I came to Los Angeles several times before moving here. Two days after Cash was born I was flown out on a callback for a beer commercial. That was my first time in LA. The second time I came I booked myself into an Extended Stay hotel for a couple of weeks and tried to scare up some meetings. The third time I came...well, that's what this post is really about.
Earlier that year, 2000, my cousin Mike had been visiting New York. As usual, debauchery and comedy ensued. This might have been the beginning of the 'Law and Order' skit that we've been amusing ourselves with, whereby a regular civilian when faced with homicide detectives, continues vigorously polishing silverware or stacking cantaloupes instead of sitting the hell down and answering the questions.
And Mike played me Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros. I remember we were riding in a cab somewhere, it was already quite late, and Mike said in that insistent tone I've come to expect great things from, "Dude, you've gotta listen to this album."
The Clash had been the template for the band I'd been in in high school. As much as I love The Replacements, The Clash are the true height of rock and roll. Some famous quote called them "The Only Band That Matters" or something to that effect. And I think in many ways that was true. For my friends and I their breakup was as crushing as The Beatles had been to the Baby Boomers.
And then Joe Strummer disappeared. Mick Jones pushed the boundaries of popular music with his rock/rap outfit Big Audio Dynamite, music that is still influencing the scene today. If you check out their stuff you'll not be able to believe it was recorded in the '80's.
But Joe Strummer? He was our Springsteen. Imagine that for the next TEN YEARS Bruce Springsteen was silent. Well, that's what Joe Strummer did. That's how punk rock that fucker was.
He'd put out the excellent 'Earthquake Weather' in 1989, he'd done some work with The Pogues, but it all felt like after-thoughts, like he'd decided to have some fun.
But when 'Rock Art & The X-Ray Style' snaked out of those headphones into my ears in early 2000 in a cab shooting up 6th avenue, I knew this was no after-thought.
Cut to LA. I'm again visiting knocking on mostly closed doors. This time, due to financial considerations, I'm staying at Cashel's uncle, my former brother in law's house. But I'm spending most of my time with Mike and Lisa in Venice. Mike excitedly tells me that Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros are playing The Troubador, the famed West Hollywood club. Mike immediately snaps up tickets. The next night I'll be seeing a hero.
I shoot up the 10 in my teeny Ford Aveo rent-a-car. In some strange fit of fiscal irresponsibility I've paid for every bit of insurance one can buy, even though my credit card supposedly covers me anyway. I am jazzed about the prospect of seeing one of the few heroes I have.
I exit the 10 onto Crenshaw. At the top of the ramp I skirt right through the tail end of a yellow light. It's about 2AM so traffic is slight. About 50 yards up Crenshaw is the ramp from the 10 going in the other direction. As I take my left onto Crenshaw that light turns green. I continue through it, thinking about Joe Strummer.
As I cross under the light, I see out of my peripheral vision a car barreling up the ramp. I realize they are not stopping at the light. They've come off the highway and must be going close to 50MPH. I brace for impact.
All is quiet. I spin, lights trace, wheel turns. I whip the wheel to keep myself from flying into the oncoming traffic of the other lane. I do either a 360 or a 720, I'm still not sure which and I come to a stop in the lane I was in but facing in the opposite direction. Imagine a car parked in a lane facing the wrong way. My brain is boggled.
The car that hit me was a giant American model. They'd taken a left onto Crenshaw, plowed through me and now pulled over on the overpass.
Here's where things get kooky.
In my head I can see the driver get out of the car and take a few steps in my direction. They are maybe 20 yards away. They are either a tall skinny black man or a short fat black woman. Both images are equally real in my memory. Perhaps there were two people in the car but I guess I'll never know. Because he/she got back in their damaged car and took off.
I sat stunned in my crumpled Aveo. An SUV was stopped at the light in the lane going the other direction. We were separated by the divider. The woman leaned out of her car and said, "You should get out of the car...you're gonna get hit again."
I thought that seemed like a sensible idea so I put the hazards on and stepped out of the car. I walked around it onto the median strip. I felt soft and over-inflated. I sat down on the ground and called 911. Then I called Mike. He said he was leaving immediately from Venice and would be there in 20 minutes.
I could now see the damage to the passenger side of the car. It was considerable. The car had struck my car right over the back wheel well, which had saved my life. If it had hit me a second sooner it would have caught my car right in the middle and pushed me into oncoming traffic where I'd have been hit head on. As it was the whole left side was punctured and indented from the impact.
More kookiness ensued.
As I sat there, a car came chugging up from the ramp where my hit-and-run attacker had come from. This car was on fire.
A small white car, perhaps a Toyota Celica or something along those lines. It rolled to a stop directly across the street from me and the driver got out. He was a small Mexican man wearing a baseball cap. He ran across the street to a house yelling, "Agua! Agua!" Another man, perhaps his father, came running out with a bucket of water and proceeded to douse the engine. I knew this was a bad idea but I was still too shocked to try to communicate with them. The hissing from the water hitting the hot engine block sounded heinous.
The fire truck came and put the car out. It took a few attempts to explain to the firemen that these two cars were completely unrelated to one another. They asked if I was hurt and I didn't think that I was. Although my head was ringing and my ears were stuffed with cotton.
Mike came. He waited for me until the cops came which was quite some time. Apparently, if you're ever in a car accident in LA and need assistance, you have to say that you thought the other person had a gun. Then the cops will rush right over to you. But if there isn't a gun involved they have better things to do.
Needless to say it was pretty cut and dried since it was a hit and run. The extra insurance paid for the car which was totaled. I went back with Mike to his apartment and gingerly went to sleep, but not before I terrified Melody by leaving her a voice message which said something like...
"Hey babe. Got into a car accident. I'm at Mike's and I'm just gonna go to sleep."
She freaked out! Pictured me like the folks in the movie who just want to lie down after head trauma. But no, it wasn't that severe. However, I was rattled to a very intense degree. I was sore all over, very emotional, spacey, irrational...you name it.
We didn't go see Joe Strummer because of it.
I don't care about the car. I don't care about the occasional aches and pains I still get. I don't care about the shudder when I cross that intersection again, which I do at least 10 times a week.
No. I care that those fuckers drove up the Crenshaw ramp and killed my last chance to see Joe Strummer in person. He'd be dead in a year. They didn't kill me, though.
You hear that whoever the fuck you are? You didn't get me.
Friday, April 16, 2010
Thursday, April 15, 2010
The Toenail Of The Living Dead
I was fired from the first job I ever had. As a janitor. Not exactly an auspicious debut in the workforce.
I was hired by the school department to clean up Hazard Elementary School over the summer with the custodial staff. They got there at 7, started work at roughly 9:30 after reading the paper and smoking assorted cigarettes, and worked sporadically throughout the day until cutting out early.
I immediately adopted their routine. When the district supervisor came down on them for their lack of progress they sold me down the river and I was fired.
Less than a week later I started working at Belmont Fruit, a small market that stocked fresh fruit and vegetables in their retail store and also sold wholesale produce to local restaurants. This job would define my summers for the next half decade as I continued to work there through my college years.
I began as The Corn Boy. The Corn Boy is a fixture in South County. Each morning somewhere between eighty and one hundred bags of fresh corn were loaded off of a truck and onto three long low tables that sat in front of the market. As Corn Boy I was the keeper of the cob.
I donned a thick heavy white apron. Customers would tell me they needed a dozen, two dozen, three ears, five small two large, nine magically perfect cobs, whatever. I would take a brown paper bag and quickly pack the desired amount.
This job was murder on your hands because you had to quickly peel back the silk to make sure there weren't worms or earwigs or small mammals hiding in the ear. By the end of each day my hands would be destroyed.
Then there were the personalities. People get crazy about corn. They were born with some instinctual genius and special knowledge about what makes a good ear. Even though you handle roughly 75,000 ears a DAY they assume you know nothing about it. They'll try to convince you that you can find a dozen ears of white kernel corn when the entire shipment is yellow. They give you tips on shucking. A rhyming ghost of "shuck you" was constantly haunting my tongue.
After a few months of this job I could tell a tourist from a local in point five seconds.
I transitioned to my next job at Belmont, The Trimmer. Instead of being parked out front of the store I was now buried in the back where the Wholesale operation was housed. The Trimmer prepared every head of lettuce that wound up on the Retail floor. This was a considerable amount. They stocked red leaf, green leaf, iceberg, romaine, Boston (both hydroponic and ground grown), red cabbage, green cabbage, chicory, and any number of seasonal varieties and exotic additions.
The heads arrived in cardboard boxes direct from farms or distribution centers. Often the farm dirt still clung to the stems. The Trimmer took a sharp knife and sliced the rough end of the stem off, washed the head in water if it called for it, and placed it on a counter to dry for a short period. Then when you had an adequate amount you loaded it all into a shopping cart and went out and restocked the shelves.
The iceberg had its own process. It was not washed. We had a machine with a hot metal rod, a roll of plastic and a hot plate. You enveloped the head in a sheet of plastic, dragged it over the heated metal rod to cut the plastic and then melted it closed on the hot plate.
I have one visible scar on my hand from cutting myself with the trimming knife. My hands were so cold from washing the lettuce that I didn't know I'd cut myself. I looked in the shopping cart at the heads of iceberg that I'd wrapped and noticed that there were three dark red heads. It took me a second to realize what I'd done.
After a summer of being The Trimmer I moved to another position, one that I would continue to hold for the rest of my time at Belmont Fruit. I became a Wholesale Delivery guy. I packed vans with orders placed by local restaurants and then took "runs" in which I drove all over Southern Rhode Island dropping off boxes and boxes of produce to every variety of establishment.
This is where I condemned my toenail to eternal damnation.
I used a hand truck to move the vegetables around. You stored it in the truck with you and pulled it out as needed. Very quickly I became like a samurai with the thing, whipping it around without even thinking about it.
One day I was trying to get a case of cabbage around the back of the van. Chen's was a local Chinese restaurant that I vowed never to eat in again once I saw the kitchen. Their parking lot was very awkward for deliveries. They also used infinite heads of cabbage. Which is HEAVY. Especially when there are four or five cases of it stacked on top of one another.
Well, I tried to hop a curb with the weighted hand truck. The metal sheet which the cases rested on came to an edge below a ladder like backing. I often put my foot in the lowest rung and used my leg to lift the burden. This time the wheel caught the curb and the metal edge came down on my toe.
Even through a heavy work boot it hurt like a mother. I jumped around yelling as various inscrutable Chinese stared at me from through the screen door that separated the kitchen from the parking lot. I cursed them for their damn two hundred pounds of cabbage and the suspicious meat boiling in some barely cleaned bathtub. I shook off the pain and went about my business.
When I got home later that day I took off my shoe. That poor toe looked like a crime scene photo. I iced it but it stayed purple for almost the rest of the summer.
Now, I've known people who have crushed a toenail, or a fingernail. What usually happens is the nail dies and then is pushed out by a new nail, a better nail. But my toe must have made some pact with the Foot Devil because that didn't happen.
No, MY toenail turned black, back to purple, then it dulled down to a dusty gray. It has been that way for over two decades. The nail doesn't grow. I don't have to cut it. But it doesn't fall out either.
It hovers between ours and the underworld, waiting to seek eternal revenge on some deep orthopedic level known only to digits, cursed to forever exist in limbo, the toenail of the living dead.
I was hired by the school department to clean up Hazard Elementary School over the summer with the custodial staff. They got there at 7, started work at roughly 9:30 after reading the paper and smoking assorted cigarettes, and worked sporadically throughout the day until cutting out early.
I immediately adopted their routine. When the district supervisor came down on them for their lack of progress they sold me down the river and I was fired.
Less than a week later I started working at Belmont Fruit, a small market that stocked fresh fruit and vegetables in their retail store and also sold wholesale produce to local restaurants. This job would define my summers for the next half decade as I continued to work there through my college years.
I began as The Corn Boy. The Corn Boy is a fixture in South County. Each morning somewhere between eighty and one hundred bags of fresh corn were loaded off of a truck and onto three long low tables that sat in front of the market. As Corn Boy I was the keeper of the cob.
I donned a thick heavy white apron. Customers would tell me they needed a dozen, two dozen, three ears, five small two large, nine magically perfect cobs, whatever. I would take a brown paper bag and quickly pack the desired amount.
This job was murder on your hands because you had to quickly peel back the silk to make sure there weren't worms or earwigs or small mammals hiding in the ear. By the end of each day my hands would be destroyed.
Then there were the personalities. People get crazy about corn. They were born with some instinctual genius and special knowledge about what makes a good ear. Even though you handle roughly 75,000 ears a DAY they assume you know nothing about it. They'll try to convince you that you can find a dozen ears of white kernel corn when the entire shipment is yellow. They give you tips on shucking. A rhyming ghost of "shuck you" was constantly haunting my tongue.
After a few months of this job I could tell a tourist from a local in point five seconds.
I transitioned to my next job at Belmont, The Trimmer. Instead of being parked out front of the store I was now buried in the back where the Wholesale operation was housed. The Trimmer prepared every head of lettuce that wound up on the Retail floor. This was a considerable amount. They stocked red leaf, green leaf, iceberg, romaine, Boston (both hydroponic and ground grown), red cabbage, green cabbage, chicory, and any number of seasonal varieties and exotic additions.
The heads arrived in cardboard boxes direct from farms or distribution centers. Often the farm dirt still clung to the stems. The Trimmer took a sharp knife and sliced the rough end of the stem off, washed the head in water if it called for it, and placed it on a counter to dry for a short period. Then when you had an adequate amount you loaded it all into a shopping cart and went out and restocked the shelves.
The iceberg had its own process. It was not washed. We had a machine with a hot metal rod, a roll of plastic and a hot plate. You enveloped the head in a sheet of plastic, dragged it over the heated metal rod to cut the plastic and then melted it closed on the hot plate.
I have one visible scar on my hand from cutting myself with the trimming knife. My hands were so cold from washing the lettuce that I didn't know I'd cut myself. I looked in the shopping cart at the heads of iceberg that I'd wrapped and noticed that there were three dark red heads. It took me a second to realize what I'd done.
After a summer of being The Trimmer I moved to another position, one that I would continue to hold for the rest of my time at Belmont Fruit. I became a Wholesale Delivery guy. I packed vans with orders placed by local restaurants and then took "runs" in which I drove all over Southern Rhode Island dropping off boxes and boxes of produce to every variety of establishment.
This is where I condemned my toenail to eternal damnation.
I used a hand truck to move the vegetables around. You stored it in the truck with you and pulled it out as needed. Very quickly I became like a samurai with the thing, whipping it around without even thinking about it.
One day I was trying to get a case of cabbage around the back of the van. Chen's was a local Chinese restaurant that I vowed never to eat in again once I saw the kitchen. Their parking lot was very awkward for deliveries. They also used infinite heads of cabbage. Which is HEAVY. Especially when there are four or five cases of it stacked on top of one another.
Well, I tried to hop a curb with the weighted hand truck. The metal sheet which the cases rested on came to an edge below a ladder like backing. I often put my foot in the lowest rung and used my leg to lift the burden. This time the wheel caught the curb and the metal edge came down on my toe.
Even through a heavy work boot it hurt like a mother. I jumped around yelling as various inscrutable Chinese stared at me from through the screen door that separated the kitchen from the parking lot. I cursed them for their damn two hundred pounds of cabbage and the suspicious meat boiling in some barely cleaned bathtub. I shook off the pain and went about my business.
When I got home later that day I took off my shoe. That poor toe looked like a crime scene photo. I iced it but it stayed purple for almost the rest of the summer.
Now, I've known people who have crushed a toenail, or a fingernail. What usually happens is the nail dies and then is pushed out by a new nail, a better nail. But my toe must have made some pact with the Foot Devil because that didn't happen.
No, MY toenail turned black, back to purple, then it dulled down to a dusty gray. It has been that way for over two decades. The nail doesn't grow. I don't have to cut it. But it doesn't fall out either.
It hovers between ours and the underworld, waiting to seek eternal revenge on some deep orthopedic level known only to digits, cursed to forever exist in limbo, the toenail of the living dead.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
The Case Of The Governor's Limo
When my parents realized that a third child was on the way they moved into a neighborhood known as Rolling Acres, a quarter mile loop of modest houses off of a small thoroughfare that connected Peacedale and Kingston. It was 1972.
Til then we'd lived in a small apartment in the heart of Peacedale and I have memories of that time that mostly come from photographs I've seen. The old lady across the street. The dusty courtyard that served as a playground. My mum cutting my dad's hair and snipping a tiny bit of his ear. But I was three when we moved and I have a feeling that these memories are anecdotal, told to me, not intrinsic.
The new house seemed like a magical place. I quickly made two great friends in Billy Hodge who lived directly across the street and Brian Quinn who lived five houses down on the same side as ours. Now, as I've said before, I dreamed only of a career as a professional athlete. The irony? My childhood neighbors would both grow up to be two of the best athletes ever to go to South Kingstown High School. By that point I was limping along and slowly realizing that if I was ever going to be an athlete I would have to play one in a film.
We raced around the loop of our world on bikes, on foot, shooting each other with imaginary guns, throwing real rocks at each other, climbing up and falling out of trees, up ramps, down bush laden hills and in and out of each others kitchens.
Brian and I were born three days apart and both of us were tiny babies. Brian was a twin and both his sister and he were so small they had to be put in incubators. No giant myself I was one ounce over the incubator weight limit and was not given that extra boost. I always secretly believed this was why Brian grew up to be 6' 1" and blindingly fast and I stayed average on both counts.
If Billy wasn't around I would run down the block to Brian's. Soon I was riding a small bike the short distance. For quite awhile after learning to ride I couldn't start or stop, I could only pedal. I would go crashing onto the Quinn's lawn and then either Mr. or Mrs. Quinn would give me a push to get me started on the way back home.
If we wanted to get back to my house fast, sometimes Brian would pedal and I'd sit behind him. Soon I began to be annoyed at this. It was my bike, why did he drive? Finally I insisted that I should drive and he should sit behind ME. I think he knew something I didn't because he skeptically agreed. He was already much bigger than me and somehow this didn't factor in to my appraisal of the situation.
Now comes the larger context that must be explained. Also across the street from us lived a nice family called the Driscolls. Mr. Driscoll was a high ranking member of the State Police who much later would go on David Letterman to show off the prize winning uniforms of the Rhode Island State Police. At this time his duty involved accompanying the Governor as a security detail. The limo used to pick up and transport the Gov was often parked on the street in front of the Driscoll's yard. They'd have parked it in the driveway but their house was actually on a steep little hill so fitting the long limo in there was tough.
Brian and I set out from the Quinn's. I struggled mightily to get the bike going fast enough. We wobbled back and forth crazily. If we'd been in a car we'd have looked like a couple of drunks. Brian hung on for dear life probably ruing the decision to let a pipsqueak like me try to pedal him around. As my house loomed I began to lose control completely.
We careened from one side of the street to the other. No sidewalks were present to bounce us to a stop. No cars came along to force us into a premature cessation. Somehow our speed increased in spite of my inability to control the trajectory of the bike. The wheel was jack-knifing under my guidance, handlebars whipping to and fro.
Somehow my house seemed more distant than ever even though we were quickly approaching. The black limo sat across from my house and was the only car in sight.
As the handlebar scraped along the door it made an ungodly sound, like some underworld beast dragging his filthy clawed fingernails across a Hellacious blackboard. We bounced off of the black metal, returned to it as if it was magnetized, bounced away again and fell against it in a heap. I had a stinging pain in my right hip where I'd hit something, the ground, a twisted pedal, the car itself, I don't know.
We slowly stood up and looked at the Governor's limo. A giant scrape ran down the length of the car. It looked as if Paul Bunyon had keyed it.
Brian told me to stop crying. I should only cry if I was bleeding. I stopped immediately but there was still the question of our impending arrest to deal with. The cover-up started immediately. We rushed my bike into my back yard and hid it in the basement so the cops couldn't run forensic tests on the handlebars and match the paint. We had a hushed intense conversation in the basement about who might have seen us, what we would say when we were interrogated, and how we would come up with the bribe money we would need to keep us out of prison for the rest of our lives.
After getting our story straight we went upstairs to the kitchen. My mum was busy doing something. I was still stifling the tears I shouldn't be crying because I wasn't bleeding. Then I went to the bathroom.
My hip was torn to shreds. It was as if I'd been shot. There was a deep gouge, a hole. My shorts were soaked with blood. It ran down my leg from underneath them. It is still a scar, a raised pucker of flesh. I came out and triumphantly showed it to Brian and promptly resumed my well-earned tears.
I only tell this story now because the Statute of Limitations has expired and I cannot be prosecuted for my heinous crime.
Til then we'd lived in a small apartment in the heart of Peacedale and I have memories of that time that mostly come from photographs I've seen. The old lady across the street. The dusty courtyard that served as a playground. My mum cutting my dad's hair and snipping a tiny bit of his ear. But I was three when we moved and I have a feeling that these memories are anecdotal, told to me, not intrinsic.
The new house seemed like a magical place. I quickly made two great friends in Billy Hodge who lived directly across the street and Brian Quinn who lived five houses down on the same side as ours. Now, as I've said before, I dreamed only of a career as a professional athlete. The irony? My childhood neighbors would both grow up to be two of the best athletes ever to go to South Kingstown High School. By that point I was limping along and slowly realizing that if I was ever going to be an athlete I would have to play one in a film.
We raced around the loop of our world on bikes, on foot, shooting each other with imaginary guns, throwing real rocks at each other, climbing up and falling out of trees, up ramps, down bush laden hills and in and out of each others kitchens.
Brian and I were born three days apart and both of us were tiny babies. Brian was a twin and both his sister and he were so small they had to be put in incubators. No giant myself I was one ounce over the incubator weight limit and was not given that extra boost. I always secretly believed this was why Brian grew up to be 6' 1" and blindingly fast and I stayed average on both counts.
If Billy wasn't around I would run down the block to Brian's. Soon I was riding a small bike the short distance. For quite awhile after learning to ride I couldn't start or stop, I could only pedal. I would go crashing onto the Quinn's lawn and then either Mr. or Mrs. Quinn would give me a push to get me started on the way back home.
If we wanted to get back to my house fast, sometimes Brian would pedal and I'd sit behind him. Soon I began to be annoyed at this. It was my bike, why did he drive? Finally I insisted that I should drive and he should sit behind ME. I think he knew something I didn't because he skeptically agreed. He was already much bigger than me and somehow this didn't factor in to my appraisal of the situation.
Now comes the larger context that must be explained. Also across the street from us lived a nice family called the Driscolls. Mr. Driscoll was a high ranking member of the State Police who much later would go on David Letterman to show off the prize winning uniforms of the Rhode Island State Police. At this time his duty involved accompanying the Governor as a security detail. The limo used to pick up and transport the Gov was often parked on the street in front of the Driscoll's yard. They'd have parked it in the driveway but their house was actually on a steep little hill so fitting the long limo in there was tough.
Brian and I set out from the Quinn's. I struggled mightily to get the bike going fast enough. We wobbled back and forth crazily. If we'd been in a car we'd have looked like a couple of drunks. Brian hung on for dear life probably ruing the decision to let a pipsqueak like me try to pedal him around. As my house loomed I began to lose control completely.
We careened from one side of the street to the other. No sidewalks were present to bounce us to a stop. No cars came along to force us into a premature cessation. Somehow our speed increased in spite of my inability to control the trajectory of the bike. The wheel was jack-knifing under my guidance, handlebars whipping to and fro.
Somehow my house seemed more distant than ever even though we were quickly approaching. The black limo sat across from my house and was the only car in sight.
As the handlebar scraped along the door it made an ungodly sound, like some underworld beast dragging his filthy clawed fingernails across a Hellacious blackboard. We bounced off of the black metal, returned to it as if it was magnetized, bounced away again and fell against it in a heap. I had a stinging pain in my right hip where I'd hit something, the ground, a twisted pedal, the car itself, I don't know.
We slowly stood up and looked at the Governor's limo. A giant scrape ran down the length of the car. It looked as if Paul Bunyon had keyed it.
Brian told me to stop crying. I should only cry if I was bleeding. I stopped immediately but there was still the question of our impending arrest to deal with. The cover-up started immediately. We rushed my bike into my back yard and hid it in the basement so the cops couldn't run forensic tests on the handlebars and match the paint. We had a hushed intense conversation in the basement about who might have seen us, what we would say when we were interrogated, and how we would come up with the bribe money we would need to keep us out of prison for the rest of our lives.
After getting our story straight we went upstairs to the kitchen. My mum was busy doing something. I was still stifling the tears I shouldn't be crying because I wasn't bleeding. Then I went to the bathroom.
My hip was torn to shreds. It was as if I'd been shot. There was a deep gouge, a hole. My shorts were soaked with blood. It ran down my leg from underneath them. It is still a scar, a raised pucker of flesh. I came out and triumphantly showed it to Brian and promptly resumed my well-earned tears.
I only tell this story now because the Statute of Limitations has expired and I cannot be prosecuted for my heinous crime.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
The Seventeen Year Blue Rose
Pleurisy is a glamorous Gothic ailment known mostly by its theatrical nickname "Blue Roses", a handle given to it by the immortal Tennessee Williams in "The Glass Menagerie". Young Laura mishears her diagnosis and romanticizes the result, transforming a pulmonary condition into a strange and wonderful flower.
I have twice had the misfortune of falling under its spell.
The first came on the heels of my appendix surgery as I recuperated at my parents house. My system was quite weakened from the surgery and I tried to come back to work too early, resulting in a near total collapse at a middle school in mid-performance.
I've never been good with spare time. I was at loose ends. I was too young and dumb to do everything I needed to do to get healthy. I drank. I smoked, both legal and illicit material. The mental aspect of my convalescence was non-existent. There was a profound disconnect going on, my pessimism surrounding my health kept me from making any real effort at getting better. This would continue long past this episode, seventeen years into the future to the second time I got pleurisy.
But back to 1993. I began having massive chest pains. Earlier in the year I'd been diagnosed with a cartilage tear in my sternum from doing push-ups. So for a week or so I ignored this deep ache, thinking it to be the result of resuming light workouts. But it soon was keeping me up at night, which wasn't hard to do as I'd become a determined insomniac by this point.
I slept on the couch in my parents living room even though there were three open bedrooms at my disposal. This drove my father crazy. He would bark at me in the mornings to get in a bed for chrissakes but something about the transience of the couch felt more accurate. I channel surfed for hours at a time and took cigarette breaks on our back porch, staring out into the quiet dark hush of our gorgeous back yard.
A quick word about me and cigarettes. I am always tempted by porches, balconies, rooftops, fire escapes, or exposed stairwells. If I am not on the ground, if I am raised at all above the landscape, I instantly want a cigarette. Thankfully I've been off the sticks for a couple of years now and will never go back but a nice balcony can give me that nostalgic urge.
The weight in my chest seemed to deepen considerably one day and I reluctantly went to the doctor. My reluctance isn't out of any fear it is simply that I have been so consistently plagued that I have emotionally trended towards a Christian Science attitude towards medicine. Not out of scorn or disbelief but simply out of annoyance at how much TIME I've spent in some tiny antiseptic office with a puzzled doctor drawing at straws.
When the doctor said the word "pleurisy" it rang a faint bell. I'd of course seen "The Glass Menagerie" and performed scenes from it but I mostly connected to Laura's limp, probably because of The Wheelchair Storm Tableau.
Pleurisy, by definition, is an inflammation of the lining of the lung. People complain of stabbing pains that worsen when they take deep breaths. This was what it was like for me. I was given anti-inflammatory and anti-biotics. I was told to rest which was ironic since I'd been sitting on a couch for a month already.
During this time I was suffering great pain and uncertainty in my personal life. I was trying not to hope that Maria would break up with her husband and choose me. This made the complications my romantic life had cultivated in college look like junior high dance intrigue. I felt guilty just thinking about it. It forced a new-found sense of morality out of me, made me see how much I craved a real relationship, one based on trust and mutual attraction.
The ache in my chest seemed to be an outgrowth of this heart pain. I burrowed deeper into the couch and wondered if I'd ever have the kind of ache that would come from a heart bursting at the seams instead of encroached upon by infection.
Like a locust the pleurisy dug back into the soil.
When they say "the more things change the more they stay the same" I am inclined to agree with them. In 2009, I was still trying to get healthy. I had quit smoking on January 1, 2008 and lost almost thirty pounds by taking up swimming. But I was still shooting myself in the foot. I let unchecked anger rampage on a regular basis. I had quit cigarettes but I had regular cigars and occasional happy grass. The pattern of self-abuse continued, much like it did as I stood on my parents porch and smoked cigarettes in the dark. I refused to truly believe in my ability to achieve a healthy constitution so that let me off the hook in much of my choices.
I tend not to talk in terms of regret because I prefer to accept whatever choice I make as the best one I could make under the given set of circumstances. But I regret that flaw in me, that inability to perceive a different reality for myself. In quick succession, as I made effort to get healthy, I inhaled myself into pneumonia and a second blooming of Blue Roses.
The double whammy was terrifying. I spent weeks in bed, exhausted to the core if I had to so much as go to the bathroom. I simply could not shake it. Now, I don't want to give the wrong impression. Once I began to feel ill I wasn't lighting up Cuban cigars and saying, "What the hell does it matter?" No. I took my medicine. I drank loads of water. I desperately wanted to heal.
But the cumulative damage I'd done made any kind of quick recovery difficult. This was the last straw for me, the final health camel that broke my bad habit's back. I've vowed never to inhale smoke again. If I am hired to do a part that requires cigarette smoking I'll use herbal cigarettes. It hasn't been hard once I closed the door.
I still struggle with my health. I might always. Just last hear I had shingles, for fuck's sake. But I won't do anything to impede the machine anymore. I refuse to court disaster. If there is a blue rose I want to smell it, not suffer under its symbolic implications. I don't think that particular locust will crawl up out of my forest floor again.
I have twice had the misfortune of falling under its spell.
The first came on the heels of my appendix surgery as I recuperated at my parents house. My system was quite weakened from the surgery and I tried to come back to work too early, resulting in a near total collapse at a middle school in mid-performance.
I've never been good with spare time. I was at loose ends. I was too young and dumb to do everything I needed to do to get healthy. I drank. I smoked, both legal and illicit material. The mental aspect of my convalescence was non-existent. There was a profound disconnect going on, my pessimism surrounding my health kept me from making any real effort at getting better. This would continue long past this episode, seventeen years into the future to the second time I got pleurisy.
But back to 1993. I began having massive chest pains. Earlier in the year I'd been diagnosed with a cartilage tear in my sternum from doing push-ups. So for a week or so I ignored this deep ache, thinking it to be the result of resuming light workouts. But it soon was keeping me up at night, which wasn't hard to do as I'd become a determined insomniac by this point.
I slept on the couch in my parents living room even though there were three open bedrooms at my disposal. This drove my father crazy. He would bark at me in the mornings to get in a bed for chrissakes but something about the transience of the couch felt more accurate. I channel surfed for hours at a time and took cigarette breaks on our back porch, staring out into the quiet dark hush of our gorgeous back yard.
A quick word about me and cigarettes. I am always tempted by porches, balconies, rooftops, fire escapes, or exposed stairwells. If I am not on the ground, if I am raised at all above the landscape, I instantly want a cigarette. Thankfully I've been off the sticks for a couple of years now and will never go back but a nice balcony can give me that nostalgic urge.
The weight in my chest seemed to deepen considerably one day and I reluctantly went to the doctor. My reluctance isn't out of any fear it is simply that I have been so consistently plagued that I have emotionally trended towards a Christian Science attitude towards medicine. Not out of scorn or disbelief but simply out of annoyance at how much TIME I've spent in some tiny antiseptic office with a puzzled doctor drawing at straws.
When the doctor said the word "pleurisy" it rang a faint bell. I'd of course seen "The Glass Menagerie" and performed scenes from it but I mostly connected to Laura's limp, probably because of The Wheelchair Storm Tableau.
Pleurisy, by definition, is an inflammation of the lining of the lung. People complain of stabbing pains that worsen when they take deep breaths. This was what it was like for me. I was given anti-inflammatory and anti-biotics. I was told to rest which was ironic since I'd been sitting on a couch for a month already.
During this time I was suffering great pain and uncertainty in my personal life. I was trying not to hope that Maria would break up with her husband and choose me. This made the complications my romantic life had cultivated in college look like junior high dance intrigue. I felt guilty just thinking about it. It forced a new-found sense of morality out of me, made me see how much I craved a real relationship, one based on trust and mutual attraction.
The ache in my chest seemed to be an outgrowth of this heart pain. I burrowed deeper into the couch and wondered if I'd ever have the kind of ache that would come from a heart bursting at the seams instead of encroached upon by infection.
Like a locust the pleurisy dug back into the soil.
When they say "the more things change the more they stay the same" I am inclined to agree with them. In 2009, I was still trying to get healthy. I had quit smoking on January 1, 2008 and lost almost thirty pounds by taking up swimming. But I was still shooting myself in the foot. I let unchecked anger rampage on a regular basis. I had quit cigarettes but I had regular cigars and occasional happy grass. The pattern of self-abuse continued, much like it did as I stood on my parents porch and smoked cigarettes in the dark. I refused to truly believe in my ability to achieve a healthy constitution so that let me off the hook in much of my choices.
I tend not to talk in terms of regret because I prefer to accept whatever choice I make as the best one I could make under the given set of circumstances. But I regret that flaw in me, that inability to perceive a different reality for myself. In quick succession, as I made effort to get healthy, I inhaled myself into pneumonia and a second blooming of Blue Roses.
The double whammy was terrifying. I spent weeks in bed, exhausted to the core if I had to so much as go to the bathroom. I simply could not shake it. Now, I don't want to give the wrong impression. Once I began to feel ill I wasn't lighting up Cuban cigars and saying, "What the hell does it matter?" No. I took my medicine. I drank loads of water. I desperately wanted to heal.
But the cumulative damage I'd done made any kind of quick recovery difficult. This was the last straw for me, the final health camel that broke my bad habit's back. I've vowed never to inhale smoke again. If I am hired to do a part that requires cigarette smoking I'll use herbal cigarettes. It hasn't been hard once I closed the door.
I still struggle with my health. I might always. Just last hear I had shingles, for fuck's sake. But I won't do anything to impede the machine anymore. I refuse to court disaster. If there is a blue rose I want to smell it, not suffer under its symbolic implications. I don't think that particular locust will crawl up out of my forest floor again.
Monday, April 12, 2010
The Sliver Of White
Elementary school is for me a paradise of sorts. The classrooms are filled with interesting books. The playground has a steel dome that functions as an alien planet. The other jungle gyms are placed at intervals across the yard and make for perfect action trajectories.
Nowadays playground surfaces are all soft synthetics and safe havens. What looks like pavement is actually more akin to rubber matting. Sandbox borders are padded heavier than a flat chested teen cheerleader with an inferiority complex. If your kid gets hurt on the modern playground your lawsuit will be thrown out in about thirty seconds and they'll force your kid to be tested for depression instead.
But in my day? The playground was dangerous and that is what made it fun. We courted disaster daily. Swinging on a swing was all well and good but we had something different in mind. I vividly remember getting up to maximum height, maintaining it for a few swings just to make sure I could go no higher, and then hurling myself off the seat and out into the void. We measured how far we could jump.
The dome was made up of interlocking steel bars that met in isosceles triangles. For a good four years this was heaven for me. We scrambled up and onto the top of it, hung into the interior with our feet and hands hooked onto the bars, bowed towards the sand in a daredevil curve. One rainy day my hands slid off the bar and I plummeted face first into the sand below, my U-shaped body flattening into a straight line, belly hitting ground first followed shortly thereafter by pelvis, shoulders, knees, head and finally feet and hands. I lay gasping for breath as the recess bell sounded, unable to move. The playground aide had to help me to my feet and even then I was enjoying myself, wind knocked out of me in the fearless pursuit of fun.
Back to the differences in the physical properties of ancient and modern playgrounds. At South Road Elementary School, each jungle gym or parallel bars or swing set sat on a slightly raised sandbox. The sandboxes were lined with a meager padding, something like old industrial carpeting folded over the gray wood underneath and stapled on.
Many areas of the makeshift padding had faded or ripped or simply been torn off. So certain areas were exposed.
In kindergarten I was running ferociously. Perhaps away from some real girl, perhaps towards an imaginary dragon, perhaps out of a dream Red Sox dugout. Whatever the impulse I was at top speed. I was about to leap over a corner of the sandbox that held the horizontal ladder, you know the one, where you grab onto a bar and go hand over hand across the abyss (a three foot abyss, yes, but an abyss nonetheless!).
It must have been late in the school year because I was wearing shorts.
What happened next is so clearly imprinted on my brain that it is almost like a short film. My back foot dragged just slightly as I made the leap. It scraped across one of the un-padded areas of wood that surrounded the sand. I felt a flash of pain and ran for a few more steps before I had to stop. I bent down to investigate the wound.
A vertical gash directly on my left inner ankle. No one knew I was injured yet and in my mind the whole playground went silent. Slow motion as I peeled back the bloody sock.
There, winking out at me, was a strip of white. It took me a second to understand what it was that I was seeing. It was bone. I had carved out every bit of skin that separated my ankle bone from the atmosphere. There was surprisingly little blood and I don't remember crying. In fact, I was fascinated. I don't know if I'd even learned about the concept of bones yet but I knew exactly what I was looking at.
Did I gain some insight into human frailty that day? Would I have been better served if my play time had not been interrupted? If I'd merely bounced my ankle off of some harmless synthetic?
Or does the appearance of an ankle bone where it ought not to be offer some truer picture of reality to an expanding mind?
I don't know. I do know this, though. The physical scar is dwarfed by the memory of that sliver of white peeking through my skin, the psychic emblem of some eternal secret I'd somehow instinctively known about well before I ever saw it.
Nowadays playground surfaces are all soft synthetics and safe havens. What looks like pavement is actually more akin to rubber matting. Sandbox borders are padded heavier than a flat chested teen cheerleader with an inferiority complex. If your kid gets hurt on the modern playground your lawsuit will be thrown out in about thirty seconds and they'll force your kid to be tested for depression instead.
But in my day? The playground was dangerous and that is what made it fun. We courted disaster daily. Swinging on a swing was all well and good but we had something different in mind. I vividly remember getting up to maximum height, maintaining it for a few swings just to make sure I could go no higher, and then hurling myself off the seat and out into the void. We measured how far we could jump.
The dome was made up of interlocking steel bars that met in isosceles triangles. For a good four years this was heaven for me. We scrambled up and onto the top of it, hung into the interior with our feet and hands hooked onto the bars, bowed towards the sand in a daredevil curve. One rainy day my hands slid off the bar and I plummeted face first into the sand below, my U-shaped body flattening into a straight line, belly hitting ground first followed shortly thereafter by pelvis, shoulders, knees, head and finally feet and hands. I lay gasping for breath as the recess bell sounded, unable to move. The playground aide had to help me to my feet and even then I was enjoying myself, wind knocked out of me in the fearless pursuit of fun.
Back to the differences in the physical properties of ancient and modern playgrounds. At South Road Elementary School, each jungle gym or parallel bars or swing set sat on a slightly raised sandbox. The sandboxes were lined with a meager padding, something like old industrial carpeting folded over the gray wood underneath and stapled on.
Many areas of the makeshift padding had faded or ripped or simply been torn off. So certain areas were exposed.
In kindergarten I was running ferociously. Perhaps away from some real girl, perhaps towards an imaginary dragon, perhaps out of a dream Red Sox dugout. Whatever the impulse I was at top speed. I was about to leap over a corner of the sandbox that held the horizontal ladder, you know the one, where you grab onto a bar and go hand over hand across the abyss (a three foot abyss, yes, but an abyss nonetheless!).
It must have been late in the school year because I was wearing shorts.
What happened next is so clearly imprinted on my brain that it is almost like a short film. My back foot dragged just slightly as I made the leap. It scraped across one of the un-padded areas of wood that surrounded the sand. I felt a flash of pain and ran for a few more steps before I had to stop. I bent down to investigate the wound.
A vertical gash directly on my left inner ankle. No one knew I was injured yet and in my mind the whole playground went silent. Slow motion as I peeled back the bloody sock.
There, winking out at me, was a strip of white. It took me a second to understand what it was that I was seeing. It was bone. I had carved out every bit of skin that separated my ankle bone from the atmosphere. There was surprisingly little blood and I don't remember crying. In fact, I was fascinated. I don't know if I'd even learned about the concept of bones yet but I knew exactly what I was looking at.
Did I gain some insight into human frailty that day? Would I have been better served if my play time had not been interrupted? If I'd merely bounced my ankle off of some harmless synthetic?
Or does the appearance of an ankle bone where it ought not to be offer some truer picture of reality to an expanding mind?
I don't know. I do know this, though. The physical scar is dwarfed by the memory of that sliver of white peeking through my skin, the psychic emblem of some eternal secret I'd somehow instinctively known about well before I ever saw it.
Friday, April 9, 2010
The Smile Line Scar
If you look closely at my face you can see a scar that runs from just above my nostril down my cheek ending roughly parallel to the corner of my mouth. When I smile it disappears into a dimple. For a three inch scar it is practically invisible. Once it is pointed out to you it will be obvious but if I don't call attention to it you'd never see it at all.
Our house on Paul Ave. was a beautiful little Cape Cod. Which might not mean anything to folks not from New England but the term Cape Cod refers to a very specific type of house, one that looks like it could be a beach house, natural shingles darkened by harsh winters and hot summers, with a sharply raked roof to allow the elements to slide off.
It sat in the middle of a rectangle of land, front yard slightly smaller than back, black bulkhead jutting out into the gently sloped backyard. There were two large glacier rocks on the property, one bulbous round one in the front yard and one square squat one in the back. The bulbous one was perfect for climbing on and the squat one perfect for picnics.
A swing-set rested at the very back of the back yard, up against the row of bushes that separated our property from the gulch behind it. For the first several years we lived there the gulch was merely the beginning of a sparse patch of woods. But then houses began to be built and the gulch became a border between back yards. My teddy bear spent a long hard winter out in a snow covered tree before the bulldozers came and tamed the underbrush.
The back right corner of the yard was divided by a short encroachment of rhododendron which created a little courtyard of sorts. This area was always where whispered strategy took place, where schemes were hatched, where imaginary kingdoms were plotted against and toppled. The open section of the yard was where all the action played out.
And it was also where whiffle ball happened.
Now, the shape of our yard was perfect for baseball. A square. Running along the left border was a tall row of chrysanthemum bushes that stood in for Fenway's Green Monster. Directly behind the bushes was a utility shed on our next door neighbor's property.
Two short digressions involving this shed.
First, in another infamous whiffle ball game, Billy Hodge went through the hedge to retrieve a whiffle ball from inside the canoe hung on the back of the shed. But he also disturbed a beehive and he came screaming back into my yard enveloped in a yellow and black cloud. We all started shouting "Run! Run!" as they stung him over one hundred times. He spent the next two weeks like a mummy, encased in baking soda.
Second, our cat had a litter of cute black kittens. My favorite we named Oliver. He went missing. A whiffle ball under the shed led me to his tiny curled up body. For one second I thought he was alive and petted his cold body while my feet poked back through the hedge.
Which would later carve the three inch line into my cheek.
I was six. Maybe seven. I was playing left field, already obsessed with replacing Yaz on the Red Sox roster. Brian Quinn was pitching to Billy Hodge. Billy took Brian deep over the yellow flowered hedge. I squeezed through the branches and found the ball. I remember that I was laughing in appreciation of the magnitude of the hit. As I came back through, a stray branch slid into the notch that my smiling cheek made. It swung through the groove like a bullwhip.
I came back through still laughing and threw the ball to Brian. Although this probably isn't accurate, I remember Billy and Brian staring at me like I had two heads. My face felt wet. I wiped my hand across my cheek and it came away covered in blood.
Only then did I begin to cry! I ran inside where my mum probably cleaned it with iodine and put a cold compress on it. The game was over for the day.
Looking at the scar now, seeing the length of it, I can only imagine how big it looked on a face half the size. Like my memory of my youth it has faded but if I look hard enough it will always be there.
Our house on Paul Ave. was a beautiful little Cape Cod. Which might not mean anything to folks not from New England but the term Cape Cod refers to a very specific type of house, one that looks like it could be a beach house, natural shingles darkened by harsh winters and hot summers, with a sharply raked roof to allow the elements to slide off.
It sat in the middle of a rectangle of land, front yard slightly smaller than back, black bulkhead jutting out into the gently sloped backyard. There were two large glacier rocks on the property, one bulbous round one in the front yard and one square squat one in the back. The bulbous one was perfect for climbing on and the squat one perfect for picnics.
A swing-set rested at the very back of the back yard, up against the row of bushes that separated our property from the gulch behind it. For the first several years we lived there the gulch was merely the beginning of a sparse patch of woods. But then houses began to be built and the gulch became a border between back yards. My teddy bear spent a long hard winter out in a snow covered tree before the bulldozers came and tamed the underbrush.
The back right corner of the yard was divided by a short encroachment of rhododendron which created a little courtyard of sorts. This area was always where whispered strategy took place, where schemes were hatched, where imaginary kingdoms were plotted against and toppled. The open section of the yard was where all the action played out.
And it was also where whiffle ball happened.
Now, the shape of our yard was perfect for baseball. A square. Running along the left border was a tall row of chrysanthemum bushes that stood in for Fenway's Green Monster. Directly behind the bushes was a utility shed on our next door neighbor's property.
Two short digressions involving this shed.
First, in another infamous whiffle ball game, Billy Hodge went through the hedge to retrieve a whiffle ball from inside the canoe hung on the back of the shed. But he also disturbed a beehive and he came screaming back into my yard enveloped in a yellow and black cloud. We all started shouting "Run! Run!" as they stung him over one hundred times. He spent the next two weeks like a mummy, encased in baking soda.
Second, our cat had a litter of cute black kittens. My favorite we named Oliver. He went missing. A whiffle ball under the shed led me to his tiny curled up body. For one second I thought he was alive and petted his cold body while my feet poked back through the hedge.
Which would later carve the three inch line into my cheek.
I was six. Maybe seven. I was playing left field, already obsessed with replacing Yaz on the Red Sox roster. Brian Quinn was pitching to Billy Hodge. Billy took Brian deep over the yellow flowered hedge. I squeezed through the branches and found the ball. I remember that I was laughing in appreciation of the magnitude of the hit. As I came back through, a stray branch slid into the notch that my smiling cheek made. It swung through the groove like a bullwhip.
I came back through still laughing and threw the ball to Brian. Although this probably isn't accurate, I remember Billy and Brian staring at me like I had two heads. My face felt wet. I wiped my hand across my cheek and it came away covered in blood.
Only then did I begin to cry! I ran inside where my mum probably cleaned it with iodine and put a cold compress on it. The game was over for the day.
Looking at the scar now, seeing the length of it, I can only imagine how big it looked on a face half the size. Like my memory of my youth it has faded but if I look hard enough it will always be there.
Thursday, April 8, 2010
The Permanent Knee Bend, Or How I Go From Team- To Cheer-Leader
It is my freshman year of high school and I've successfully tried out for and made the soccer team. For me this is a huge deal. Steam is gathering in the soccer community of South Kingstown and everyone feels as if a State Championship is within reach. I hope to be a part of it.
Now, as I've previously discussed, I am not the most skilled of soccer players but I approach the game with the zeal of a suicide bomber. If I slide under you and take your legs out 72 virgins await. An elbow to your ribs as I target your shins with my cleats. A sly bump while the ref is following the action. I try to bait my opponents into frustration. They then usually try to gain revenge by overdoing it and then I have a tactical advantage.
Plus I wear big wrap-around prescription goggles and look like a sad extra sitting in the bleachers while the cool kids dance in a John Hughes film.
The Junior Varsity is made up of mostly freshman and sophomores with the occasional junior. If you are still on the JV squad as a junior, chances are you won't ever see much Varsity playing time. You are low on the depth chart. Sophomores who don't start on the JV squad are looking at being backups in their Junior and Senior year.
There are freshman and sophomores who start for the Varsity but not many. Most of the starting Varsity team are Juniors or Seniors with the occasional phenom stealing a spot.
I am the starting left fullback for the JV squad so I've already vaulted past a few disgruntled upperclassmen on the depth chart. As far as I'm concerned I'll be a backup on the Varsity sophomore year, and starting Junior and Senior years. It didn't work out that way because of The Torn Tendon.
The Junior Varsity season opens. Like the Varsity we are a team to be reckoned with. We do not lose often. We scrimmage with the Varsity who are one of the best teams in the state so when we come up against other Junior Varsity squads we feel very confident.
The season flies by. I improve as it goes. I've gotten faster, bigger, stronger. I've faced the ridiculously fast upperclassmen in practice and held my own. I've shut down excellent opposing teams on a regular basis and am a vocal leader on the JV squad.
By vocal leader I mean that I yell a lot on the field. I am never negative. I encourage the offensive squad from my post. I warn my fellow defenders of sneaky encroachment from our opponent. I am respectfully strident with refs. I do not trash talk specific players but I do keep up a steady stream of chatter reminding my teammates that we are better than these guys.
Well, maybe I occasionally whisper a sweet nothing to whatever offensive player I'm assigned to, but nothing a ref could ever hear.
A yellow card is issued in soccer for fouls that go just beyond the aggressive innocent play. I am a frequent receiver of yellow cards. My signature play is a sort of all out baseball slide assault. I know that once someone gets by me I don't have the speed to catch them so I prefer to simply bring you to the ground. If I get the ball with my feet I don't get a foul. If I don't get the ball with my feet I tend to get carded. But I prefer a card to a goal.
It is the last game of our season. The Varsity season continues for several weeks after ours, with key members of the JV being placed on Varsity for the playoff run. I know that I won't be on that roster because the starting left fullback is All-State and there are two very capable junior backups behind him. But I'll keep playing in practice and trying to give those guys a run for their money.
So. Last game. First half. We are leading but it is a hard fought contest. Our offense keeps the ball on their half of the field much of the game.
At one point I put my hands on my knees while exhorting my guys to put the ball in the net again. The action starts to reverse and come back over towards our goal. I start to come out of my gentle crouch.
But I can't. My knee has locked. I cannot UNBEND my knee. Thankfully the play heads down the other sideline and I signal to my coach that I have to come out of the game. It is rather obvious as I am walking like someone just pulled the toilet out from under me while I sat on it.
I am taken to the local sports doctor who would later help me rehabilitate the torn tendon that effectively ended my soccer career. He tells me I have something called "chondromalacia of the left patella". What this means is that my kneecap is pinching the tendon underneath it and locking it into place. Turns out I'm slightly bow-legged.
My knee stays locked in place for a week, as if I'm perpetually leaning forward, urging the rest of my team to pick up the slack for me.
I watch the last two weeks of the season from the sidelines on crutches, as vocal as ever, needing only a pom-pom and a megaphone to cement the transition that I didn't know was already inevitable.
Now, as I've previously discussed, I am not the most skilled of soccer players but I approach the game with the zeal of a suicide bomber. If I slide under you and take your legs out 72 virgins await. An elbow to your ribs as I target your shins with my cleats. A sly bump while the ref is following the action. I try to bait my opponents into frustration. They then usually try to gain revenge by overdoing it and then I have a tactical advantage.
Plus I wear big wrap-around prescription goggles and look like a sad extra sitting in the bleachers while the cool kids dance in a John Hughes film.
The Junior Varsity is made up of mostly freshman and sophomores with the occasional junior. If you are still on the JV squad as a junior, chances are you won't ever see much Varsity playing time. You are low on the depth chart. Sophomores who don't start on the JV squad are looking at being backups in their Junior and Senior year.
There are freshman and sophomores who start for the Varsity but not many. Most of the starting Varsity team are Juniors or Seniors with the occasional phenom stealing a spot.
I am the starting left fullback for the JV squad so I've already vaulted past a few disgruntled upperclassmen on the depth chart. As far as I'm concerned I'll be a backup on the Varsity sophomore year, and starting Junior and Senior years. It didn't work out that way because of The Torn Tendon.
The Junior Varsity season opens. Like the Varsity we are a team to be reckoned with. We do not lose often. We scrimmage with the Varsity who are one of the best teams in the state so when we come up against other Junior Varsity squads we feel very confident.
The season flies by. I improve as it goes. I've gotten faster, bigger, stronger. I've faced the ridiculously fast upperclassmen in practice and held my own. I've shut down excellent opposing teams on a regular basis and am a vocal leader on the JV squad.
By vocal leader I mean that I yell a lot on the field. I am never negative. I encourage the offensive squad from my post. I warn my fellow defenders of sneaky encroachment from our opponent. I am respectfully strident with refs. I do not trash talk specific players but I do keep up a steady stream of chatter reminding my teammates that we are better than these guys.
Well, maybe I occasionally whisper a sweet nothing to whatever offensive player I'm assigned to, but nothing a ref could ever hear.
A yellow card is issued in soccer for fouls that go just beyond the aggressive innocent play. I am a frequent receiver of yellow cards. My signature play is a sort of all out baseball slide assault. I know that once someone gets by me I don't have the speed to catch them so I prefer to simply bring you to the ground. If I get the ball with my feet I don't get a foul. If I don't get the ball with my feet I tend to get carded. But I prefer a card to a goal.
It is the last game of our season. The Varsity season continues for several weeks after ours, with key members of the JV being placed on Varsity for the playoff run. I know that I won't be on that roster because the starting left fullback is All-State and there are two very capable junior backups behind him. But I'll keep playing in practice and trying to give those guys a run for their money.
So. Last game. First half. We are leading but it is a hard fought contest. Our offense keeps the ball on their half of the field much of the game.
At one point I put my hands on my knees while exhorting my guys to put the ball in the net again. The action starts to reverse and come back over towards our goal. I start to come out of my gentle crouch.
But I can't. My knee has locked. I cannot UNBEND my knee. Thankfully the play heads down the other sideline and I signal to my coach that I have to come out of the game. It is rather obvious as I am walking like someone just pulled the toilet out from under me while I sat on it.
I am taken to the local sports doctor who would later help me rehabilitate the torn tendon that effectively ended my soccer career. He tells me I have something called "chondromalacia of the left patella". What this means is that my kneecap is pinching the tendon underneath it and locking it into place. Turns out I'm slightly bow-legged.
My knee stays locked in place for a week, as if I'm perpetually leaning forward, urging the rest of my team to pick up the slack for me.
I watch the last two weeks of the season from the sidelines on crutches, as vocal as ever, needing only a pom-pom and a megaphone to cement the transition that I didn't know was already inevitable.
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
The Post-Heartbreak Pre-Europe Trip Deer Tick Blues
For the first six weeks of summer I hobbled around on a cane from The Plum On My Heel. I reeled from the break-up that ensued when my girlfriend went back to Illinois and resumed dating another much older guy. I healed very slowly but while I did I took on a new job, helping care for adults with behavioral and mental disabilities in a string of group homes across the Southern part of the state.
I met a whole new slate of people, several of which I would form a band with once I returned stateside. My trip to Europe loomed. You'd think I'd be excited but I was so physically strained and so emotionally blasted that all I could sense was a deep unease at leaving home. I'd spent two of my four college years living with my parents so college was not for me the time when a taste of the real world helped prepare me for my post-college years. If anything I'd regressed.
But this new job? This new job was good. I was challenged. This is very difficult work that involves adhering to programs put in place by trained psychological experts. Training in physical restraint is required as you are often called upon to intercept violent behavior, either against others or, in most cases, self-directed, against the client themselves. At first I couldn't work with clients who required this kind of intercession because I was walking with a cane. But once I was cleared to walk I took on any shift I could get.
The shift that altered the next twenty years of my physical well-being involved clearing the side of a hill that blocked a view from a luxury house that was being built. The owner of the house had heard about the work programs that the clients were involved with and hired several of the clients to aid in clearing the land. A work crew was scheduled to go out into a wooded plot of land in Western Rhode Island and cut down a slew of trees and remove the wood.
Now, during this time, I'd begun to date again, a girl I'd been introduced to by an old friend. Jennifer. She lived in Newport and I would drive my Karmann Ghia over the tiny Jamestown Bridge dreading our awkward lust-less interludes. Every second I spent with her my hands were enveloped in a cold sweat and the specter of my ex hung over every second. The cane didn't help either. We had weekend plans to go see a friend of mine perform in an evening of one-act plays in Providence.
Now, we'd been on a few dates before this but they'd been to parties with other people, bars where crews gathered, etc. This was sort of our first date even though we'd been out several times over the course of two months.
At the beginning of the week I got a terrible rash on my groin. Hip/groin, but close enough to the good stuff that I immediately became certain that my rotten ex had given me some terrible disease.
Since I was still officially a college student I made the dread trek down to Health Services who seemed hellbent on making my life miserable. But this time the doctor took one look, assured me that I had no sexually transmitted disease, unless you counted the deer tick who'd taken a bite out of my inner thigh.
I had Lyme's Disease. It was a Friday morning. I was prescribed a round of antibiotics. When I got home Jennifer (the girl I was going out with) called. I told her my diagnosis. She said it would be fine if we canceled that night, if I wasn't feeling well. I said I felt fine. I wasn't lying. But the shit hit me quick.
A mere hours later as we filed into our seats in the little black box theater, everything started to disintegrate. The chair felt like a torture device. I was sweating bullets. Walking from the car to the theater, the bottoms of my feet had hurt, as if I'd been standing in line in the cold, instead of taking a short stroll in comfortable shoes in warm weather. I had difficulty getting my wallet out of my pocket to pay for the tickets.
By the time the first short one-act was over I knew I'd have to leave.
I had trouble walking out of the theater, so sore were my legs. Jennifer had to drive my car.
I no longer had sufficient energy to be able to make it through a grueling shift at work, tackling and restraining grown men and women who had no restraint of their own. Bright light hurt my eyes.
Now, remember, I was leaving to go live in France for NINE MONTHS in little over a month. The prescription lasted until the day of my departure. Looking back, I marvel that I went through with it, that I left to go live in a foreign country for the better part of a year when I was having trouble functioning here in the good ol' US of A. But go I did.
The last month of the summer I spent in seclusion and began obsessively watching 'Crimes And Misdemeanors' and 'Goodfellas' back to back in some sort of twisted high-brow/low-brow double feature. I must have watched them every other day for a month, bundled up in my parents living room, shivering even though it was August, forcing myself to eat because I had no appetite from the massive doses of antibiotics I was taking daily, and occasionally hanging out with Justin over at his house.
At the time, Lyme's Disease was still something of an under-reported mystery. Most people upon hearing what I had, didn't even know what I was talking about. Pre-Internet, pre-Lyme's epidemic, I was like a guinea pig in a sadistic unregulated study.
If Lyme's Disease is left undiagnosed it can kill you. For some people Lyme's Disease is like a bad cold. You take your medicine and it goes away. Then there are people like me who walk away with something resembling arthritis. I've never felt the same. Aches, pains, discomfort at even the slightest contortion, my body feels DIS-jointed, disconnected, something patched back together after having been disassembled.
I didn't know any of this at the time. All I knew was I was going to live in Europe where I wouldn't be able to scrutinize the masterworks of Woody Allen and Martin Scorcese on a daily basis anymore.
And Jennifer? Well, it turns out that the old friend and I had a lot more in common than she and I did. One of the few nights I had enough energy to be out, the three of us went to a bar down near the ocean. As we were leaving, my old friend and I naturally held hands as we walked out of the place. Jennifer didn't see it. As our fingers meshed we looked at each other. Twenty one years of history was instantly transformed. Their friendship ended and ours changed.
I took the last antibiotic pill right before I got in the car to drive to Boston to catch my flight to Paris. Working on my nervous system were so many factors that there was a kind of blackout. I cried for what I was leaving behind, I cried for what I might encounter across the pond, I cried for all that I didn't know.
Today I can still feel the weight of those factors. The antibiotics didn't erase the imprint of the Lyme's Disease and there was simply no antidote for the remaining drags on my constitution. Those I'd have to endure as well.
I met a whole new slate of people, several of which I would form a band with once I returned stateside. My trip to Europe loomed. You'd think I'd be excited but I was so physically strained and so emotionally blasted that all I could sense was a deep unease at leaving home. I'd spent two of my four college years living with my parents so college was not for me the time when a taste of the real world helped prepare me for my post-college years. If anything I'd regressed.
But this new job? This new job was good. I was challenged. This is very difficult work that involves adhering to programs put in place by trained psychological experts. Training in physical restraint is required as you are often called upon to intercept violent behavior, either against others or, in most cases, self-directed, against the client themselves. At first I couldn't work with clients who required this kind of intercession because I was walking with a cane. But once I was cleared to walk I took on any shift I could get.
The shift that altered the next twenty years of my physical well-being involved clearing the side of a hill that blocked a view from a luxury house that was being built. The owner of the house had heard about the work programs that the clients were involved with and hired several of the clients to aid in clearing the land. A work crew was scheduled to go out into a wooded plot of land in Western Rhode Island and cut down a slew of trees and remove the wood.
Now, during this time, I'd begun to date again, a girl I'd been introduced to by an old friend. Jennifer. She lived in Newport and I would drive my Karmann Ghia over the tiny Jamestown Bridge dreading our awkward lust-less interludes. Every second I spent with her my hands were enveloped in a cold sweat and the specter of my ex hung over every second. The cane didn't help either. We had weekend plans to go see a friend of mine perform in an evening of one-act plays in Providence.
Now, we'd been on a few dates before this but they'd been to parties with other people, bars where crews gathered, etc. This was sort of our first date even though we'd been out several times over the course of two months.
At the beginning of the week I got a terrible rash on my groin. Hip/groin, but close enough to the good stuff that I immediately became certain that my rotten ex had given me some terrible disease.
Since I was still officially a college student I made the dread trek down to Health Services who seemed hellbent on making my life miserable. But this time the doctor took one look, assured me that I had no sexually transmitted disease, unless you counted the deer tick who'd taken a bite out of my inner thigh.
I had Lyme's Disease. It was a Friday morning. I was prescribed a round of antibiotics. When I got home Jennifer (the girl I was going out with) called. I told her my diagnosis. She said it would be fine if we canceled that night, if I wasn't feeling well. I said I felt fine. I wasn't lying. But the shit hit me quick.
A mere hours later as we filed into our seats in the little black box theater, everything started to disintegrate. The chair felt like a torture device. I was sweating bullets. Walking from the car to the theater, the bottoms of my feet had hurt, as if I'd been standing in line in the cold, instead of taking a short stroll in comfortable shoes in warm weather. I had difficulty getting my wallet out of my pocket to pay for the tickets.
By the time the first short one-act was over I knew I'd have to leave.
I had trouble walking out of the theater, so sore were my legs. Jennifer had to drive my car.
I no longer had sufficient energy to be able to make it through a grueling shift at work, tackling and restraining grown men and women who had no restraint of their own. Bright light hurt my eyes.
Now, remember, I was leaving to go live in France for NINE MONTHS in little over a month. The prescription lasted until the day of my departure. Looking back, I marvel that I went through with it, that I left to go live in a foreign country for the better part of a year when I was having trouble functioning here in the good ol' US of A. But go I did.
The last month of the summer I spent in seclusion and began obsessively watching 'Crimes And Misdemeanors' and 'Goodfellas' back to back in some sort of twisted high-brow/low-brow double feature. I must have watched them every other day for a month, bundled up in my parents living room, shivering even though it was August, forcing myself to eat because I had no appetite from the massive doses of antibiotics I was taking daily, and occasionally hanging out with Justin over at his house.
At the time, Lyme's Disease was still something of an under-reported mystery. Most people upon hearing what I had, didn't even know what I was talking about. Pre-Internet, pre-Lyme's epidemic, I was like a guinea pig in a sadistic unregulated study.
If Lyme's Disease is left undiagnosed it can kill you. For some people Lyme's Disease is like a bad cold. You take your medicine and it goes away. Then there are people like me who walk away with something resembling arthritis. I've never felt the same. Aches, pains, discomfort at even the slightest contortion, my body feels DIS-jointed, disconnected, something patched back together after having been disassembled.
I didn't know any of this at the time. All I knew was I was going to live in Europe where I wouldn't be able to scrutinize the masterworks of Woody Allen and Martin Scorcese on a daily basis anymore.
And Jennifer? Well, it turns out that the old friend and I had a lot more in common than she and I did. One of the few nights I had enough energy to be out, the three of us went to a bar down near the ocean. As we were leaving, my old friend and I naturally held hands as we walked out of the place. Jennifer didn't see it. As our fingers meshed we looked at each other. Twenty one years of history was instantly transformed. Their friendship ended and ours changed.
I took the last antibiotic pill right before I got in the car to drive to Boston to catch my flight to Paris. Working on my nervous system were so many factors that there was a kind of blackout. I cried for what I was leaving behind, I cried for what I might encounter across the pond, I cried for all that I didn't know.
Today I can still feel the weight of those factors. The antibiotics didn't erase the imprint of the Lyme's Disease and there was simply no antidote for the remaining drags on my constitution. Those I'd have to endure as well.
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
The Hospital Marlboro Medium
Easter Morning 1993.
The night before I'd been out to see a play or a movie. I have no memory of what I did that evening. I know that I had a beer and a burger at around 10 PM. I went home around midnight because I didn't feel all that well.
I was living in Providence in a three-bedroom apartment that cost $450 a month. I had two roommates. Yes. My rent was $150 a month. To this date I have never lived in a larger apartment.
I was acting for Looking Glass Theater, performing shows in elementary schools all over Rhode Island and Massachusetts. I think I was making about $325 a week which meant that I had plenty of money to spare. I had a silver diesel Rabbit that got unbelievable gas mileage and I was in love with a married woman.
I eventually quit Looking Glass and moved to New York, started dating the now-divorced woman, stopped dating her when I went to New York, resumed dating her after I'd gotten there, married her in 1996, had Cashel with her in 1997, and divorced her in late 2001, having moved out in late 2000.
But in 1993? Around Easter? I was a mess. This was before the advent of internet or cell phones so we wrote tortured letters to each other. We met occasionally but did not have a full-blown affair. I knew I wanted more than that. I was also smoking cigarettes, smoking pot on a regular basis, and probably drinking to excess more than was good for me.
Anyhow, back to Easter eve. I felt profoundly disassociated from my own life so the fact that I would cut a Saturday night short and go home was not unusual. I sat and watched television for a bit, thinking that I might try to catch SNL. One of my roommates was already asleep.
I became sick to my stomach. I had diarrhea. Then I settled back in on the couch thinking that the worst was behind me. I got sick again. And again. I tried to go to bed. At some point I began to think that maybe I'd had more beer than I remembered...had I gotten wasted and forgotten? I was pretty sure I hadn't but things were getting hazy.
I spent the next five hours shuffling between my bedroom and the bathroom.
At around six Easter morning, my poor roommate who slept right next to the bathroom stepped out of his bedroom and suggested that we might want to take a drive next door.
We lived right next to Roger Williams Hospital, tucked on the top curve of a horse-shoe shaped drive which hugged a middle school. I remember being vaguely shocked by the suggestion that something might be wrong. I mean, I'd just been puking for almost six hours, what was the big deal? But some dim corner of my brain that was still functioning assented and Tom helped me into his car and drove me the 100 yards to the emergency room.
He assured me that he would call my parents who were probably just waking up. A family church visit and jaunt up to Massachusetts to visit relatives was planned.
Once at the emergency room I was put through a battery of tests. By this point my abdomen was red, swollen and hot to the touch. I was pretty certain that my appendix was about to leave my body. So were the doctors. But they can't give you anything to mask the pain until they've put you through your paces. Which took about four hours.
Every so often a doctor would come into the room, poke me in the belly, note the volume of my scream, and say, "Yeah, it's probably your appendix" and then leave. Agony began to gather inside of me.
My parents arrived. It seemed as if it had been days since I'd gotten there but I was still surprised at how quickly they'd traveled the length of Rhode Island.
By this time I'd been awake for almost thirty-six hours and I'd been vomiting for almost ten. It was almost 11AM when they finally could officially pronounce what we all already knew. I had acute appendicitis and was about to have my first ever surgery. They shot me with something and within minutes I could barely feel any existential angst, let alone physical pain.
I don't remember any of the surgery. I don't remember being wheeled to the operating room. I don't remember being put under. I know they must have done the old 'count back from 100' thing but it is NOT in my brain.
When I came to the pain in my gut was worse and I actually asked a nurse if they'd performed the operation yet. She assured me that they had and that the pain I was feeling was just because, you know, I had a huge wound. I was skeptical and asked again. My folks were there and they sat with me in my room. I think they might have gone up to Massachusetts but I'm not sure.
Anyway, I was in the hospital for a few days.
I don't remember how but I got word to Maria that I'd been hospitalized. We'd been in regular enough contact that I didn't want her to think I was blowing her off.
She came on a lunch break and sat with me. I was still quite drugged up but they were forcing me to walk regularly. We took my IV and wandered slowly down the hall. We didn't talk about much. Any in depth analysis of our situation was not feasible for me in my condition and we simply enjoyed each others company.
She had brought a pack of Marlboro Mediums with her and we sat (in the hospital mind you and if that doesn't show how much things have changed I don't know what will) and smoked quietly and studiously didn't talk about our future.
It took me longer than expected to recover and I wound up missing about 8 weeks of work, almost the rest of the school year. By the following Easter Maria and I would be living together and headed for a breakup of our own, the penultimate.
I'm pretty sure they don't let you smoke in hospitals anymore.
The night before I'd been out to see a play or a movie. I have no memory of what I did that evening. I know that I had a beer and a burger at around 10 PM. I went home around midnight because I didn't feel all that well.
I was living in Providence in a three-bedroom apartment that cost $450 a month. I had two roommates. Yes. My rent was $150 a month. To this date I have never lived in a larger apartment.
I was acting for Looking Glass Theater, performing shows in elementary schools all over Rhode Island and Massachusetts. I think I was making about $325 a week which meant that I had plenty of money to spare. I had a silver diesel Rabbit that got unbelievable gas mileage and I was in love with a married woman.
I eventually quit Looking Glass and moved to New York, started dating the now-divorced woman, stopped dating her when I went to New York, resumed dating her after I'd gotten there, married her in 1996, had Cashel with her in 1997, and divorced her in late 2001, having moved out in late 2000.
But in 1993? Around Easter? I was a mess. This was before the advent of internet or cell phones so we wrote tortured letters to each other. We met occasionally but did not have a full-blown affair. I knew I wanted more than that. I was also smoking cigarettes, smoking pot on a regular basis, and probably drinking to excess more than was good for me.
Anyhow, back to Easter eve. I felt profoundly disassociated from my own life so the fact that I would cut a Saturday night short and go home was not unusual. I sat and watched television for a bit, thinking that I might try to catch SNL. One of my roommates was already asleep.
I became sick to my stomach. I had diarrhea. Then I settled back in on the couch thinking that the worst was behind me. I got sick again. And again. I tried to go to bed. At some point I began to think that maybe I'd had more beer than I remembered...had I gotten wasted and forgotten? I was pretty sure I hadn't but things were getting hazy.
I spent the next five hours shuffling between my bedroom and the bathroom.
At around six Easter morning, my poor roommate who slept right next to the bathroom stepped out of his bedroom and suggested that we might want to take a drive next door.
We lived right next to Roger Williams Hospital, tucked on the top curve of a horse-shoe shaped drive which hugged a middle school. I remember being vaguely shocked by the suggestion that something might be wrong. I mean, I'd just been puking for almost six hours, what was the big deal? But some dim corner of my brain that was still functioning assented and Tom helped me into his car and drove me the 100 yards to the emergency room.
He assured me that he would call my parents who were probably just waking up. A family church visit and jaunt up to Massachusetts to visit relatives was planned.
Once at the emergency room I was put through a battery of tests. By this point my abdomen was red, swollen and hot to the touch. I was pretty certain that my appendix was about to leave my body. So were the doctors. But they can't give you anything to mask the pain until they've put you through your paces. Which took about four hours.
Every so often a doctor would come into the room, poke me in the belly, note the volume of my scream, and say, "Yeah, it's probably your appendix" and then leave. Agony began to gather inside of me.
My parents arrived. It seemed as if it had been days since I'd gotten there but I was still surprised at how quickly they'd traveled the length of Rhode Island.
By this time I'd been awake for almost thirty-six hours and I'd been vomiting for almost ten. It was almost 11AM when they finally could officially pronounce what we all already knew. I had acute appendicitis and was about to have my first ever surgery. They shot me with something and within minutes I could barely feel any existential angst, let alone physical pain.
I don't remember any of the surgery. I don't remember being wheeled to the operating room. I don't remember being put under. I know they must have done the old 'count back from 100' thing but it is NOT in my brain.
When I came to the pain in my gut was worse and I actually asked a nurse if they'd performed the operation yet. She assured me that they had and that the pain I was feeling was just because, you know, I had a huge wound. I was skeptical and asked again. My folks were there and they sat with me in my room. I think they might have gone up to Massachusetts but I'm not sure.
Anyway, I was in the hospital for a few days.
I don't remember how but I got word to Maria that I'd been hospitalized. We'd been in regular enough contact that I didn't want her to think I was blowing her off.
She came on a lunch break and sat with me. I was still quite drugged up but they were forcing me to walk regularly. We took my IV and wandered slowly down the hall. We didn't talk about much. Any in depth analysis of our situation was not feasible for me in my condition and we simply enjoyed each others company.
She had brought a pack of Marlboro Mediums with her and we sat (in the hospital mind you and if that doesn't show how much things have changed I don't know what will) and smoked quietly and studiously didn't talk about our future.
It took me longer than expected to recover and I wound up missing about 8 weeks of work, almost the rest of the school year. By the following Easter Maria and I would be living together and headed for a breakup of our own, the penultimate.
I'm pretty sure they don't let you smoke in hospitals anymore.
Monday, April 5, 2010
The Cadillac Fridge
My high school drama club experience was, I believe, not your ordinary high school drama club experience. I've already outlined the Diary of Anne Frank snowstorm defiance which led to me being embedded in a Catholic school girl production of Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat aping Elvis in gold lame debacle/triumph. Another highlight was an adaptation of the Hitchcock film 'Rope' in which my buddy Tom DeVincke was murdered in the first scene and then spent an hour and forty minutes stuffed into a trunk, but that's a story for another day.
Another full production that somehow made its way past the censors of public school education was 'A Hatful Of Rain', the famous Michael Gazzo play that dealt with the trials of a morphine addict struggling to readjust to society after WWII. I played the morphine addict.
This play, for those unfamiliar with it, is still shocking TODAY. If you saw it you wouldn't be snickering at the 1950's version of addiction. It is BRUTAL. The main character is in love with his brother's wife. He is a junkie. He is in trouble with loan sharks. And none of this has the Damon Runyan sheen and pep that colors most portrayals of the underworld from that era. The edges are blurry, the cigarettes stink, the scabs are real.
In our high school there were two kinds of production. There were the mainstage drama club productions and then the productions that came out of the actual Drama Class. 'A Hatful Of Rain' was directed by Tom Hull who is now something of an origami genius. I think, as amazing as his origami structures are, that he may have missed his calling, because he was a hell of a theater director.
Class time was taken up with rehearsal. I can't quite recall the difference between a Drama Club production and a Drama Class production because they seem equally well prepared in my memory. But this show was extra ready because Tom knew exactly what he wanted. He had blocking ideas, staging and lighting ideas, ideas that not only served the play but also clarified it, honed it to a sharper edge, removed whatever anachronistic tendency that might still linger around the edges.
Which is why he needed a refrigerator.
Much of the play took place in the squalid kitchen of a cramped New York apartment. At one point I got a big laugh merely by closing the door at an appropriate moment. So Tom wasn't joking. We needed the fridge.
Through behind the scenes machinations we found someone who could loan us an old broken down 1950's fridge, the kind that you could stand on end, put wheels on and get 9 miles to the gallon with. We had to go over to a warehouse behind the old mill to pick it up.
Someone had a pickup truck so after school we drove the half mile or so from SK High School to the warehouse. The fridge was on a loading dock waiting for us and man was it a mother of a fridge. It towered over us. There were five or six students in the truck because we'd been warned that the thing was big. Even so we were shocked.
We started the awkward process of trying to lower it into the bed of the pick up. We had no equipment, just five or six teenage brains. Clearly it was not enough gray matter, because somehow I wound up on the bed of the truck as the giant monolith creaked down on top of me. I was the only one aware of my presence in the bed of the truck. It backed me down like an aggressive jock pinning a cheerleader to a couch. I began to yell but there was a moment when my two hands took the whole weight of it as it bounced down on top of me.
They talk about women being able to lift cars off of their babies. Well, I don't know about that. But I do know that for one second I bench pressed in the vicinity of what I can only guess to be at least 400 pounds.
I was immediately sore all over. Of course we'd waited to get the fridge until the very night of the play so I had to go onstage that night aching from head to foot.
Much later when I was forced to get chest X-rays due to a bout with pleurisy or pneumonia or bronchitis, the doctor said I had a crushed vertebra in the center of my spine. This was fairly common. I could have had it since birth. Or it could have happened later. Had I been in any kind of an accident?
I told the doctor, no, I'd never had any kind of a car accident. Sitting there I somehow failed to recollect the Cadillac refrigerator slowly enveloping me in its loving embrace.
Another full production that somehow made its way past the censors of public school education was 'A Hatful Of Rain', the famous Michael Gazzo play that dealt with the trials of a morphine addict struggling to readjust to society after WWII. I played the morphine addict.
This play, for those unfamiliar with it, is still shocking TODAY. If you saw it you wouldn't be snickering at the 1950's version of addiction. It is BRUTAL. The main character is in love with his brother's wife. He is a junkie. He is in trouble with loan sharks. And none of this has the Damon Runyan sheen and pep that colors most portrayals of the underworld from that era. The edges are blurry, the cigarettes stink, the scabs are real.
In our high school there were two kinds of production. There were the mainstage drama club productions and then the productions that came out of the actual Drama Class. 'A Hatful Of Rain' was directed by Tom Hull who is now something of an origami genius. I think, as amazing as his origami structures are, that he may have missed his calling, because he was a hell of a theater director.
Class time was taken up with rehearsal. I can't quite recall the difference between a Drama Club production and a Drama Class production because they seem equally well prepared in my memory. But this show was extra ready because Tom knew exactly what he wanted. He had blocking ideas, staging and lighting ideas, ideas that not only served the play but also clarified it, honed it to a sharper edge, removed whatever anachronistic tendency that might still linger around the edges.
Which is why he needed a refrigerator.
Much of the play took place in the squalid kitchen of a cramped New York apartment. At one point I got a big laugh merely by closing the door at an appropriate moment. So Tom wasn't joking. We needed the fridge.
Through behind the scenes machinations we found someone who could loan us an old broken down 1950's fridge, the kind that you could stand on end, put wheels on and get 9 miles to the gallon with. We had to go over to a warehouse behind the old mill to pick it up.
Someone had a pickup truck so after school we drove the half mile or so from SK High School to the warehouse. The fridge was on a loading dock waiting for us and man was it a mother of a fridge. It towered over us. There were five or six students in the truck because we'd been warned that the thing was big. Even so we were shocked.
We started the awkward process of trying to lower it into the bed of the pick up. We had no equipment, just five or six teenage brains. Clearly it was not enough gray matter, because somehow I wound up on the bed of the truck as the giant monolith creaked down on top of me. I was the only one aware of my presence in the bed of the truck. It backed me down like an aggressive jock pinning a cheerleader to a couch. I began to yell but there was a moment when my two hands took the whole weight of it as it bounced down on top of me.
They talk about women being able to lift cars off of their babies. Well, I don't know about that. But I do know that for one second I bench pressed in the vicinity of what I can only guess to be at least 400 pounds.
I was immediately sore all over. Of course we'd waited to get the fridge until the very night of the play so I had to go onstage that night aching from head to foot.
Much later when I was forced to get chest X-rays due to a bout with pleurisy or pneumonia or bronchitis, the doctor said I had a crushed vertebra in the center of my spine. This was fairly common. I could have had it since birth. Or it could have happened later. Had I been in any kind of an accident?
I told the doctor, no, I'd never had any kind of a car accident. Sitting there I somehow failed to recollect the Cadillac refrigerator slowly enveloping me in its loving embrace.
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