1984 - Chapter 15 December: The last quiet month of my existence

 December arrived and it felt as if Port Aransas moved even further out into the Gulf of Mexico.  The island became even more quiet.  There was no word on jobs either.  Looking back, there were plenty of local retail places I could have applied at and made a respectful minimum wage which at that time was somewhere right around $3.50 per hour. My nineteen-year-old limitations not really letting me see it.

Our house was warm with the creative cooking of my father's.  I find it amazing that I could be around so much good cooking in my life, my Mom's, Grandmom's, and Dad's, and yet at this point in life, it never occurred to me to try it for myself. I now realize that this is how life is for people who cannot cook, because, I was one of them.  The more time passes, the funnier it gets.

There were a couple of intense points in December that stand out in my collective memory.  One of these was Saturday, December 15th. Dad was turning 39 the next day and we decided to have a few friends over.  We went into this day knowing it was going to be a big one.  Rum and Cokes, Vodka and grapefruit juice, and beer were flowing by noontime.  This was gonna be a long one.  

I will not go back into the details of this day as I did elaborate on the events later on in a previous chapter.  In the aftermath of mess and blood and coming down, we enjoyed a week of quiet nights watching TV and just hanging out.

On Friday, December 21st, we were ready to go back out again, so we went to the Gaff.  Again, this story is told in the previous chapter about a sweet little Texas bar.  I called my father out that night.  Every feeling I ever had about why he did not do what I expected him to do, what I needed him to do.  We broke through that night.  That night and the morning after really showed the human side of both of us.  He shared some things that really shook him and he did not try to use them as excuses, he only wanted me to know why he really did not know what to do. Sometimes, you have to just lead with your weakness.  

This weekend really led to about a week of some pretty deep conversations.  I recall one in which Dad told me a story about being a teenager.  He and his friends had been drinking all night.  They all crashed in his car at Lake Compounce in the parking lot.  In the morning, they were surrounded by the police.  The police were trying to coax them to open the doors, but they all knew, that if they did, the cops who all had their clubs drawn were going to beat them senseless with them.  He described it as a potentially explosive negotiation.  In the end, after painstakingly establishing some sort of report with the officers, they were able to get out of the car and have a long talk with them.  But first, they somehow had to prove that they were not deserving of the treatment that was initially coming.  He said this type of thing was pretty normal back in the early sixties.

New Year's Eve was on a Monday night.  Dad and I had our usual weekend and by Monday, he was happy to just go to bed at 10 PM.  I was staying up.  MTV was doing the New Year's Eve Party and Joan Jett was the featured artist.  I recorded it on the cassette stereo as everyone back in 1984 had their stereo hooked to their cable line so you could watch MTV, but have the sound coming through your home sound system.  The cable company would set this up for you for a fee, we of course did not need a cable person to do this for us.

New Year's Eve, 364 days later.  I awoke on January 1st in Waterbury Connecticut with a feeling of doom in the pit of my stomach. 2,279 miles later I was sitting here in Port Aransas, Texas with many things only just beginning.  The last 3 months felt very introverted, but in reality, they were not.  I sat on the couch, writing and watching the concert contemplating the contrast of two very different lives I lived this year.

On January 1st, I knew I was going to see my Dad this year, but I could not imagine what that would be like to see him every day. All I had at that time was my last memories of him from 1980. My 14-year-old Junior High School Graduation in which we had a crazy few hours, driving around Connecticut finally ended with the police arresting his friend Wayne, who then kicked out the back window of the police car and I ended up driving home.  This Dad, despite momentary lapses, was a more calm and mature person.  He was respected by his peers and loved by his friends who really were a diverse group of people.

At the beginning of the year, I had no limits when it came to the partying life.  Here at the end of the year, after some crazy drinking days and nights, here in Port Aransas and back up north at Lone Oak in East Canaan, a deep set knowledge was there, rising into view, telling me that I would not be able to maintain this way of life indefinitely. I questioned it deep inside and most of the time, my glorious denial made it seem like there were no doubts within me at all.

It also became clear to me that Dad needing alcohol to make it easier to communicate, to show emotion, and to socialize was spot on to my own situation.  The hereditary nature of this worried me in the darkest places of contemplation because I did not know how a person could get out of such a place.  My Dad was 20 years older than me and he could not seem to find an escape from it.  I suspected there could be a way in my writing, but I was not sure how to utilize it.

Even more unsettling about the likeness was a difference that I noticed. Although we were similar, Dad still retained a good deal of moral compass during different levels of alcoholic phases, me, not at all.  I mentioned this to him in 1989 about a week after I quit drinking for good.  He laughed, "Don't let that get out that I have morals, I have an image to maintain."

In the coming years, I had some of the biggest mistakes of my life to still make, but there was a lot of foundation set here in 1984.  In just a few days, Jeri and I did get hired at the refinery.  The social restraints and tides that I learned this year resonated with me and caused me to refine my outward person.  84 and the realigning of the things I missed from 14 to 18 were quickly accessed and applied in the places that I thought they should be.

If at first, I thought that the contrast in my life experienced here in 1984 was merely because of the crossing over from high school to adult life, I would learn that my life would become a series of endless dramatic changes that were so different, it was hard to believe that it could all happen to just one person.  In each phase, different places to live, different jobs, careers, and people around me. It has been like living different lifetimes.

Here on December 31st, two of the most impacting events of my life were just a few weeks away. Like a trail of dominoes, they would first change the course of my life and then fortify me with a shift-on-the-fly armor that I would live for years using. 

This was really the last quiet month.  After this, I was always chasing something or being chased by something.  Life never returned to the calmness that existed here in 84.  I have to believe it is because of 1984 and not an alternative to it.

I lost my Dad when he was 50 in 1996.  He always wanted to make it to New Year's Eve 1999. Admittedly, after the night of December 15th, 1984, I was a little scared to see what would happen.  Overall, my Dad was a quiet man. There was turmoil inside and aside from brief detours into easing the things that bothered him, he kept it to himself.  In that quiet reserve, I have learned so much.  

To this day, I am still learning from him, even though I lost him over 27 years ago. I appreciate that so much because it gives me more time than I really had.  His humanity was an excellent teacher, or at least an unclouded mirror that allowed me to see my own.

1984.  Regan was the president, MTV was in its heyday, space shuttles were launching in record numbers, and computers became a household appliance for people who had more money than us.  The world was changing.  USA Night Flight aired overnight on the weekends and gas was $1.07 a gallon.

There were so many other things that happened in 1984 in my life.  In a peculiar way of access, writing about these is slowly bringing those memories to light, and maybe I can eventually tell those stories too.

Why did I write this?  For the reason mentioned in Chapter One, someday, if I am no longer here, or no longer can remember, these stories will go on.  If my grandparents or parents ever did journal anything like this, I would treasure it.  I hope that in taking this journey, I have given something to my children that will make them feel closer to me.

1984 chapter 14 - The MG's are fixin to kick into high gear

A South Texas Gulf Coast winter approaching was nothing like what I expected it to be. I continued to work on the house. Jeri’s wife Odette had given us some carpet squares from a construction job she had worked at. Our living room was a series of carpet remnant squares that were all earth tones left over from the 70s. I added color where needed and where the carpets had been wearing.

In preparation for Brooke and Grandma’s visit, I painted the bathroom. Dad's reaction to the painting of the bathroom strongly indicated that I had clearly done a lousy job when he said that with all of the paint that I had gotten on the bathtub, he was surprised that I just had not painted it. 

I was still unemployed. We had retracted into a bit of a leaner mode. We were not frequenting bars as much as we used to. Dad was carrying everything. We saw Jeri and Odette more often.

 

During this time, Dad and I founded our famous Sunday Morning Gentleman's Club. The TABC patrolled the beaches on Sunday mornings looking for people with open containers. Drinking alcohol in public before noon on Sundays was not permitted. The Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission Officers fined a lot of people for this violation.

At this point in my life, and at this place in the world, this sort of restriction seemed very unreasonable. I guess it’s kind of like telling a teenager that they cannot do something, and ultimately they find a way. The Sunday Morning Gentleman's Club was our way. 

There were four core members, my Dad, me, Steve, and Glenn. Every Sunday at 10 AM sharp everyone would arrive, and the dart games would commence. On the stereo, Joan Jett, Robert Palmer, Little Feat, Joe Walsh, CCR, Uriah Heep, Montrose, and many other, classic artists would play while we sip beer and enjoyed throwing darts and talking about what happened the previous week or anything that we wanted to discuss. We threw an initial dart to determine teams and away we went. A favorite team name was the MG's (Mike and Glenn).  Every time Steve and my Dad were kicking our butts at darts, Glenn would walk up to the throw line and say, "The MG's fixin' to kick into high gear, there." These Sunday morning sessions highlighted all of the best of our friendships, our ability to make snacks, our sense of humor, and our intellect.

Sometimes someone would bring someone extra. When Steve‘s father-in-law was visiting from Pennsylvania, he came. I do recall that day, the conversation was dominated by the price of potatoes in Texas and Pennsylvania. Some Sundays were better than others.

Another time, Steve arrived telling the story of how his wife had a crash with their Chevette on Alister Street right in front of the Ice Box convenience store. She was so upset. She flung the driver's door open and bolted out of the car, sprinting through the Ice Box parking lot and through the backyard and as Steve told it “one hand on the fence and never broke stride“ Crying hysterically. I sort of always envisioned this scene with Chariots of Fire music playing in the background. That phrase about "one hand on the fence" is one I have used 1000 times since then because it fits so many situations. 

These were things that we talked about, always starting with a recap of what happened to us all the week before.  Then it moved on to more knowledge-based content, followed by the telling of past stories. The games usually continued until about 1 PM. And then everyone went their separate ways.

On Thanksgiving, Jeri and Odette invited Dad and me to their house for dinner with their two children. They lived in Flour Bluff which was a town on the north end of South Padre Island just east of the causeway that led into Corpus Christie. They lived in a one-story house in which the yard was surrounded by a 4-foot chain-link fence. Jeri naturally wheeled and dealt with everything. He would go to the Thunderbird Drive-in Corpus every weekend and just sell things that he couldn’t help but acquire. He would come home with about $800 every weekend, he called it his spending money. $800 in 1984 was something. 

The cars that he had in the yard were models all throughout the 1960s and 1970s and everything was for sale at all times. The car he drove the most was the 1965 Chevrolet Impala SS, dark green with a white interior. Everything he drove had For Sale written in white shoe polish on the back window followed by the phone number 939-7407.

If someone on the island needed a car and they told us they were looking for one, I would drive them to Jeri’s and they would buy a car. Glenn bought a Chevrolet station wagon one time. Texas was pretty cool, you never change plates they always went with the cars. so when you bought one, you pretty much drove on someone else’s registration, the rule was as long as you knew what the registrar's name was, you were good. 

Thanksgiving dinner was great. Jeri talked about Costa Rica and how he did not see it happening. Jeri had a lot of friends and a lot of connections. He knew a guy named Bob Jackson over at Koch (pronounced coke) Refinery in West Corpus. He said we could show up over there at 7 sharp tomorrow morning and press for jobs. Jeri knew the meaning of the word “no” just as much as he knew the meaning of speed limits he was confident he and I could get in as an instrument fitter and a fitter's helper.

When dinner was over, it was decided that I would stay at Jeri’s that night out in the yard in his 69 Chevy pickup that had the slide-in camper on the back. Early in the morning Jeri and I would trek across Corpus Christi and go to the refinery and try to get hired.

That night I was cold. This was South Texas. I’ve never seen cold here. With a bit of coffee in me, we jumped into Jeri’s 65 and headed out South Padre Island Drive, the main artery that spurred through Corpus.

In South, Texas, when a heater hose breaks on your car, you don’t fix it, you take the good hose and loop it back to the engine, because who needs heat in South Texas? So the 65 had no heat because the heater core was bypassed. We froze to death on the way into the refinery that morning. I will never, ever forget our reaction when we first heard a person on the radio tell us what the temperature was in Corpus Christi that morning. It was a brutal 53°! By our reaction, you would have thought that they said -3. Oh, how things have changed! 5 months of Texas summer and my blood was as thin as water.

Jeri and I did not get those jobs that day, but his friend Bob told us that he would figure something out. We headed back to Flour Bluff. Jeri was a joy to drive with, he never drove slow anywhere. He had been nailed for speeding so many times that when he did get pulled over he and his wife changed places so that, they could either get out of the ticket or at least not have it go against his license. 

Jeri had this fascinating way about him. When we were on the highway, he literally looked at every person we passed by. He studied people. I think it is what made him such an incredible buyer and seller. There was always assessment in his studying people. But it went deeper than that, he just knew how people were feeling and could read so many things about them. He was brutally honest. I was a mere kid of 19. Jeri was one of the people that was kicking my butt into adulthood. 

That day Dad picked me up in Flour Bluff. We were hopeful that I was going to have a job soon and what was cool about this idea was that I could learn a trade.

I was always assuming that my 72 Dodge Dart was capable of "this or that" great thing. Although that 225 slant six was one of the best engines ever made, dependable and economical, and would go down in history as one of the finest ever, my personal feelings were as over-inflated as the air shocks I had on the car. On the drive home, Dad said “98“. I asked "98 What?" “98 miles an hour, that’s how fast this thing can go”. He shook his head, “That’s something you don’t wanna do, with the air shocks on the back of this, it was all over the place”. Yep, that was my dad.

Dad was in his winter mode. I spent a Saturday making homemade meatballs and sauce and freezing them in Ziploc bags. Making homemade bread. He found a recipe for something called Turkey Stuffing Bake on a Campbell Soup can and made it. At 19 years old, my tastes have not developed very far. They matured a great deal from when I was a kid and hated everything. Dad once told me that as a small child, the only two things in the world I would eat were the skin of Kentucky Fried Chicken and hotdogs. Now I like fast food, Shake and Bake pork chops, steak, and pizza. I still had a long way to go. As far as cooking, fried dough, Shake and Bake, and MAYBE not burning a steak on the Weber, were pretty much my limitations. 

I liked the way Dad cooked though. He had this invisible drive for curiosity that made him almost like a scientist. I appreciated the exciting curiosity and creativity that he had. It made cooking cool, even though I couldn’t do it.

The big surprise for me was that I loved the Turkey Stuffing Bake. It had peas in it. Peas were something I absolutely would not even tolerate! But here I was loving this dish. Years later, I would stumble across an index card that he glued that recipe to. In his absence, I would make this recipe to try to relive these days. This one thing was basically a spark that started a giant culinary forest fire for me and with it, I inherited all of Dad‘s creativity and his mad scientist-like mindset. 

The most amazing about this is at a time when I felt the weight of not being effective, not contributing to the finances that Dad really needed me to, I really gleaned something so powerful from this. It was a type of training that is going to go down through generations. It already has. My sons also cook. I see my father's particular brand of creativity in them as well. My only regret is that my dad did not live to meet them or see the talent manifest. 

Over the next few weeks, Jeri told me to be ready. He had absolute faith in his friend and his friend's connections to get us jobs. Although the initial phase of my father and my reuniting was over, it was clear that we had an incredible bond, a real friendship. We synced well, and we were ready for whatever came ahead. All I needed was a job.

1984 Chapter 13: A path of lesser resistance

 It came without warning.  We were living on Avenue J in Jeri's old 1950s mobile home.  The dark green 1965 Chevy Super Sport pulled in.  Jeri asked me if I would like to drive the 65 for a day or two. He had a lot of miles to go pick up Odette and the Dodge not only got 25 miles to the gallon, it had not yet surrendered to the Coastal Bend issues that all vehicles eventually surrendered to.  The SS was fine, but he needed a car to travel in.  I handed him my keys.  I liked Jeri.  Even if I didn't, a 1965 Super Sport?  How often do you get to drive one of these for a day or two?

I loved driving the 65.  I was at A Auto Supply the next day.  Johnnie, my piano player friend stopped in her tracks to look at the car.  She was good friends with Jeri and Odette. I went out to talk with her.  This car really did get people's attention. It was amazing.

 

That evening Jeri and Odette came to get their car back and return mine.  Mission accomplished.  Jeri was on a new trajectory for work now, he had been working on residential construction, but that was not steady for them.  He had some history working in the oil refineries.  A friend who was in the oil business told him that there was a giant refinery about to be built in Costa Rica. They needed everyone they could get.  Jeri had worked as an instrument fitter in the past.  I was not employed and it was an opportunity to learn a trade. My answer was, absolutely!

I learned that we could be gone for six months to a year and during that time, we would bank crazy amounts of money and then return to the States.  It was just what I needed and it sounded like a great adventure to me. I was not sure if Dad was crazy about me leaving for that long, but he wanted me to have the experience. 

The more time that passed, the more I got familiar with Dad's, for lack of a better phrase, "cycles".  I knew as early as age 8 that my father were two very different people.  I loved them both.  I found qualities in the quiet, sober, Dad who went to work, who camped on the couch on a Sunday afternoon and sipped grape Kool-aid watching football.  He was so reserved, intelligent, and strong.  This Dad also seemed to have more impatience than the alternate Dad. I always tread carefully around him.  This Dad had the silent gunfighter way about him. There was a subliminal annoyance that he held, but it was so there. As children, my mother could run a couple of sentences at my sisters and me in a raised voice to make us do something we were supposed to do, which we would do begrudgingly. Let my father say, "Do it" in a low, barely audible tone, we were up, "Yes Dad" and we snapped to attention to the task. His quiet, low-key, annoyance always seemed to keep us riding the ridge of that. As I got older, I realized that Dad was not annoyed with us, or impatient with us.  He ALWAYS loved us, always loved being with us. I was just too young to get it.  There was something inside of him that he struggled with.  It was something about himself that he did not like, and so he sought relief.

This is where the alternate Dad comes into the picture.  After a couple of beers, he would loosen up, and it made him loving, funny, and social. He was naturally interesting, and conversations, no matter how old I was, were very invested.  He made me feel important when we talked because he was genuinely interested.  

He was also over the top.  I recall Brooke's birthday party in 1974, he and his friend Larry brought an entire full-size brown paper grocery bag into the top of not-yet-inflated balloons.  There had to be a few hundred of them.  All of us kids spent the next few hours blowing up balloons till the room was waist-high.  It was he who popped the first one, starting this wild party of kids popping balloons.  There was more action in this living room than in a Chicago nightclub during a hit back in the twenties.

This Dad was easy to ask questions and to talk with. This Dad gave hugs, said "I love you" and seemed to completely lose the annoyance that plagued him when he did not have the aid of alcohol.  Sometimes I missed this Dad, especially when I felt that I was annoying the other one. This dad was dynamic though.  It was a journey through the levels of alcohol stages.  In the beginning, you would see cracks in the quiet and sober Joe.  Then, the next phase was probably my favorite, because, at this point, he was the best of both of them, which I truly believe was the person he really was. It was proof of why he needed it.  This was where he wanted to be. The reality is though there is a certain fire that you cannot play with and not get burned and this is the dance that he lived with for most of his life.

When the perfect blend stage passed, things got fun and livened up the party.  As a 19-year-old who also liked to drink, this was a pretty cool spot for me as well. We enjoyed many, and I mean many days and nights here.  But there was another phase that I seemed incapable of meeting him on.  It only happened a handful of times a year and I suspect these were brief visits that reverted back to the days when Dad's friends had told me that he changed from when I arrived.

He could stay up for a whole weekend and maintain a seriously strong buzz.  This Joe was a third possibility.  He was the one who rationalized anything, he was the most dangerous to himself.  This is the one who I always thought would be his end, the one who scared me and made me feel that I would lose my Dad when he was still a young man. This was that Dad who became totally irreverent and would blast Uriah Heep at 3:00 AM on a Sunday morning.  Uriah Heep was a British hard rock band formed in 1969 that obliterated the sound spectrum with electronic keyboards and guitars, and at 3 AM, pushing the stereo speakers way beyond their limit has a force to literally blow you 2 feet off your bed as if the Battle of Britain suddenly overtook you.

He would disappear and I would have no idea where he was. One weekend I did not see Dad around anywhere.  After a brief tour of the island, it was clear the very noticeable 74 Chrysler was nowhere in Port Aransas. I drove out to Flour Bluff.  Dad was there.  It was clearly a binge weekend and had pulled an all-weekender.  His stamina to do this amazed me. Here at 39 years old, he could just keep going indefinitely like this.  It was an oddity, like it had to happen, like a pressure valve opening. It was very surreal.  It was always like this was a visitor when it happened. I always knew that he would arrive again, I just never knew when.  I finally coaxed him home with me and Jeri made sure the Chrysler made it home too.

My daily directionless life continued on. I continued writing songs and my book, but the gravity of the approaching winter was pulling me down and my refuge came in the form of the writing. As everything changed physically and climate-wise, I naively thought that when you live on a tropical island, winter simply would not exist, but I was wrong.  The young and the wild beach people, college students, and surfers all disappeared.  They were replaced by "Winter Texans" formerly known as snowbirds.  They were the retired folks from Kansas, Oklahoma, Missouri, and North Texas who stayed for the winter and drove 15 miles an hour in our 30-mile-an-hour town and 40 miles per hour on our 15-mile-per-hour beach. The island became quiet and smaller. 

As the days passed I dreamed, of going to Costa Rica but I could tell it was getting farther away by the day. I just knew Costa Rica wasn’t going to happen.

Breakfast in Arkansas

It was just breakfast in Arkansas, but it was so much more to me. Here today with my boys, we enjoyed a Pilot Truck stop breakfast together. Each of us chose exactly what we wanted for ourselves. I could tell just being near them this was an unforgettable moment in time, one I am sure they will think about long after I am gone. But it was so much more to me.

This breakfast was a merging of the past, actually many past lives of mine and the here and now. From solo trips across the US as a young man, then important military missions spanning years of history, to my years as a civilian over-the-road truck driver, the truck stop breakfast overlooking a day of unknown adventure was a dimension of its own. Here today, I could tell my boys were feeling it.

In my culinary brain, there is nothing great about this food, but I can tell you as a former service member, there is much worse food out there.

You might think the worst food I ever ate had to be in Saudi Arabia, but no it was not. The "absolute bad in every way conceivable meal" was at Lexington Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky in 1992. 

Here our own company cooking crew had access to a full-scale military mess hall, that’s a “commercial kitchen” for you Civs. What they did to the food touched upon all of the aspects of culinary senses, violating them in ways impossible to imagine. Visually, not resembling food. Flavor-wise, there should have been an award for making matter that food somehow not taste like anything. Aromatically, dead. Texture, various forms of hard, mush, and burnt.  Even Temperature-wise, warm to already in the garbage can cold. Here it was,  "food as a weapon", I have heard the stories told while marching and singing cadence, this was the Army way.

I will never forget coming in from our mission of hauling 1.1D explosives into the base, a very long ride from Pennsylvania, looking forward to a hot delicious meal. The food was inedible and as I sat at the table across from my friend Nick, I plunged my fingers into my luke-warm coffee cup. Taking a page from the old Palmolive commercials with Madge, I complained to Nick, “LOOK! I am soaking in it!!!”

*Periodic Disclaimer: 

I apologize to all the kindly folk who are reading for my flagrant digression from the topic and for all of the emotionally charged sarcasm that inevitably comes with said detour. And now, back to our story. 

So the truck stop food is not great, but you go in, you eat it, and you carry that one large coffee out with you. That coffee, my friends, is your best friend for the next 47 miles. You step outside the door and it hits you! The air of a new and different place. Your day is about to come and for the most part, you have no idea what is coming. You only know what direction you are headed. 

Whether it is the pink morning fog in Oklahoma, the weighty air of Arkansas promising a brutally hot steamy day, or the utter synchronized chaos of old town Chicago. The screaming severity of West Virginia, the feeling of possibilities in Alabama, or the frost-kissed trees of Maine in October. It hits you and you know that you are really alive.

Just a song before I go

 Writing a blog regularly has some strange ups and downs. It is more than not knowing what to write on some days. It is more about quietly paying attention to why you can’t seem to start writing on a particular day. In my case, I often write about a memory that was prompted by a song from the past that triggered the memory. Strange associative memory prompts allow me to go down the path of storytelling.

Yesterday I was testing a printer that I had repaired, and I needed to test a printout of a web browser. For some reason, I chose to look up the front page of the Torrington Register, the newspaper from the town I lived in, in the northwest hills of Connecticut, from 1974 to 1979. Here in Torrington, I went from third grade through seventh grade at three different schools. We lived in three different houses in Torrington during those years. The first house we lived in was right across the street from a major manufacturing plant called the Torrington Company.

When I navigated to the Torrington Register website now known as the Register Citizen, I was taken aback by a news story about how the Torrington Company buildings were finally set for demolition. The Torrington Company started in 1866. The factory was sprawled throughout Torrington and factory buildings splattered all through the center of town and leading out in multiple directions. It is a company that has enjoyed incredible success and has fed, supported and shaped countless families for over 150 years.

During that time that I lived in Torrington the factory across the road was alive and jumping every day. The parking lot was completely full, multiple shifts, always alive. The Torrington Company was preserved in my 1970s memory, safe and sound, never-ending, protected from the corrosion of time. I own my ignorance. A few years ago I carefully scoped out those roads on Google Earth noting empty parking lots and abandoned-looking factory buildings and then tried to forget about it.

In the 1970s Torrington had saved us. I had mostly lived in Bristol for the first nearly 9 years of my life. As my parents reconciled from a year-and-a-half-long separation in August 1974 we moved to New Britain. We moved into a large house that was surrounded by highway construction which would eventually become Route 72, an interstate-like highway that spurred through the city. From my nine-year-old standpoint, these were wonderful days. A very large old second-floor apartment in a house that was built in the 1800s with 9 1/2 foot ceilings, the old brass gaslights still protruding from the walls from a time long ago. It also featured a dumbwaiter, which was a small freight elevator of less than a cubic yard for the purpose of transporting trays of food from floor to floor. These became popular in the 1840s. It was not unusual to find one still working more than 100 years later. The house still had steam heat, which in my memory always brings sweet nostalgia in that each room had a personality. Those old cast-iron registers each singing their own indigenous song of whistling hissing and banging and tapping. You could always tell what noise was coming from which room.  

In the fall of 1974, in New Britain Connecticut, children were disappearing. Just around the corner from where we lived there was a brutal shooting at a local convenience store. Our landlords and their friends up in the incredible hippie pad on the third floor were also tough to live with. In December our parents deposited us in the safety of our grandmother's house in Bristol and we didn’t come home until we lived in Torrington.

With the move to Torrington, everything changed for us. Torrington was a city of first at 30,000 people but it had a small-town feel to it being nestled in a valley up in the northwest hills of Connecticut. For being a small place it was a rough place to go to school and yet somehow great at the same time.

We lived on James Street in Torrington from December 1974 until April 1976. During that time we were part of the heartbeat of the Torrington Company. We met people who worked there, and we saw the same people every day, it was a place that seemed to have always been there the place that would never go away.

Two of my uncles worked at the Torrington Company. Its legacy of manufacturing began with sewing needles, evolving into bearings, 60-plus years of bicycle pedals, and many heavy equipment parts as well. In the 1970s, it was unimaginable that this powerful American industrial machine could disintegrate and migrate to other continents. There were people who saw it coming. There were accurate assessments as to why it was happening. Ten short years later, companies all over North America were breaking apart like satellites burning up in the atmosphere.

The great determined people within these companies fought hard to diversify, to downsize into smaller, efficient, specialized shops. In the backdrop, the old factories, the great dinosaurs of the Industrial Revolution, were dying and there was nothing we could do to stop it.

All over North America, these once great carcasses of better days have sat. Those of us living nearby, stressing through our inflated busy lives with blinders on, never looking at what these wastelands say about where we came from, and who we really are. We drive on in an age in which automation promises more leisure time to rescue us from the very life these cities of manufacturing provide. Instead, we overtook our daily life with over-documentation, overindulgence, overthinking, over-anxiety, and self-absorption.

It can be said what is there always was. The structure of the old ways just made it not rise into public view. The decay of this way of life has certainly had its casualties, and its victories too. Whatever the case, I remember you. As these buildings come down, the great monuments to the lives you put into them, I remember the great men and women who marched by my home every day in my 10-year-old life. You were amazing. 

The Taxi Effect

 Something about her was familiar, I could swear I’d seen her face before, but she said I’m sure you’re mistaken and she didn’t say anything more.

Rain fell on the stressed rooftop of that one 63 Plymouth. We were thrown about in a complex whirlwind we did not understand. At the age that I now I understand that my parents, just children themselves, barely understood either.

I am thankful for the sweet pillow of protection that we enjoyed. It is funny how I perceived hardness and discipline in a bubble that love protected. I knew though, 3 years later when I did not get to spend the day with my father that our bond was powerful.

We stupidly went to visit people I did not even know and all day, I was on the edge of breaking down. I did not understand it, but I knew it was real.

The year after that I rejoiced when my parents reconciled. Part of it was the escape from the totalitarian regime I was living in. We became the family that we started out to be. How sweet and surreal.

If you wonder where my ability to shift on the fly came from, my parents displayed this in the final month of 1974, to protect us.

Then that morning in early 75. I watched him sit on the living room couch. I could feel every molecule of his pain. In the background, Linda Ronstadt sang Baby, you’re no good. 

It was a silent ride to Bristol. Nothing was really ever the same. 

One thing happened from all of this. My dad became my hero, for better or worse. Because of this, I learned more than I could have ever learned from him. For this, I am so grateful.

Let’s work

Let’s work, be proud, stand tall…

I have no concept of the length of days. I am indeed lost in a strange life. One moment I was headed in one direction and then I woke up headed in an alternate direction. 

This part of my life seems to be almost a sequel to my trek out of South Texas, but in reality the year before, and this one, if you look deeply is represented by one underlying factor. 

I left the house in the morning and was on a mission like so many men who came before me in the previous decades of the Industrial Revolution. Somewhere along the way, something happened. 

The earth shook, and the ground beneath me broke away, I was falling from building to building, desperately grasping onto whatever I could. I think I always knew why it was happening, but just couldn’t get myself to say it. 

So here I am, running up and down ladders, shooting condos, Home is a van in a campground. There is no uncertainty like this when you have many people depending on you and they live on the edge with you. 

The day will come to a close, we will saddle up and ride away. Under the evening sky, we will eat and talk and drink. In the morning, it will happen all over again.

I will grow tired of this work and give ultimatums, bluffing poorly with nothing in hand.  They lose, I lose, we lose.

Rescue comes in the form of shelter and also in work that is in its very last days of a 100-year run. This is good, but the immensity of my pursuer makes me as powerful as a speck of dust against the galaxy. Before my words are even spoken, they are defeated. I have known this before I became self-aware.

Looking out the window on Lillian Road to the farthest street light I could see before the road bent away to the right. They painted futility onto the surface of the road even though I already knew.

But I tried! I fought. Ridiculous! Like seeing the car speeding towards me, I try as hard as I can to close the door, even though I know it should have been closed an hour ago. Even so, the door separates nothing.

Like on July 13th, while New York City sat in darkness, I was suddenly flung out into the woods late at night. Slowly I walk back towards my yard, back towards my house. I saw him in the driveway walking away from me, yet I knew for sure that when he got to the stairs, he would walk up them and toward me. 

Four steps up to the outside porch for me, opening the old-fashioned aluminum storm door. It squeaks as I close it, and I walk past the first door, making a left down the hall, coming to the end, and making another left into the rounded stairwell. Just as I do that, I hear him open the aluminum storm door. I am not surprised by this.

Up to the second floor, I go, and as I round the corner and look at my door. There is no knob on it. I hear him start up the stairs behind me. 

I knock on the door so that someone might open it for me, but when I knock on it, instead of it being made of wood, as it appears to be, it is made of concrete and makes no noise whatsoever. In futility, I turn around and look up just as he gets to the top of the stairs.

What do you want? 

The fight for summer

In the silence, in the frozen days, we promise grandiose things. We woo, we campaign, and we sell. In the aftermath of extraordinary downpours, I wonder if my January self will look favorably upon this.  My hesitation last night, although familiar as of late was also foreign to me. So I wrestled against its restraints, forcing myself to my knees, and then to my feet. I screamed in resistance to everything around me. No, no, no! I will not lie down. I will not fade. In my portfolio of adventures, clinging to ledges, and holding on with only four fingers, there’s got to be something better than this. I know I got this. I will not be subdued.

And so like at the end of a 1950s science-fiction movie, the sun rises. I wake up seeing that I did, knowing that I did, always knowing it was always possible. What is the shaded alternate reality that slips in when we’re not looking? Slowly it sings a vengeful lullaby, that we may never escape. But I have rage on my side.

The days are getting shorter, and yet I do not see that one red maple leaf. I get torn between the things that I should do and the things that I should also do for peace of mind.

As I sit here, music sways around me, like the air oxygen and the carbon dioxide that is everywhere. I am taken back to those moments when it was just me and my father and to the times when his friend Bob would come off of a ship bearing gifts from faraway places. Nobody even knows those things exist anymore unless I talk about them.

Just imagine if we had social media back in the days when we used to do incredible things. I smile thinking about my 20-something-year-old adventures, being forever, suspended in a cloud of virtual data that outlives me.

A release of Mick Jagger and David Bowie‘s from late 1984 plays. I am transported to that old secondhand sofa that sat under the dartboard on Avenue J in Port Aransas that old 1950s mobile home with the laminate panel walls and the bamboo shades that completely covered the ceiling covering up God knows what. Clever.

Under the canopy, a forest, my campsite yields only slivers of sunlight cutting through the trees. My lone solar panel constantly asked for this dance to find a sharper cut.

The B-side of an old, 1972 wings cut plays. It makes me think of that black 1957 Chevy coming down the road on a flooded Lillian Road. And then another time with a homemade motorhome Bread Truck and a popped balloon. 

It is funny how our lives become these fragments that if we try really hard, can be small passages into other days. Once in a while, you feel it, literally smelling it, feeling it, being there. So much so that your current reality almost disappears. That is ok, so long as we do not disappear too.

. 

1984 Chapter 12: Into the nebula

 Somehow, summer disintegrated into fall, but there was no way to tell by way of the weather. Labor Day weekend came and went. It left Port Aransas with truckloads of drunken trash all over the beach. Dad was in charge of the beach crew, they would spend an entire week picking up the mess of empties, lost clothing, random items that did not belong on the beach, and who knows what else.

News reporters came out to the island to report on the aftermath. Spring Break, and holiday weekends, they were all alike. Our island of 2000ish people exploded into as much as 600,000. The TV crews always acted Ike this was unexpected, or maybe they just had nothing better to report.

My Dad understood that being an employee of the city, you might end up with your picture in the paper now and then. This he tolerated. The one thing that was not going to fly, was being on TV news. When KIII in Corpus Christi reporters stuck a camera and microphone in his face asking about how many people there were out on the beach working at the cleanup effort, he made sure that he would not be on television. In doing so, he also helped them to see how stupid a question it was that they were asking.

Joe looked blankly at the camera then turned and looked out at his crew, slowly pointing to each one, one at a time. “One,      Two,     Three,    Four”    Another blank stare at the camera, then a smile, as he pointed to himself: “Five!” Needless to say, he did not end up on the evening news. Just the beach truck, the workers out picking up the trash with the narration, “five-person crew working to get things back to normal…” Dad was pretty proud of this.

Dad was clearly happy to have me with him now. It was a very common thing for people to wait until he walked away to use the restroom or somewhere out of the room. They would suddenly zero in on me and say, “You have no idea how much your being here has changed your father!” You could tell, the change was significant. I heard this so many times, it was clearly true.

I met a lot of people through Dad. Some were friends and workmates. His circle of friends was actually interesting. It was the people that we met together that were a bit more Twilight Zone-ish. There was a couple living in our friend Jeri’s 1950’s mobile home. I recall helping them with something that felt like either a stakeout or a heist. I could never be sure. 

I met Johnnie. She was a pianist. She had studied classical music. I would bring my Stratocaster over to her house and we would try to play together. She was always struggling to meet me in the rock and roll genre, and I was certainly not anywhere talented enough to meet her classical expertise. We always had fun talking and playing music together even though we seemed worlds apart. 

We met wayward people on the beach living in a bus. It was always amazing how you encountered people in Port Aransas, and for that day or night, they were like special guest stars in a television show. Then, we never saw them again.

A Auto Supply was drying up on me. The city had started doing its own split rims and with summer tourists gone, Charlie could not continue to keep the tire shop open. I had very little job experience at this point in my life. I put applications in all around Corpus Christie. We, like other islanders, did not have a phone. I left A Auto’s number on applications as I went. Nothing was coming of it though. 

Dad and I moved into Jeri’s 1950s mobile home in late September to get ready for Grandma and Brooke’s visit. It was not all that fair to Dad. We moved into a place that was $50 more a month which was 25% higher and now I was not employed.

The weekdays were long and strange for me. I missed my friends back at Lone Oak. I had lots of time on my hands so I played guitar all the time. I created these recordings called Rock and Roll Strange Tapes which were collages of music I played, songs I wrote, radio plays I wrote and enacted, with sound effects, game shows, and simple audio letters. These I sent to my friends up north.

In October, the EMS Chili Cookoff took place. It was fun to be at an event in Port Aransas that really modeled it as a small town. Dad seemed to like the henna tattoo artist and the kids there were all excited as they would choose tattoos for him to get and the artist would do them. It was that sort of payday happiness I loved about Dad. I always remembered how he loved the ZZ Top song Just Got Paid, and there it was on a beautiful October Saturday on our little Island, deep in the south of Texas.

As the weeks continued, the lines blurred on who I felt I was, not working can do that to you. Missing friends back home and not finding my rightful spot except with my Dad wearing on me.  He was handling everything financially and that too made me feel bad.  I worked on the house and did chores.  I needed definition, and the guitar gave me something.

When I was 14, I began writing a book called Lost in a Strange Life.  In the next few years, I rewrote the story two more times.  Now, since I was not working, I began to write it again, this time, for the final time. 

So I had two lives now, the one who loved hanging with my father nights and weekends and the other who was a recluse, missing friends, lost in my book and music, sort of living an alternate existence. The lines were getting more blurred all of the time.