancies. There is something finally out there for them. My dad has this cool new job and some self-esteem, a reward for all his late nights going to college and working a second job. For mom it is a house, a real house they had had built with carpets and stairs and more than two rooms. She can clean and clean and clean. She's already told us she plans to build a white picket fence in the front to complete the picture in her head.

In the backseat we're coming at this from a different place. We're happy. What the hell do we know? We walk everyday during school to St. Helena's with a group of our closest friends. We play on the street right in front of the building, close enough for our parents to open a window and yell for us to come for supper - "get in here right now." We can see dad walk up the street coming home from work, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows in summer. Sweating from the subway and the walk.

This is something wholly different, a change we hadn't bargained for. Jimmy, Eileen and I hadn't really talked, but I suspect none of us really want to leave despite my parents' promises of new friends and schools, "other kids to play with," they call it, as if the ones we'd been playing with are somehow suddenly damaged or not good enough.

The worst part of it now as we head up Westchester Avenue is that I can see that no one really seems to care. The whole place - people and buildings and streets and sewers - is letting us go without so much as a tug at our sleeve. We are too young to do anything about it, but I am wishing someone could have protested, someone could have cried. No one did.

We're moving up 95 toward New Rochelle, then Connecticut then Rhode Island. Lots of awkward Indian-sounding names - Mamaroneck, Housatonic, Mystic. I don't know anyone in any of these places. They are strange names on a sign.

My parents don't say much to each other or to us. They seem lost in their own thoughts. The three of us kids sit quietly, the mop pressing into my legs. We pass Orchard Beach. Years before my mother had gotten mad at Mitzi the cat for shitting on the floor of our apartment and had ordered my dad to get rid of him. (Mitzi was misnamed - whoever had given him to us had named him before confirming his sex). My dad took us three kids and the banished cat in the car to some woods near Orchard Beach and we reluctantly left him there beside a tree with some food. When we got home my mother had experienced a change of heart and was sobbing. She ordered us back out to find Mitzi, who miraculously was still standing in the exact same spot when we returned. He gratefully accepted the ride back home and was never again banned.

I was hoping I could get a Mitzi too, that my dad was going to stop the car and turn around, telling us he'd changed his mind. Fuck Rhode Island, all five of us really belong in that two-room apartment with the steam heat and the rows of overflowing garbage cans and roaches in the huge dungeon of a basement.

No such luck. Mitzi settles in on the crowded floor at our feet. We are leaving the whole thing back there for good. Goodbye.

We are on the road to Rhode Island and I am thinking already how alone I suddenly am, and that it will stay this way for a long time to come. Probably forever. They are all gone now, Johnny, Emil, Mary, Diane. Nothing will replace them.

It is getting dark but the car window is still mostly unwound. It' cold. The wind blows my hair and it makes my face feels clean, renewed.

No one speaks to me but the red Dauphine. It knows of motion and impermanence and being so small in such a big place.

"Let it go, " it says, the tires whining north toward the darkness.

"Let it go Kevin. Walk away. This is what we do. "

In Rhode Island a year or so later, the Dauphine would die, felled by a blown piston along I-95. My dad would sell it to a junkyard for $25 and catch a train home.

Later that night we arrived in Coventry, Rhode Island. From the backseat the headlights showed us a small red and grey split level house gleaming, new, and as empty as anything I had ever seen in my life.

What I saw in the kindergarten picture

I recently read an excerpt from a memoir called The Night of the Gun by a writer named David Carr who works for the New York Times. Here's a guy who was a serious crack head and dope fiend, who slithered around in unsavory places with dark people, but ended up wearing a suit and writing for the Times. The hook in Carr's memoir is that he's a genuine newspaper reporter and he's managed to work his way through all this horrible shit - addiction and crime and paranoia - and now he wants to look back and figure out how he got to his current place in life from his past one.

So he uses his skill as a reporter to go back and find people who knew him and interviews them to find out what they saw in him back in the day, so maybe he can see some of it himself. Bottom line is that he wants to know not only how he made his grand personal shift, but what of his seedy past still remains in his shiny present.

When I first read that excerpt I was a little annoyed because I thought this dude had stolen my idea before I ever had a chance to develop it. I mean I was a reporter too and in trying to piece together my past I'd done a lot of Internet research and made some calls and sent some letters and at one point actually drive up to New York from Baltimore just to walk around my old neighborhood in the Bronx to see if, like a medium, I could pick-up a vibe of something, some spirit, some moment that I'd left there.

But in a moment of honesty and lucidity, I realized that old David Carr had not stolen a thing and I had no reason to resent him, though that rarely stops me from doing so.

In reality I was a reporter but a bush league reporter. No NY Times here. How about the Vandalia Drummer News and the Tipp City Herald near Dayton. Ohio? The other piece of the equation that lets Carr of my personal hook is that I don't really have to go on a heavy investigative journey to figure out what went wrong and to measure what pieces of my former self are still embedded in me. I think I already know.

I've poked around my past more in an effort to piece it together than to find clues. One gem I uncovered was a website called Bronx Board, an electronic message board for "misplaced, displaced and nostalgic ex-Bronxites." Amidst the nostalgic clutter are pages of old school pictures from parochial schools from the 1940s through the 1970s. I found myself there. St. Helena's grammar school kindergarten class of 1964, third row up, second from the right. Just the picture tells a story of who I am and where I came from. Thirty-four little five year-olds, all dressed immaculately in crisp white suits and lacy white dresses. The girls all wore white gloves and matching green and white bows and ribbons in their coiffed hair. The boys' hair was all slicked down with Vitalis. We wore white shirts, black bow ties and long ribbons pinned to our miniature chests that matched the girls' bows. Front and center sat Monsignor Scanlan, the then-patriarch of St. Helena's. He's an old italian priest resplendent in his monsignor dress uniform, black cassock and plum-colored accoutrement's.

I look at this and see not just myself, a cute little kid with reddish brown hair and an excited smile, but I see my parents and my neighborhood and my time. Back then there was a certain amount of order and respect. We were Catholics first and foremost, the highest-ranking priest even sat for kindergarten pictures with the kids (this was well before priests were sniffed out as potential creeps, and Monsignor Scanlan was no pedophile, I assure you). We were also aware of each other and respected the neighborhood and the school. At least parents did. There wasn't one kid in the picture with a hair out of place or a spot of dirt on their virginal whiteness. You can see behind the deep maroon curtain that served as a backdrop, mothers carefully combing and teasing hair, licking fingers to wipe smudges off freckled faces. The names were even within the small confines of the neighborhood. Irish and Italian period - Sullivan, Thornton, Camille Gargano and Frankie Starr. Greaseballs and Micks.

This is where I grew up, in a distant time where you followed the rules because they were there, no questions asked. And even if that very morning my mother had jammed bobby pins into my ears and made them bleed or screamed at me and pulled my arm nearly out of the socket as we left the apartment, I still showed up for school in dazzling white and still smiled for that camera and took my place behind the high ranking priest because this is how it worked. You did not air your laundry in public. No one was watching anyway, second or third generation immigrants living in brown apartment buildings and carrying their trash dutifully to the basement were not interested in your problems or your scars or your issues. You showed up for the class picture and took your place. You were clean and Catholic and quiet. That's all anyone would want to see.

Sophomore jinx - Part I

The hardest part of writing about my own life is remembering it. I know people who can pull dates out of thin air, or of their ass, with great ease. "Oh, I was living at 4251 Idyllic Way in the fall of 1972." Yeah, right.

Literally, I have years, huge chunks of time I cannot put together. I can remembers incidents, little squares that happened, like making out with a girl my freshman year of high school at her house. But what was her name? Who was I with? Why was I there?

Maybe it's all the drinking I did in later years that burned my memory like a chemical reaction. I sometimes wonder if it's just the way I lived. When you have no definitive purpose it seems kind of useless to make a point of remembering things. I just lived, stumbled through from one scene to the next without a lot of thought. I guess if I had been a basketball stud I would recall that night I scored 25 against our crosstown rival because it was a moment that was meaningful to me and to others. But I wasn't. I was pretty much alone, feeling my way against the walls looking for an opening. Only now that I've found a little light do I feel the need to look back, to try to literally pick up those squares like a hundred different shards from a broken glass, and glue them back into something that I can actually use again.

I do remember this: sometime in the spring or summer of my freshman year I met Dave Newland.

Dave lived nearby in Danbury, a few streets over in a small two-story white house with a detached garage. I'm not sure how exactly we met, but I do remember that Dave was something special. He was kind of an unusual guy; a little tall with a tangle of dirty blonde hair that he never seemed to care much about. He walked a little bowlegged and had a lazy eye, the result of an accident involving gasoline as a child.

But Dave was charismatic, you were simply drawn to the guy because he was cool and a little tough and a little bit of a bully, even when he liked you. He wasn't particularly good-looking but he attracted girls, maybe because he was a pretty good athlete or because he would steal his parents car on occasion and drive around and buy beer, even though he was underage.

Dave was originally from the Midwest - Oklahoma, and because of that he had that same underlying detachment to Danbury (or anyplace for that matter) that I did. Yeah he was just a kid growing up but he wasn't a local, he didn't really have roots there and probably knew in his heart that eventually he would leave. He also had an older brother, Don, who was in the Navy. I think Dave not only worshipped Don, he took his direction from him. Not that Don was every really around, but Dave knew what he was doing, and tried to do the same, which included getting high and drinking and having sex and pretty much doing whatever the hell he wanted do, but he did it with a cocky sort of air that even kept his parents a little off stride.

My first real recollection of Dave was that he was the first person I ever smoked pot with. It was Dave and I and his little brother Bob. We were hanging out at Dave's house listening to music when he asked me the fated question, "want to get high?"

I'd never gotten high before, not because I had any particular problem with it or fear of it, I'd just never been exposed to it. During my freshman year at Immaculate I had done some huffing, because that's what people were doing. I recall going to a party at a girl named Linda's house one night. She was also a freshman at Immacualte, and was a little overweight, but moderately pretty. She had a bottom lip that stuck out ever so slightly in a permanent pout. But Linda talked a lot about getting high and drunk, and she had big titties and an attitude about her that said if you hung around long enough and nobody was looking, you could probably get a squeeze out of them if you tried.

The party was in the basement of her parent's house, and the drug of choice that night was glue, or rags dipped in gasoline in paper bags. You stuck the bag on your face, covered your nose and mouth and chin with brown paper and took some deep breaths, and for a few moments you were dizzy and stupid and everything seemed very funny. Then you'd have to go find the bag again.

That night I ended up sitting behind the basement bar with Linda and a bag of rags. We kissed with tongues, and she actually let me see those fat freshmen boobs for just a second.

So when Dave asked me to get high it wasn't like I was a complete virgin, more like someone who'd been to third base and was ready to take the next step.

Dave's house was on a cul-de-sac and at the end of the street was an old overgrown field with high grass and trees and a messy pile of dirt where someone had done a perk test and never built anything. Later in the summer that field would become a baseball diamond where a group of neighborhood guys would play ball - usually three nerdy Italian guys against my brother and I in a game of three on two. It was something to do.

But that day it was an initiation field, the start of something big for me. Not that I would rocket away from that moment to become some sort of big pot head. In reality I never did like marijuana that much, though I smoked my share of it. I never really like the loss of control I felt with pot. Plus pot was like internal truth serum to me. Whenver I got high I would go deeper inside and start looking at myself and staring straight at my flaws like a kid with a face full of pimples and a mirror. I really didn't like looking at myself that much.

What was more important about that day was that Dave trusted me, that he pulled the joint out of his pocket which he'd quickly rolled in his room and showed me that not only was he cool, but I was cool too. He trusted me, he said that when he fired up the splif and handed it me.

The greatest part of that memory was after we were done and walked back to his house and up to his room on the second floor. Dave had one of those standard 1970s stereos that everyone had in their room - receiver with a record player, couple of speakers. But he also had two killer sets of headphones and two headphone inputs. The record he had on the turntable that day was Bachman Turner Overdrive's second album, BTO II, the one with Taking Care of Business on it. But we didn't listen to that song, he dropped the needle at the start of the album instead, and we each grabbed a set of headphones. He laid across his bed, I sat in a chair.

I don't remember being ridiculously high that first time, though I was definitely feeling something. I remember being happier than I'd been in awhile and laughing at silly shit, and being a little nervous about maybe seeing Dave's mother when we came in his house.

What I remember more than anything was what the pot did to the music. Bachman Turner Overdrive was an okay '70s band with a few hits, but that day they were the Beatles and Stones, Verdi and Thelonius Monk rolled into one. The music was so clear, crisp, like the band was right there in Dave's room or in my own head. You could hear the friggin' drumsticks tap the cymbal heads, feel the bass thump right through your heart, and every word was as deep as the Bible. Music. I'd discovered a new coping mechanism -somewhere else to hide. Music. Music and pot. Beautiful combination.

The first song he put on by the way was called Blown.

A fucking masterpiece:

I used to smoke my brains out
Fly thru the sky
I used to really freak out
Didn't wonder why
I heard the Stones a rollin'
And I'd roll too
I didn't care what I was doin'
As long as I was with you
I was blown
And that's what you are now
I was blown
Didn't care why or how
I was blown
Ran and jumped and screamed
I was bloown
Right inside a dream

I used to tell my story
Right out loud
I sure was in my glory
I sure was proud
But then one day I fell down
I couldn't get up
People crowdin' all around
That was when they locked me up
I was blown
And that's what you are now
I was blown
Didn't care why or how
I was blown
Ran and jumped and screamed
I was blown
Right inside,
Right inside
Right inside
a dream

In the beginning - Part I

This is how I picture my life:

Years and events are arranged on a gameboard with little colored squares, each one representing something of significance. My squares aren't formed into a nice rectangle so that you have perfect symmetry and can loop around the board and maybe hit something you missed the first time around. No, it's all stretched out in a long line with a distinct beginning but no tangible end.

While the squares are all connected, they aren't necessarily consecutive. In other words, you don't have to do my imaginary life board in a logical order. That's just the way it's laid out, like perfect pieces of a puzzle that form a sort of dysfunctional road. Each box is a perfect square, and they're like Monopoly spaces with colors at the top and descriptive words. And just like that game there are good squares and bad ones - Park Avenues and jails.

My board has specific incidents on it, not big huge general time chunks like infancy and adolescence. It has moments, things that have happened that influenced or moved me or brought me to my knees. There's a box for an afternoon at a candy store in the Bronx in the mid-1960s when my parents took my brother and sister and I in and said we could "get something." My brother and I picked out comic books - he a Superman, me an Archie and friends. My sister spotted a dusty plastic bag above the counter, hanging with other toys. It was a package with a little cylindrical pump and a handful of balloons. She insisted she had to have it despite my quiet protestations of embarrassment. She got it and blew balloons up in the car on the way home, then never looked at it again, as i suspected she wouldn't. The whole scene pained me, though I'm still not sure why. Maybe it was the sheer impermanence, the little fit she had, my parent's willingness to make her happy at any cost.

There's a box for my first real drunk in a cow field beside the high school football stadium in Centerville, Ohio in 1973. I was with a guy named Mike Adams, a good-looking but painfully cocky freshman I couldn't stand, but hung out with because there was no one else. There was a football game going on, I can still see the rows of bright lights pointing down at the nearby football stadium and can hear the occasional single raw-throated voice of a Friday night crowd in Ohio. I was supposed to be there in the stands caring if Centerville High School won. I wasn't. I didn't. I threw-up.

There are boxes for my wedding and babies being born and for college graduations and rehabs. It's all there, step by step, inch by inch, a jumble of a road that in some ways I created and in others I did not. I only had to walk it.

I know this is a little ideal, this whole road thing, but it's what I see when I close my eyes and try to think back and remember where the hell I've been and try to reconstruct what happened back there that may have triggered behaviors and events later. There's much I've forgotten, and much I've had to re-create through research and phone calls and cigarettes at night on the back porch searching the stars. The questions have been the same for years: How? By what route? Why for Godsakes? Why? I've traced and re-traced my line a hundred times, stopping at various moments to examine them. I'm in bed once, just a kid, and I have the measles. I'm sick as hell and running a high fever. That particular day my aunt, my mother's twin, has promised to take me to the circus - the Ringling Brother Barnum and Bailey Circus at Madison Square Garden. The Greatest Show on Earth. But I am sick and laying on the bed hot and aching, and my brother has gone in my place. That day I think I hallucinated. I recall seeing and "feeling" images around and on me. The images were animals, circus animals. They were drawn with simple white lines like stick-figure cartoons. One of them was an elephant. He sat on my chest and head, and his weight was light, but real. Years later in my journey I went to an acupuncturist who would push needles into particular points in my body that he said were connected to specific areas and fields of energy. He hit the elephant like a dentist accidentally tapping a root when he's drilling. I felt him again, his thin translucent heaviness pressing down on me. There was something there, some box, some step I had failed to see. I added it to my life line.

After so many years of holding these moments in my hands and sorting through them, I think I've discovered a flaw. I think it is this: my visual has a definitive beginning, and it begins with me, a nine-pound little fat kid born in a hospital in the northeast Bronx, NY. But in actuality, the line started well before that. There are boxes I never saw, though now I know I've felt their influence. Boxes that started with my parents, who were walking their own paths and happened to stumble on me like a baby left in a basket on a marble stoop. Isn't he cute?

It's like the singer/songwriter Elvis Costello wrote in Accidents will Happen, "it's the damage that we do and never know/ it's the words that we don't say that scare me so."

It's actually the little brightly-colored life boxes that I never saw that scare the hell out of me. What do you suppose I missed?

A lot. I know I missed my mother's parents, an angry mom of her own who ruled with the iron fist of an old queen. I missed my father's own parents, his dad a handsome but sad Irishman with a head of thick hair that turned grey early. He drank and drank and drank. He did not give my father anything - no decent home, no decent clothes or education, no real guidance. He brought all that into his own fatherhood.

I missed my parents, still with bad complexions, at the tender ages of 16 and 17, having sex one afternoon on the floor while my mother was babysitting. They conceived my brother right then and there, and several months later they were married because you had to be married. It was 1957. My parents were children. About a year later, I came along, chubby and cute with a mouth to feed and shitty diapers to change and they took me home because they had to.

I missed all those boxes, but I know they led to mine. That's the start, really, a couple of children in a hospital in the Bronx in the late 1950s with a one-year baby and a new one now in their arms and on their hands.

So that's how it started.

People I still hate - #1 Perry Simone (Part II)

A big part of the problem with being a loner or a loser is that you literally lose touch with what other people think and how they act. By the time I got to high school I was living in my third state in 14 years, had suffered occasional abuse at the hands of my red-haired mother, and had been consistently counseled that I was a directionless dolt with little upside. Perhaps because of that emotional concoction, I had developed coping mechanisms that veered between jumping up and down in search of attention and love, and crawling inside my own head looking for something positive to hang onto. Anything, really. I'd created my own little reality, an island where you could tell people to go fuck themselves and there were no consequences. You could just walk away and everything would be just swell in the morning, as if it never happened.

How was I to know that Perry Simone didn't live on my island? How was I to know that on the other side of that door that afternoon was not only a skinny little Italian kid with a Napoleonic complex, but two huge Simone sycophants as well who happened to double as his high school bodyguards?

I didn't know, but I found out. It started the very next day in the Immaculate High School cafeteria when my new best friend approached as I sat at a table with some other freshmen. Perry pushed through some nearby doors, leaned over and told me come in the hall. That's when I met his goons, two oversized upperclassmen with their ties slightly loosened. One had thick blonde hair and red, red lips. The other was black-haired with a hint of a five o'clock shadow on his sharp jaw. I never learned their names, but I saw them both up-close because one or the other immediately grabbed me by my tie the moment I entered the hallway and jacked me up against the industrial painted cement block wall.

"Think you're tough freshmen? We're gonna kill you. We're going to rip your balls off and feed them to you . We're gonna torture you." Perry Simone stood behind them sneering, pressing his fist into his little dark palm. They pushed me. They tightened their tie grip to choking capacity. They breathed on me.

I said nothing. What was there to say? I'd spoken so eloquently the day before.

The routine went on for months, mostly in hallways, sometimes outside, whenever they saw me they bullied me. I lived in constant fear, knowing always precisely where I was and whether Perry and his boys were anywhere in the vicinity. I would sit in class and constantly glance out the doorway. Were they waiting?

You'd think they'd tire of it after awhile. It took some time. I suppose they had nothing better to do and I was such an easy mark. Only once did I speak, stand up as much as I could with my tie snug against my windpipe. As the gorillas roughed me up in the hall by the cafeteria one morning I squeaked to Perry Simone that I knew I could kick his ass, and if I ever saw him alone I would do just that to the little bastard. Some big stand I made.

The worst part of all this was that there was no one to share it with. Oh, to have had a friend, another wimpy loser I could at least have shared my misery with, someone who could have said "yeah that happened to me once, I hate those people," and we would devise creative ways to make them suffer. But there was not a soul. I certainly wasn't going to the school administrators or teachers, it just wasn't done. As low as my self-esteem and self-worth were, it could only plummet more if I crawled to some adult whining about being mistreated by several of the fine young Catholic students of Immaculate. I couldn't tell my parents for a number of reasons. Mainly I figured they wouldn't care and would find a way to blame it on me (well, it kind of was my fault, after all). More so, I was afraid they would; that they, my father especially, would feel embarrassed that his foul-mouthed son had caused his family name to be disrespected. I was afraid he'd make a big deal and I would end up in the Principal's office, a priest probably, fingering Perry Simone and his posse, and the next day I would be alone again in the hallway pressed against cement blocks with my tie embedded in my Adam's apple. No thanks. No thanks at all.

So I tolerated it. I stumbled through much of my freshman year at Immaculate in fear and loathing and quiet desperation. Always, no matter where I was, there were three constants in my head - failure, Perry Simone, and two goons with a penchant for ties.

It was not a stellar year. One of the highlights was that I met a kid I actually liked who treated me like a human. His name was Ralph Scozzafava, another Italian, dark skinned and gangly. Ralph was a bit of a jock, a basketball player who had played on the middle school team and had plans to do the same on the freshman team at Immacullate. Ralph was actually a pretty good ballplayer and pretty serious about it. In fact long after I left, he became an all-state player at Immaculate. Ralph's seriousness convinced me that I too should try out for the freshman basketball team because that's what you do as a high school freshman, you get involved, you try out for teams, as if everyone is equal and you just pick and choose what activites you want to get involved with. Let's see, I'll do basketball and prom court. I suppose that I didn't tell Ralph that I had little to no experience and less talent as a basketball player, and he must have been cool or kind enough not to mention the fact that I was not tall and not gangly and not really much of anything.

As a way to get in in shape for basketball, Ralph decided to run on the cross country team and I decided to join him. Big mistake. ven then I was smoking cigarettes pretty regularly and I hated to run, still do. I ended running in two races, finished 21st once and in the other someone stepped on the back of my foot in the first hundred yards and my running shoe came off. I had to stop and put it back on - a deficit that only added to my glaring deficit. I finished somewhere near dead last. It didn't matter, really. I sucked at cross country and knew it. I quit after a few weeks, turned in my tank top.

Later I actually did try out for the freshman basketball team. Despite my failure at cross country, Ralph and worked out several times at the local YMCA in advance. Ralph, by the way had stuck with cross country for the entire season. For the tryouts my mother bought me three pairs of new cool tall white athletic socks with colored rings near the knees. I think she wanted me to look good. I recall that actually thought I had a shot at making the team. I was not then a good judge of my own abilities. During a scrimmage in the second practice I hit an outside jumper, pure luck, but I thought maybe it would draw some attention, raise an eyebrow, cause a spark. In the end, Ralph made the team. I was cut the end of that second day, and was left with a new pair of unused socks for gym class.

In the spring I tried out for baseball. I was cut. I couldn't hit worth a damn. Not much of a fielder, either. Somewhere in there I also got myself in trouble with another kid, this one a cool jock, a basketball stud named Bob Bollinger. He was a senior and perhaps the coolest guy in a school of pretty uncool people. To balance the catholic uniform he would shed his blue jacket with the Immaculate crest on the breast pocket. He would undo the buttons at the wrists of his dress shirt and jam his hands into the pockets of his fitted grey dress pants. He had moderately long brown hair parted in the middle and would walk with a long bouncy step so the sleeves and the hair would bounce along with him as he walked the school hallways. Cool. Because he was at the opposite end of my spectrum I noticed him, and to get attention I would sometimes undo the buttons on my sleeves, jam my hands in my pockets and walk around Spanish class doing Bob Bollinger imitations. Who the hell I was to be mocking a popular jock I don't know, but I do know word apparently got back to him. His sister Laurie, a buck-toothed but attractive freshman was in one of my classes. At some point I got word that Bob Bollinger was "after me," wanted to kick my ass for my mocking his cool. He never did and I never actually spoke any words to or with him, but the threat was there, and my own need for attention and acceptance had once again turned on me.

I also fall madly in love with a girl named Margaret Tihman, she too of Italian descent who wore her black hair parted down the middle with two long pieces from either side of the front wrapped tautly around her temples and were held together in back with a barrette. She had the locker next to mine at school and I would hint at my passion but she never bit. In reality, Margaret was equally in love with Danny Fitzgerald, who had been the star of the junior high basketball team and would go on to star on the freshman hoops squad at Immaculate, the one I was cut from. Margaret and I never amounted to anything. I called her once on the phone and had a brief, awkward freshman conversation, one of those that what's not said speaks louder than what it is.

I also got drunk that year for the first time. I met a guy at Immaculate named Brian Rowe, who became my personal hero for a short time. He was an athletic kid but not a jock, good looking, tight curled brown hair, funny, charismatic, the kind of guy who could easily float through any of the tight-knit high school groups and be accepted. The best part was that he didn't really give a shit whether anyone liked him or not. Unlike me, he was supremely confident.

We got drunk one night at his house where I spent the night. He got into his parent's liquor cabinet and we drank deep swigs of gin from a clear bottle. I did somersaults on his parent's wall-to-wall carpeting and loved the dizzy, loose unfettered feeling it gave me. Brian thought I was funny. I loved him for it.

As for Perry Simone, he and the goons did eventually fade away, their hallway harassments growing fewer and fewer as the year marched on.

Late in the spring of my freshman year I was caught smoking in the bathroom at Immaculate, another uncalculated risk that did not pay off. I had taken to going to a first floor john at the school where the majority of the smokers hung out; a bathroom that was always thick with blue smoke and toughs in blue blazers. Instead of stepping into a stall, I stood out in the open by the urinals puffing away. That day a door opened, a teacher appeared from a cloud and I was dead to rights despite my late lame attempt at discretion, which included turning my back to the urinal, my hands and smoking cigarette behind me. I backed up and dropped the offending smoke into the ceramic piss pot. It hissed but continued to smoulder. Of all the smokers that morning only two were sent to the office. Busted.

So I did end up in the Principal's office. He was not a priest, but he was a prick. At my father's request I was suspended from school for three days AND given an in-school suspension which included the humiliating job of cutting the school's grass after classes were over in the afternoon. My dad felt I needed to be taught a lesson I would not forget. He was right. Between dad and the prick of a principal, they also collectively decided I was not Immaculate material, and when the school year ended we permanently parted ways, Immaculate back to its Immaculate conception of itself, me back to my futile attempts at finding something that would set me apart.

That summer before I started at my next school - Danbury High School, home of the Hatters (Danbury was a former hat manufacturing town), I had one last glimpse of my past, or perhaps my future.

I was alone, as always, riding my white ten-speed Iverson bicycle. I had crested the hill on Birch Road and turned right onto Middle River Road. I noticed another bike was there riding slowly along the side of the road which was marked like a river with a shore of loose brown dirt on the sides. The kid was about my age, thin, wiry, riding an expensive green ten-speed, an Italian job, not like mine which my parents had bought at the Gold Circle discount store.

I recognized him right away. Who could forget? I'd know him now, the black hair thrust to his eyebrows, the small tight mouth, tiny teeth, the dark skin, the snarl. Simone, fucking Simone, alone and in my neighborhood.

Yeah, I thought about it for a moment, about kicking over his bike, about confronting him, about doing something tough and awful and redeeming, something that would balance the scale for just one bloody moment of a terrible year that had done nothing but reaffirm my uselessness, my immaturity, my nothing. This was the moment when the music was supposed to swell and the bad guy gets pushed out the window and glass shards scatter in slow motion and the crowd, all of whom have been bullied at some time too, gasps and applauds.

I rode toward him slowly, briefly, then turned away, back down middle River to Birch, home. I was aware of it, the moment, the opportunity.

"Fuck it," I told myself. "What good now? What does it achieve? What does it change?"

Nothing then, nothing at all. I can still see him pedaling slowly, the front tire of his bike coiling one way like a snake readying itself for a quick movement. Fight or flight. I wonder if he knew it was me, if he knew I saw him, if he knew I was scared to death, as always.

That moment I would like to have back. That moment, of all of them that have slipped through my fingers, that I have lost, that I have damaged, I would like to have back. I would like, just once, just once, to have hurt someone back.