dop-jon

[dop-jon]

He was gentle, wise, and generous. Other customers wouldn't allow us to use their bathrooms or offer water to drink, another guy was getting high with his buddies in the basement where we worked, watching an old white lady get gangbanged on his tv by 5 black guys. They carried on like it was the best porn ever. Now, I realize that there are people like that everywhere, but these were my people, this was my town, and I had as much claim to call myself a Detroiter as anyone. I still do. When I moved away in 2005 for Tucson, I was hoping to garner that same feeling there, but outside of memorizing streets, this wasn't my town. I felt like I had seen some life and was wiser for it, but still diminished. I no longer had a hometown, that in the desert southwest, my stories might as well come from the moon. I did learn how to observe, tho. And so my education continued, just in different ways, under an unkind sun.

I've since moved back to Michigan. I haven't been happy about it. I have visited Detroit a few times since, tho, and every visit has been a wonder to me. I've caught a play and been to a Tiger's game. I've visited with old friends that are doing the urban pioneer thing, and we've shared stories of our shared loves from our native home. There are less buildings, less people, more poverty. For me, it doesn't matter. Detroit will one day be a tombstone of a city, marked only by stone and cement as a totem for what it once was. Such is the state of many things, whether we wish it or no. I'd never move there, there is too much of my dad in me, my desire to keep my family "safe". I've seen a lot of this country, tho, and it remains the only place in the world that I feel a kinship for, of a remembrance of a grand city, like Samarkand or Carthage, sped to it's demise by mankind's neglect, it's place on Earth marked by long forgotten labors, kept alive only by memory and lore, soon extinguished by apathy. My love for Detroit will one day fail as my being does, proving painfully yet repeatedly that love isn't forever, but for only as long as one has the mind to tend it.

A Place, But at the End

I think I’ve always loved Detroit. I remember as a very young boy hearing of Detroit’s census numbers in 1980 and how it was the the fourth or fifth-biggest city in the US. Just being so proud of that fact, like I had a hand in it. I’m not sure from whither that love came, but I suspect two sources and they both involve family. My mom’s side of the family, the men in the family, worked as stagehands. Back then, stage entertainment was still a decent draw and my step-grandfather or uncles would pick up either myself or my brother, or both, and we’d get to watch the play or musical from the wings, or from the spotlight room, or from the sound room. If that was all it was, it still would’ve been cool. It was the ride down there, tho, going from our shitty little house in the nearby suburbs, down onto the Lodge Freeway, The Ditch, and as early evening was settling on Detroit, I’d look out from the backseat at the adjacent neighborhoods and marvel at the houses, becoming larger and less familiar as we drew closer to downtown, the lights on the high rises blinking on and off slowly, or remaining on, illuminating the office of some obviously well-connected tycoon. I knew even then that I liked the closeness of a city, that lived-in, pavement and horns feel, that dangerous feeling, like befriending a whore for practical and platonic purposes. And so we’d find a parking spot behind the theater and take the back way in, under the gathered drear of that breaking cityscape and find a place to sit, inconspicuously, in some of the grandest rooms designed by men for the purposes of entertainment while my uncles or step grandfather plied their trade. Needless to say, I was impressed. I never really cared what the entertainment was, although I’d certainly namedrop the event around potentially envious company. It was being down in those aging beauties, or darting over to grab a bite to eat around the corner, keeping your eyes peeled for anything that might happen because of…well…because of the second possible source of my love for Detroit. My dad’s cowardice and his youngest brother’s advice might be that source, in tandem. My dad, for his part, has always been afraid. I don’t see anything wrong with that, as it were. I’m afraid every day as well. My fear keeps my feet moving. My father’s fear keeps him in place, and as events come and go that others might find engaging, he rationalizes being disengaged, after the fact, on the ostensible grounds of either his or our personal safety. In a word, Detroit was too dangerous. His brother, 11 years my father’s junior, spent all the time he could down there, and never missed a chance to tell me his more appropriately themed doings. They were all tame stories, but that was hardly the point. “Your dad doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” he’d tell me. “He’s never been down there. There’s just too many people down there for him and it’s a shame because he missed out on a lot of fun.” My dad’s reply to that, after I filtered the sting out Uncle Jimmy’s assessment, was a variation of “yeah, but I’m *alive*”. Yeah, I see that, dad.

So through my teens I tried to get downtown as much as possible, to get that addictive whiff of a life spent on concrete, of being surrounded by the symmetrical masses that Man raises in his own honor to celebrate his victory over chaos. I always knew my hometown was shabby, a bit. All it would take, in my view, was for people just to get hip to going back down there. To be in a crowd for an event downtown, to have that feeling like there is something happening in the world and you are not only witnessing it, but viewing it somewhere that was made for the sole intent of you seeing it. Imagine for a moment, or recall if experience provides, a downtown sporting event. Cities are male by nature and design, phallic and angular and aggressive, filled with an unthinking kinetic energy. A sporting event, a football game, say, thrives in such an environment. It’s just a game played on a big field without it. And after living those moments in the now, when victory was uncertain and collective breaths were held, when the ebbs and flows of so much unfettered emotion plays upon the minds, upon the singular mind that the crowd shares at events such as these, and then victory is secured and 60,000 people feel the relief and release that such moments engender, and at that moment when they leave the fantastic cathedral and pour out into the heart of the city, you can’t help but feel that this, this, happened here. A shadow of that feeling was always upon me when I was down there then. Checking out a band, or a famous bar, or taking in what sites I could in the relative safety of downtown.

A brief practical history of Detroit is needed here. Since it’s founding in 1701 until WWI, Detroit was fairly unremarkable as cities go. A naturally advantageous location along the river of the same name that joins the upper Great Lakes to the lower, it served as the first (or last, depending on direction) major Midwestern port. Growth was modest but steady. Then Henry Ford hit the scene. There were a handful of like-minded men in Detroit that developed then automobile, but no single man left a larger imprint on the area, and maybe this country, as Ford. He developed and perfected the assembly line and an affordable car besides, and the the world hasn’t been the same since. This drove many immigrants and blacks north to find work there, and neighborhoods, city governments, roads, they all felt the guiding hand of Ford. With his employment came certain expectations of behavior, and even the number of bars and neighborhood layouts were done or undone with his blessing. This led to exponential growth thru the first half of the 20th century. Even here tho, the seeds of it’s eventual decline and abandonment took root amongst this unprecedented growth. Larger, slightly older American cities grew vigorously during the first two hundred years of this continent’s taming, and it was done mostly with immigrants, people in less hopeful war or famine torn urban locales that already had a feel for what to expect in city life, especially in cities that already had it’s natural boundaries established and developed. Detroit’s expansion grew apace and unchecked predominately from an incoming rural populace that had little notion or interest of what city life was like. They were here to work and provide for their families a significantly better life and future than they were used to. As a result, little thought was given as to how that growth would be maintained. In the early part of the century, I’m sure it seemed a question that answered itself; growth would maintain itself. What was to stop it? By 1950 it was the fourth largest city in America. A war had been one, a Depression had been reversed for over a decade, and there was relative peace and plenty for all. With all this wealth and disposable time, and with a keen eye for further developing commerce, freeways were put in. America’s first freeway was built in Detroit, then another, then another. As city planners hadn’t foreseen such an event, neighborhoods had to be partially demolished and people relocated to accommodate. Poor people, mostly. Blacks, Poles, Jews. Those that could afford it moved to nicer neighborhoods. The people people already in those neighborhoods, white, middle class types, well, they didn’t go for that. So the expansion continued, but not for Detroit. Within two generations the whites fled to the suburbs, desirous of modestly more space and dramatically fewer blacks. Detroit stagnated, industry trickled away, infrastructure decayed, crime rose to unprecedented levels, and we know have the husk, more or less, of how I found the city in 1995.

In the November of that year, I went to work for John P., a master plumber by trade and a proud Detroiter, father of my girlfriend and child of a white flight family. He grew up in the Northwest side, Fenkel and Wyoming, hard by the Lodge freeway that had recently been built. I was without a significant college education and no practical trade. I was 22 and past time to start doing something with my life, begrudging as I might have been. John was a father figure to me, one that I needed. I had a dad, but his advice was basically limited to “keep it in your pants” and “keep your words soft and sweet”. He worked hard, but it was mindless work and unprosperous. John worked hard, had a keen if practical mind, and prospered, after a fashion. Holding a job of one sort or another since the age of 5, when he would take a crosstown bus with his shine box and shine shoes at every bar between his bus stop and his house along Fenkell, he developed a work ethic that drove him to do whatever it was that he had to do. In a practical vein, he memorized every cross street along his route and eventually came to know, thru his extensive work around the city as a plumber, almost the entire West Side and much of the East. I found his capacity for that sort of thing compelling. Personally, I found the man to be a shortsighted boor. But whatever his reservations, he put me to work on a project he had going on, the renovation of an old apartment building in Detroit’s first neighborhood, Corktown. Eighth Street and Porter, right down the street, on the other side of Michigan Avenue, from old Tiger Stadium. Corktown is the closest neighborhood still occupied and standing to downtown, and on my first day I went up on the roof of this four story building and looked around. West I could see the 30-odd story train depot, a beautiful building on the outside but long since closed and stripped of any value inside. The great white monolith of Tiger Stadium was to my north, northeast of there, roughly midtown, was The Masonic Temple, massive, a testament to the power of the Freemasons. Past that, The Fisher Building and The GM Headquarters sat across from either on Grand Boulevard, and then a large swath of old commercial buildings and random homes, many abandoned or failing, until, turning clockwise, the knot of downtown could be descried to the east, with the incongruous Renaissance Center hugging the Detroit River. It was my first glimpse of the heart of the city from such a vantage point, and as weather allowed I would take my lunches up there and just look around and wonder at what a marvel this city must have been when it mattered. Inside the building, which had been gutted by fire a number of years prior, held the social dynamic of the city within it’s brick walls. Initially, it was staffed with day labor from the local shelters and local residents, a way to make $8hr for backbreaking work. Black manual labor and white skilled labor, and most of them union members. Being unskilled white labor, I hung with the black guys. Their stories were fascinating. All function and no theory, their lives were revealed to me with unaware candor. Mack, who bummed smokes from me all day with the implied agreement that he’d keep talking, comes to mind immediately. A wheel man for a bank robbing crew, Mack told countless stories of his misdeeds, without any regret. He was shot in the riots of ‘67, tv in hand, on Gratiot Avenue. He spoke of picking up snitches or other lowlifes, taking them to some hideout and torturing

them with tubs filled with piranhas, or simply beating them to death or very nearly so. Then he’d talk about seeing Hendrix at the Masonic, and how he sounded like he was just pulling music from the universe, and Mack would strum an air guitar while he talked, rheumy eyes partly closed, remembering how he felt when he got to hear Jimi’s astral projections. All the brothers were cool with me, and I absorbed it all. A couple of them didn’t think that there were any poor white kids, so it was a treat to share my stories of misery with them. The union tradesmen weren’t as kind. Most were snarly and rude, white trash that had figured out a decent way to make good money but begrudged my presence as the sole nonunion trade on the job. One had taken the time to nail a dead rat to a board and write “Non Union Tradesman” on it. Tim, an journeyman plumber that kept me busy cutting pipe and running around drilling holes, took the time to put the numbers 1-12 around the body of the rat like a clock, then spin the rat in order to guess the time according to where it’s tail and nose would come to rest. If I had any sense, I would’ve been scared. So for a year we worked like that, and on a handful of other jobs besides, all in Detroit. Although not as colorful, with the possible exception of working at Cass and Alexandrine, I slowly gleaned what I could from John and those that I came into contact with. I tried to absorb the facts but set aside the opinions given with them. There has never been a shortage of opinions on the city and it’s woes, certainly by those with little knowledge of the city itself, so I took all I could with an open mind. Eventually John’s little company folded and we went to work for an HVAC company in the suburb my dad grew up in, Redford Twp., which borders Detroit on the far northwest. There my exposure and education increased dramatically. Until this time, I met only other workers, tradesmen. Now I was in people’s homes, installing boilers, furnaces, plumbing. I learned this fact quickly; if you really want to see someone’s true self, observe how they behave in the comfort of their own homes. At some point, during each installation, I would fish for information from the occupant. Most of them were poor and basic, living squalid little lives. Some of the homes were well maintained, in vibrant neighborhoods. Others lived in older, grandiose castles from a bygone era, losing the battle to keep up with maintaining a 100 year old house. Still others lived in little shitbox Cracker Jack hovels, not built to endure yet still occupied. And everyone of those people had a story to tell, and being relaxed in their dwelling, I feel like I was getting The Truth, or at least their version of it. I recall giving an old black lady an estimate on some repairs to her boiler. She looked about 70. Six Mile and Nevada area, old neighborhood, not far from Woodward which divides the city in two. After I wrote up the estimate, she asked me if I knew why I was there. I said, naively, to write her an estimate. I had barely finished my answer when she came with the correct one. “I’d rather have flies in my house than niggers. You can get a fly out of your house.” Then she paused, squinted at me to make sure I was paying attention to her, then said “you DO know what I’m talkin’ about, right?” “Yes ma'am, I believe I do.” And then she wished me a good day as another white contractor was coming up the walk to write an estimate for her as well. I remember a Mr. Langston, a black guy, that owned a huge home on the Lower East Side. He was 80 at the time. First black guy to move into the neighborhood. Worked at Ford his whole life, out three kids thru college. Had lived in that home since 1940. When we drove up to his house, he was outside, in a driving snow, snow blowing the walk. No evidence existed that any of his neighbors had been out of their houses in days. His marbled carpet, otherwise immaculate, had tracks worn in it from the path he had made from his bedroom, thru the living room, the dining room, and into the kitchen.

[dop-jon]

A Place, But at the End

I think I've always loved Detroit. I remember as a very young boy hearing of Detroit's census numbers in 1980 and how it was the the fourth or fifth-biggest city in the US. Just being so proud of that fact, like I had a hand in it. I'm not sure from whither that love came, but I suspect two sources and they both involve family. My mom's side of the family, the men in the family, worked as stagehands. Back then, stage entertainment was still a decent draw and my step-grandfather or uncles would pick up either myself or my brother, or both, and we'd get to watch the play or musical from the wings, or from the spotlight room, or from the sound room. If that was all it was, it still would've been cool. It was the ride down there, tho, going from our shitty little house in the nearby suburbs, down onto the Lodge Freeway, The Ditch, and as early evening was settling on Detroit, I'd look out from the backseat at the adjacent neighborhoods and marvel at the houses, becoming larger and less familiar as we drew closer to downtown, the lights on the high rises blinking on and off slowly, or remaining on, illuminating the office of some obviously well-connected tycoon. I knew even then that I liked the closeness of a city, that lived-in, pavement and horns feel, that dangerous feeling, like befriending a whore for practical and platonic purposes. And so we'd find a parking spot behind the theater and take the back way in, under the gathered drear of that breaking cityscape and find a place to sit, inconspicuously, in some of the grandest rooms designed by men for the purposes of entertainment while my uncles or step grandfather plied their trade. Needless to say, I was impressed. I never really cared what the entertainment was, although I'd certainly namedrop the event around potentially envious company. It was being down in those aging beauties, or darting over to grab a bite to eat around the corner, keeping your eyes peeled for anything that might happen because of...well...because of the second possible source of my love for Detroit. My dad's cowardice and his youngest brother's advice might be that source, in tandem. My dad, for his part, has always been afraid. I don't see anything wrong with that, as it were. I'm afraid every day as well. My fear keeps my feet moving. My father's fear keeps him in place, and as events come and go that others might find engaging, he rationalizes being disengaged, after the fact, on the ostensible grounds of either his or our personal safety. In a word, Detroit was too dangerous. His brother, 11 years my father's junior, spent all the time he could down there, and never missed a chance to tell me his more appropriately themed doings. They were all tame stories, but that was hardly the point. "Your dad doesn't know what he's talking about," he'd tell me. "He's never been down there. There's just too many people down there for him and it's a shame because he missed out on a lot of fun." My dad's reply to that, after I filtered the sting out Uncle Jimmy's assessment, was a variation of "yeah, but I'm *alive*". Yeah, I see that, dad.

So through my teens I tried to get downtown as much as possible, to get that addictive whiff of a life spent on concrete, of being surrounded by the symmetrical masses that Man raises in his own honor to celebrate his victory over chaos. I always knew my hometown was shabby, a bit. All it would take, in my view, was for people just to get hip to going back down there. To be in a crowd for an event downtown, to have that feeling like there is something happening in the world and you are not only witnessing it, but viewing it somewhere that was made for the sole intent of you seeing it. Imagine for a moment, or recall if experience provides, a downtown sporting event. Cities are male by nature and design, phallic and angular and aggressive, filled with an unthinking kinetic energy. A sporting event, a football game, say, thrives in such an environment. It's just a game played on a big field without it. And after living those moments in the now, when victory was uncertain and collective breaths were held, when the ebbs and flows of so much unfettered emotion plays upon the minds, upon the singular mind that the crowd shares at events such as these, and then victory is secured and 60,000 people feel the relief and release that such moments engender, and at that moment when they leave the fantastic cathedral and pour out into the heart of the city, you can't help but feel that this, this, happened here. A shadow of that feeling was always upon me when I was down there then. Checking out a band, or a famous bar, or taking in what sites I could in the relative safety of downtown.

A brief practical history of Detroit is needed here. Since it's founding in 1701 until WWI, Detroit was fairly unremarkable as cities go. A naturally advantageous location along the river of the same name that joins the upper Great Lakes to the lower, it served as the first (or last, depending on direction) major Midwestern port. Growth was modest but steady. Then Henry Ford hit the scene. There were a handful of like-minded men in Detroit that developed then automobile, but no single man left a larger imprint on the area, and maybe this country, as Ford. He developed and perfected the assembly line and an affordable car besides, and the the world hasn't been the same since. This drove many immigrants and blacks north to find work there, and neighborhoods, city governments, roads, they all felt the guiding hand of Ford. With his employment came certain expectations of behavior, and even the number of bars and neighborhood layouts were done or undone with his blessing. This led to exponential growth thru the first half of the 20th century. Even here tho, the seeds of it's eventual decline and abandonment took root amongst this unprecedented growth. Larger, slightly older American cities grew vigorously during the first two hundred years of this continent's taming, and it was done mostly with immigrants, people in less hopeful war or famine torn urban locales that already had a feel for what to expect in city life, especially in cities that already had it's natural boundaries established and developed. Detroit's expansion grew apace and unchecked predominately from an incoming rural populace that had little notion or interest of what city life was like. They were here to work and provide for their families a significantly better life and future than they were used to. As a result, little thought was given as to how that growth would be maintained. In the early part of the century, I'm sure it seemed a question that answered itself; growth would maintain itself. What was to stop it? By 1950 it was the fourth largest city in America. A war had been one, a Depression had been reversed for over a decade, and there was relative peace and plenty for all. With all this wealth and disposable time, and with a keen eye for further developing commerce, freeways were put in. America's first freeway was built in Detroit, then another, then another. As city planners hadn't foreseen such an event, neighborhoods had to be partially demolished and people relocated to accommodate. Poor people, mostly. Blacks, Poles, Jews. Those that could afford it moved to nicer neighborhoods. The people people already in those neighborhoods, white, middle class types, well, they didn't go for that. So the expansion continued, but not for Detroit. Within two generations the whites fled to the suburbs, desirous of modestly more space and dramatically fewer blacks. Detroit stagnated, industry trickled away, infrastructure decayed, crime rose to unprecedented levels, and we know have the husk, more or less, of how I found the city in 1995.

In the November of that year, I went to work for John P., a master plumber by trade and a proud Detroiter, father of my girlfriend and child of a white flight family. He grew up in the Northwest side, Fenkel and Wyoming, hard by the Lodge freeway that had recently been built. I was without a significant college education and no practical trade. I was 22 and past time to start doing something with my life, begrudging as I might have been. John was a father figure to me, one that I needed. I had a dad, but his advice was basically limited to "keep it in your pants" and "keep your words soft and sweet". He worked hard, but it was mindless work and unprosperous. John worked hard, had a keen if practical mind, and prospered, after a fashion. Holding a job of one sort or another since the age of 5, when he would take a crosstown bus with his shine box and shine shoes at every bar between his bus stop and his house along Fenkell, he developed a work ethic that drove him to do whatever it was that he had to do. In a practical vein, he memorized every cross street along his route and eventually came to know, thru his extensive work around the city as a plumber, almost the entire West Side and much of the East. I found his capacity for that sort of thing compelling. Personally, I found the man to be a shortsighted boor. But whatever his reservations, he put me to work on a project he had going on, the renovation of an old apartment building in Detroit's first neighborhood, Corktown. Eighth Street and Porter, right down the street, on the other side of Michigan Avenue, from old Tiger Stadium. Corktown is the closest neighborhood still occupied and standing to downtown, and on my first day I went up on the roof of this four story building and looked around. West I could see the 30-odd story train depot, a beautiful building on the outside but long since closed and stripped of any value inside. The great white monolith of Tiger Stadium was to my north, northeast of there, roughly midtown, was The Masonic Temple, massive, a testament to the power of the Freemasons. Past that, The Fisher Building and The GM Headquarters sat across from either on Grand Boulevard, and then a large swath of old commercial buildings and random homes, many abandoned or failing, until, turning clockwise, the knot of downtown could be descried to the east, with the incongruous Renaissance Center hugging the Detroit River. It was my first glimpse of the heart of the city from such a vantage point, and as weather allowed I would take my lunches up there and just look around and wonder at what a marvel this city must have been when it mattered. Inside the building, which had been gutted by fire a number of years prior, held the social dynamic of the city within it's brick walls. Initially, it was staffed with day labor from the local shelters and local residents, a way to make $8hr for backbreaking work. Black manual labor and white skilled labor, and most of them union members. Being unskilled white labor, I hung with the black guys. Their stories were fascinating. All function and no theory, their lives were revealed to me with unaware candor. Mack, who bummed smokes from me all day with the implied agreement that he'd keep talking, comes to mind immediately. A wheel man for a bank robbing crew, Mack told countless stories of his misdeeds, without any regret. He was shot in the riots of '67, tv in hand, on Gratiot Avenue. He spoke of picking up snitches or other lowlifes, taking them to some hideout and torturing

them with tubs filled with piranhas, or simply beating them to death or very nearly so. Then he'd talk about seeing Hendrix at the Masonic, and how he sounded like he was just pulling music from the universe, and Mack would strum an air guitar while he talked, rheumy eyes partly closed, remembering how he felt when he got to hear Jimi's astral projections. All the brothers were cool with me, and I absorbed it all. A couple of them didn't think that there were any poor white kids, so it was a treat to share my stories of misery with them. The union tradesmen weren't as kind. Most were snarly and rude, white trash that had figured out a decent way to make good money but begrudged my presence as the sole nonunion trade on the job. One had taken the time to nail a dead rat to a board and write "Non Union Tradesman" on it. Tim, an journeyman plumber that kept me busy cutting pipe and running around drilling holes, took the time to put the numbers 1-12 around the body of the rat like a clock, then spin the rat in order to guess the time according to where it's tail and nose would come to rest. If I had any sense, I would've been scared. So for a year we worked like that, and on a handful of other jobs besides, all in Detroit. Although not as colorful, with the possible exception of working at Cass and Alexandrine, I slowly gleaned what I could from John and those that I came into contact with. I tried to absorb the facts but set aside the opinions given with them. There has never been a shortage of opinions on the city and it's woes, certainly by those with little knowledge of the city itself, so I took all I could with an open mind. Eventually John's little company folded and we went to work for an HVAC company in the suburb my dad grew up in, Redford Twp., which borders Detroit on the far northwest. There my exposure and education increased dramatically. Until this time, I met only other workers, tradesmen. Now I was in people's homes, installing boilers, furnaces, plumbing. I learned this fact quickly; if you really want to see someone's true self, observe how they behave in the comfort of their own homes. At some point, during each installation, I would fish for information from the occupant. Most of them were poor and basic, living squalid little lives. Some of the homes were well maintained, in vibrant neighborhoods. Others lived in older, grandiose castles from a bygone era, losing the battle to keep up with maintaining a 100 year old house. Still others lived in little shitbox Cracker Jack hovels, not built to endure yet still occupied. And everyone of those people had a story to tell, and being relaxed in their dwelling, I feel like I was getting The Truth, or at least their version of it. I recall giving an old black lady an estimate on some repairs to her boiler. She looked about 70. Six Mile and Nevada area, old neighborhood, not far from Woodward which divides the city in two. After I wrote up the estimate, she asked me if I knew why I was there. I said, naively, to write her an estimate. I had barely finished my answer when she came with the correct one. "I'd rather have flies in my house than niggers. You can get a fly out of your house." Then she paused, squinted at me to make sure I was paying attention to her, then said "you DO know what I'm talkin' about, right?" "Yes ma'am, I believe I do." And then she wished me a good day as another white contractor was coming up the walk to write an estimate for her as well. I remember a Mr. Langston, a black guy, that owned a huge home on the Lower East Side. He was 80 at the time. First black guy to move into the neighborhood. Worked at Ford his whole life, out three kids thru college. Had lived in that home since 1940. When we drove up to his house, he was outside, in a driving snow, snow blowing the walk. No evidence existed that any of his neighbors had been out of their houses in days. His marbled carpet, otherwise immaculate, had tracks worn in it from the path he had made from his bedroom, thru the living room, the dining room, and into the kitchen.

[dop-jon]

Heroism and being the world's nicest asshole

Jonathan was Matthew’s hero. I wasn’t there to see the start of it, so I can’t speak to Jon’s origin story, but I’ve seen the rest of the series and it’s so tragic and good. They made it look so easy, this coming of age buddy story about two boys growing up with a violent mother in utter poverty, with Jon as the wisecracking, fatally charming, devastatingly brilliant older brother and Matthew as the brooding, sensitive cynic who wept over baby birds and imaginary friends. I watched these two from the moment my eyes could focus, these fixed points in my life, Ursa Major and Minor made men, envious of their connection. I was determined to find that for myself. I wanted to be someone’s hero, as Jon was Matt’s, as they both were mine, and when our little brother came along, I knew this was my destiny.

Here I am, sweet soft blob of pink, I will be your hero.

It wasn’t a conscious decision. I didn’t literally gaze upon Mark and swear an oath of protection over his sickly infant self. I had no top level understanding, really, that he was even all that sick. Frankly, Matthew was the one who always seemed ill to me, with migraines and allergies and ear infections and all his complicated feelings about the vulnerable creatures of the world.

He was sickly, though. Born with a collapsed lung after an emergency c-section, we were encouraged to keep Mark from crying. I don’t remember the order, I barely remember the effort. I do remember sharing a room with him, singing him to sleep. I remember finding him face down in the water, a toddler in a lake, and deciding the adults needed my help. He was always my responsibility, and I reassured myself I was doing something good and worthy, even as it grew stifling and lonely, the better part of a childhood spent staring at the back of a little boy’s head while shielding him as best I could with mine. There was never a payoff, though. The best acts of heroism are supposed to go unnoticed. Sainthood isn’t an application you fill out on your own behalf. It’s a lifetime of purity in the face of fire, and then martyrdom, and I grew less willing to die on the hill of my baby brother’s backside.

There were signs along the way that we were creating something we’d regret. I remember the first flash of irritation that whenever we rejoiced at Mom leaving the house for a few hours he would stand at the door and howl. Didn’t he understand that with her not there we could be free for a little while? When Mom went out with Dad, Jon was in charge, and that meant if we finished our chores he’d wrestle with us, or we’d watch one of Mark’s sing along tapes, or listen to music or make home movies. Didn’t he understand that gift? And when I inspected that morsel of data I realized Mark had zero reasons to be glad for our freedom. When Mom wasn’t there we made him do his one chore, and then we’d go back to doing what the world always did: whatever it took to stop his crying.

He was a funny kid. Heard a song once, knew it forever. Could quote movies from beginning to end. Obsessed with funerals. Tended to blurt out the most outrageous stuff, like the time, at four years old, during one of Mom’s Saturday Morning Rampages, he said, “No offense but you’re acting like a bitch.” Jon whisked all of us outside, Mark included, and I watched his face, devoid of remorse or sense of wrongdoing, much less danger, because it was all I could see in the reflection of our sliding glass door. I was sure our mother would throw the door aside any moment now to slaughter we small four, or crumple and weep in a corner. I was torn between my unconditional love of my mother, which always burbled my second earliest memory of her weeping on her bed after Dad walked out; and my sheer terror of the woman. I wanted to hug him and shake him, but Jon took away the choice by saying, “Mark, you can’t say that shit to your mother, even if it’s true.”

In the end she just let us back in the house. There were no consequences for his outburst (nor any change in her behavior). It was as if it were something that happened only in my mind, except my older brothers tiptoed in the same confounded way for the rest of the day. How did he get away with it, I asked myself a thousand times. How does he always get away with it? Because no matter what, Mark never faced a consequence for anything, and when I took a beating because he peed on the bathroom floor, and he never so much as thanked me, I began to see we had a problem.

That doesn’t mean we stopped protecting him. No one deserved what we faced as kids, much less this little boy whose very existence reunited our parents. Because of him, our parents didn’t divorce, and at the time I clung to that as the best possible reason a person could be alive. Purpose and destiny were always important and alluring to me, who has never identified her own, and here’s this fair haired angel of a brother who was born having fulfilled his. The whole rest of his life was free to do whatever he wanted, because he saved us from the unknown fate of being left alone with a brokenhearted mother.

But. But even as I sang him to sleep or wiped his tears and skinned knees, I learned the taste of resentment. Because he hadn’t really earned the right to get away with shit. I didn’t want him hurt, but knowing he could say literally whatever the fuck he wanted while my nose bled for having not screwed my face into just the right level of emptiness drove me right out of my mind. He hadn’t earned the freedom he had. He, who loved mom best, who treated her with the least respect, could get away with anything while the rest of us bled while cleaning his pedestal.

It was not his fault. I wasn’t resentful toward him for Mom’s deference. That was her call, and Mark faced a universe of destiny later, ate it whole and has carried it as scar tissue in his brain ever since. When puberty approached Mark, it didn’t offer him the likeability and cleverness of Jonathan, or Matthew’s muscular physique and musical aptitude. No, Mark was handed epilepsy, the kind where he’d tremble slightly as his head tipped back and he hallucinated. He was capable of interacting, of speaking and responding and moving, but he wasn’t there when they happened. His eyes, always a little lifeless, would void, and he’d be at the lake, or arguing with Mom, or god knows what or where. His teachers thought he was spacey, that’s how subtle these things were, and it took years for us to convince the school he had a real condition. By then, I was pulled from my class three, four times a week, because my voice could draw him back. They would have him in the office and I’d sit beside him, panting from having run from my building to his, and I’d sing his name softly, over and over, and somewhere inside his lights would come back on and he’d smack his lips and come out of it. He’d be confused, because he never knew they were happening, but he’d always swim back to my voice and then go back to class. He never remembered I was there, too fogged yet to recall anything.

The summer Matt graduated from high school was a turning point. Mom must have realized her nest was shrinking, and as her net worth was only ever equal to the amount of control she had over her children, she began to panic. Jon was long free at this point, and visited happily to see our squalor and remember to be grateful for what he had and then leave, and Matt was so close to his escape. She clenched her ass on us that summer, fists bound tight around our throats, even threatening to beat Mark once. And for the first time, she met resistance. Matt and I refused to allow it. I remember her asking Mark if he was just acting out for attention and thinking what an absurd thing to ask - he was eleven, his body changing, his mind misty with his medication, and who consciously acts out for attention? No, Matt and I wouldn’t let her lay a hand on him. Yes, hold him accountable for being a little shit, but no one deserved her brand of punishment.

I was proud of us. Matt, who tended to be shy, and me, who tended to be ashamed, had managed to slay a dragon. And later, when we were playing in the yard, Mark thanked us by chanting Matt’s name in his loud, watery pubescent voice.

Go Matt, go Matt, go Matt!

I bristled, seeing the slight, feeling it prick where I was most vulnerable. Take that cheer and balance it atop my school losing me in their system every year, teachers always forgetting my certificate when everyone in the class got recognized. Place it next to never getting a good part in the plays I loved because I wasn’t pretty, underneath Mom blowing in my ear to refill my airhead, slightly above Dad laughing at how I threw a ball or mocking my weight to strangers. Stick it in the same pile as being a fairly typical middle kid, crippled with anxiety about being forgotten, with a history of actually being forgotten. Take my little brother, whose very life was the only meaning to my own. And have him thank Matt for it.

Resentment tastes like water from rusted pipes. It tastes like cocoa wheats and Pizza Magic. Resentment doesn’t boil or burst. Resentment simmers gently, because it hides under reasonability. Be reasonable, I’d remind myself. Be mild. Of course Matt is his hero. He’s one of yours. Of course you have absolutely no right to resent a thing - you don’t have epilepsy, you don’t have medications and hallucinations. You don’t have anything you don’t deserve.

And here we are, some twenty years down the road, and I wake up at all hours thinking of Mark. He’s fully disabled now. His mind has been gone for years. He spent six months one year in a mental ward in Utah. I visited him while he ate a turkey sandwich and wiped a glob of mayonnaise from his cheek so slowly I aged ten years in the time he took to do it. Mark disappeared into his prescriptions and his epilepsy won. He lived through it, but what was once Mark now blinks through the curtains only rarely now. He’s gone, replaced by a crazed byproduct of Munchausens by Proxy. Mom’s need for control has kept them together and kept him sick, until she finally pulled a fully baked monster from the oven. He rages when she doesn’t spend their limited income on him - t shirts and video games and blue ray copies of Disney movies - because in his mind he’s still 8, and has toddler temper tantrums that cause real trauma. And because he’s our mother’s son, he feels bad for being violent and checks himself into psych wards until they get their disability checks again and she can buy him whatever he wants, to the point she wrote a series of hot checks and almost went to jail. But Matt stepped in and paid their debts, and shipped Mark off to live with Dad, and is trying to set Mom up in a place where she can live without what she always delivered - fear and violence and poverty. Because Mark never faced a consequence.

And here we are. He calls me every day now, because we’re trying not to let him talk to Mom, so she can heal from what he’s done to her. He calls me and tells me about his video games and what he wants Dad to buy him next, and he’s so happy until he remembers he misses Mom, who always made it easy for him.

You can’t live with her ever again, Mark. It isn’t fair to her to spend her last years in terror of her youngest son.

He ignores that and asks about my old books, about old bus drivers, about how to get a girlfriend, and when he realizes I don’t show the appropriate level of enthusiasm, because I refuse to lie to this abusive and manipulative monster who stole my sweet pink little brother, I hear him sigh halfheartedly into the phone. “Remember when you were nice, sis?”

No, Mark. I can’t remember being nice anymore. I remember trying to save you, and losing.

[dop-jon]

Poor John.

Varys' tragedy imho is his relationship with Aegon, whatever his heritage, and not Illyrio. It's going to fail even though Varys' plan worked to perfection -- and at a key moment plotwise, Varys will probably even have to reveal everything to Aegon to keep him from doing something brash ala Quent re: Dany's dragons. (My guess is that Arianne witnesses this, because it's even more tragic from her perspective)

In terms of his end, I kind of like the idea of Varys trying to explain his Master Plan to Aegon once he’s gotten the young man on the Iron Throne, only to get Falstaffed: 

[dop-jon]

Oi! How do you see Moqorro's future roll differing from Marwyn in relation to Dany? Do you think they will be allies or adversaries, in the event they become advisors to her?

Hey brother :) the major difference twixt the two is that while Moqorro has an institutional axe to grind, Marwyn could not possibly be more “teacher who tells you to hate the system and gets high with you after class” if he tried. The Black Flame is working for Benerro, and they’ve got big plans for Dany once they anoint her Azor Ahai–gotta imagine they involve breaking chains and smashing other faiths all over Essos and beyond. The Mage’s message is rather different: get your dragon-riding ass to the North and melt Others, your however-many-great-uncle Aemon tells us we don’t have much time! 

As such, yeah, I think they might clash. Which would be awesome, because they are wizards. 

[dop-jon]

Valentines Lulz

In sixth grade, a couple of buddies and myself made celebrated Anti-Valentines Day. Having seen little uptick in our respective romantic fortunes from year to year, our little loveless triumvirate decided to actively campaign against this dread holiday. How did we come to such a low estate, you wonder? I guess I hit bottom the previous year, in 5th grade. Now, we are all familiar with how VD cards are purchased; whether in boxes of 12, 18, 20, 24, or 30, it's not like one needs to trouble themselves with sorting out a classroom's worth of cards. Your mom buys the box, you get muscled into signing them all, maybe you make sure the ones you secretly crush on get the better ones, and then the cards get put into whatever cutesy container was produced to that end in art the next day. So...on February 14, 1984 (that's the worst part VD; if something shitty happens on that day, you are sorta stuck remembering shit like this)...on 2.14.84, after observing all the normal procedures for the day, I received 2 Valentines Day cards. Two. II. Dos. My mom thought I was kidding, maybe they just didn't plainly see my construction paper heart-shaped envelope hung sturdily with the 26 other ones that, not coincidentally, veritably brimmed with cards and candied hearts laden with innocent amorous intentions. So, there I was; sixth grade. It was Keith LaBumbard, Rick Beckett, and myself. My memory isn't what it once was, but I don't think Keith would mind me saying that he wasn't exactly "a looker", Rick had what my brother (who beaned him remorselessly with a matchbox car in his dome a few years back) described as "some shit on his hands", and myself, who had coke bottle glasses, tennis shoes cobbled together with duct tape, and the complexion of a Little Caesar's Hot-n-Ready pepperoni pizza. But that's not the point! It's not the point. The point is we hadn't signed off on the notion that inner beauty transcends and outward ugliness yada yada, so instead of sitting idly by while the girls of the world scorned our existence, we would demonstrate "Save it, ladies. Your holiday can kick rocks." Rick made up three Anti-Valentines Day buttons, we each saw to the discrete disposal of those dreadful cards our parents insisted on purchasing for us, and Keith and I set about stealing and destroying every note that was passed around in class, as if in our blackest rage we could somehow block the very flow of love into the world. We received no cards that year, the three of us, and proud we were of our handiwork. Life, as it must, returned to normal and we set ourselves to the subtle task of socially ridding ourselves of each other. The thing about being so low in the social strata is that no one really wants to be there, regardless of what one might say, and any sort of elevated social relief would be a welcome comfort. What were the first fruits of karma for me on taking such a principled stand at such an early Angry Jon age? I would go on to double my age, 11 years later, before I experienced a Valentines Day that actually meant something to me in a positive way. By that time, I was all too aware that it was indeed some Hallmark scam and that even the potential for me to come emotionally around on the day had passed. Still, 22 years was a long time to go without knowing love. Even still, on February 14, 1996...I don't remember a single detail. Not one. I'm sure I've had fun on this day since, but for the most part, I'd rather just put it the day behind me. To make a sports comparison, once you stop being a fan of this or that team, you can never really be a fan again. You'll never have that emotional purity of when you first became a fan, by birth or by choice is irrelevant, and can only hope for, at best, is that you don't feel like your time is being wasted watching that team. So Happy Valentines Day, Keith LaBumbard! I may go months without your name crossing my mind, but rest assured that you are fondly remembered on this feckless day.

[dop-jon]

Maybe you just lose your touch one day. It's not even a matter of trying to become. Maybe the art and subtlety sloughs off the bone and you are just left with an asshole. I'd fight someone right now that tried to convince me that Carlin was actually funny when he got old. He wasn't. He went from "oh yeah, no shit, huh" to Andy Rooney overnight. Maybe it just leaves you. I don't think I'll be funny when I'm old. But I'm also still the only person I know that can have two conversations going on at the same time with someone, but they only hear one and the audience hears the other. Let that be my saving grace until I'm simply branded an asshole. Amen.

Discuss with me:

I’ve noticed a habit in an unnamed family elder of attempting to emulate his firstborn, but whereas firstborn is funny and charming, elder comes off as an asshole.

How does this happen? One person can poke fun and it is a brand, a gimmick of biting humor, and his father just sounds like a dick. …but my real question is, at what age did my dad begin trying to be his oldest son, and god, why?!

[dop-jon]

There’s no wrong way to be sad, or wrong thing to be sad about. I learned this from my kids, namely Kid2, who cried at everything when she was still so small. One time, she cried because her doughnut was too big, which is a problem I’d certainly never imagined, but she has a small mouth and had a loose tooth, and it was just so frustrating that she couldn’t take a good, vertical bite. She taught me to choose empathy instead of impatience.

When a celebrity dies I usually respond by checking the Getinthebox Twitter account to read the more humorous take on the obituary. I don’t typically feel anything beyond a twinge toward the family, knowing the pain they must feel. But very rarely - and I mean maybe three times ever - I’ll feel sad for myself, for the loss of a source of something meaningful. Carl Sagan, who told me what I was made of and how I fit in the universe. Jimmy Stewart, who represented dignity and the end of an era (read: grandpa issues). Ronald Reagan, because Alzheimer’s is the worst way to watch someone die.

Today, I’m sad for me, and for Carrie Fisher’s family. I never thought of her as a mother figure, but rather a more realistic version of who I could become. Leia was the ideal - strong, smart, funny, a dead shot, a leader, a mother and a partner and a sister who had lost everything but chose to be a comfort when she deserved her own grief. The actress wasn’t that different. She made her mistakes and had her misadventures and in the end chose to be strong for her children, who did whatever it took, regardless of how little credit or fame she received, to survive, to be there. I didn’t grow up with her as my mother, so I don’t know what kind of mom she really was, but she represented what I wanted to be. A heroine in a story she wrote for herself, drafting a legacy of humor, honesty and strength with every hilarious and sometimes painful interview. I don’t know what it would be like to sit through that. But I hope to be remembered by my children the way we’ll remember her.

In the meantime, I have taxes to do, children to raise, a husband to love. I’m going to try to have fun while I do it, so when they drag me out for interviews when I’d rather be in bed, I at least have something funny to say.

[dop-jon]

Good Behavior: Available for a Limited Time Only

Kid3 is a pretty run of the mill boy stereotype. He’s never met a rock he won’t jump off, a hill he won’t climb, a room he won’t fill with his own shouts. He’s loud and active and bold, a little lazy, and overall a nice kid. He doesn’t try as hard as he could in school, but he doesn’t get into trouble. In fact, he expends so much effort in not being his normal active, talkative self he sort of explodes when he gets home. From his arrival to when he finally passes out, every thought that slips through his mind comes out his mouth with no awareness of if someone else was speaking. When he’s not watching YouTube videos of dudes doing ill advised stuff, he’s trying them out, badgering his sisters (as little brothers do) by playing pranks, not flushing the toilet after himself in his sister’s bathroom, shooting them with nerf guns - the usual stuff. What saves him is how he spends almost as much time being sweet, a naturally generous kid who openly shares his affection and sense of humor. It helps, too, that even at nine, he still has something of the baby to him, with his baby fingers and baby feet and disproportionately huge brown eyes, framed with glasses and the longest eyelashes I’ve ever seen, and the biggest, quickest grin this side of a used car lot. He’s cute, and he’s sweet, so he gets away with a lot of little brother bullshit. Otherwise I’m pretty sure Kid1 would have lost him in the woods by now.

Now take that personality and apply it to an adult.

See, I’ve had an epiphany. You could almost call it my own tinfoil hat theory regarding our current political situation, which honestly should not have taken me by such surprise, because I see now this happens to every generation when you really hard boil the yolk of it.

Being good - being nice, polite, waiting our turn to speak, waiting our turn in line - it’s exhausting. Think about your most recent trip to a grocery store and you’ll probably know what I mean. By the end of it I’m ready to run people down with my van. But I don’t because it’s illegal at the same time as being really really wrong. So I don’t. But after a lifetime of waiting my turn in line, lips pursed, fingers wrapped around the handle of the grocery cart, will I be so patient? Will I still have breath to hold so I can make polite small talk with the cashier? Will I have the strength to clutch my plastic bags of groceries as some teenager shoves past me out the door?

I don’t know. I’d like to think so. I’d like to think one of the things I have going for me is my unfailing need for approval, because it fuels my charm even when I’m at my most exhausted. I suspect, too, that my general sense of not being owed anything is going to come into play in my twilight years to help still my tongue when it wants to carve the disrespect out of some village idiot who can’t figure out how to pay for his shit.

But say I was raised differently. Say I was less self-aware, maybe, or grew up in an alternate universe. Or say the Greatest Generation raised me. Take a minute now to picture that, what that must feel like. The Greatest Generation. The grandparents and great grandparents of our time, who fought and defeated fascism and actual, real life evil. To us, they’re heroes. To baby boomers, they’re mom and dad. They’re the people who made them eat green beans and wouldn’t let them out after dark. Who grounded them when they talked smack. Who spanked them and sent them to bed hungry when they were little shits. Who sent them to a war we in which we should have had no part. All the while, evangelizing the message, Respect Your Elders.

A good message, truly. A fine one meant for children to teach patience and a dash of humility, but perhaps blown out of proportion. Because the Greatest Generation fought off real evil to raise a generation of, in their view, drug addicts and sexual deviants and draft dodgers and wannabe revolutionaries who, when pressed up against the standard of their parents, couldn’t hope to compare because the same opportunity for dough boy greatness didn’t exist, completely fucking cracked. How do you cope with knowing you’ll never have the opportunity to be national heroes? You identify other, perhaps less obvious, more subversive evil. You start a movement to bring equal rights to all people, regardless of color or gender. You become heroes in a war against something that shouldn’t have existed in the first place, and by the time you turn 40 the world is so dramatically different it feels like you won. You tolerate your parents in the grocery store, creeping along with an oxygen tank and a basket of Town House crackers and liver sausage, because you know the Greatest Generation earned your respect, and you know your time will come. Look at what your generation accomplished, you think when you stand in line behind your black neighbor, waiting for your turn to vote. Look at how great this is, as the girl at the cash register rings up your bill. Everyone is so much better off.

So you raise your kids in your enlightened state - respect your elders, eat your vegetables, structured play time, car seats and safety belts and toy phones with cords too short to strangle the baby, and warning labels and Parental Discretion is Advised and limited screen time and Teddy Ruxbin and look at this safe, cuddly world. And eventually you find yourself being cared for, or visiting your grandchildren, or strolling through a park, and some new young mom is talking about how it’s amazing we made it to adulthood, what with eating peanuts before we were 18 months old and our car seats having only a three point safety belt instead of five, and we need to allow the children to have freedom and confidence to make their own choices, and I wish I was paid as much as my male counterpart, and people of color are still discriminated against, and the work of the civil rights movement wasn’t enough, and why do I have to respect a veteran who was drafted against his will into service, or voluntarily enlisted when we shouldn’t have been involved in Vietnam at all, and we shouldn’t have to respect someone just because they were born first, respect should be earned and

And and and

And

All you’d hear, if you try to see it from a baby boomer’s perspective, is how all their efforts to measure up to the Greatest Generation, to improve the world left for them, were not enough. Riots and wars on drugs and Christmas and activism and equal rights - it wasn’t enough. And they won’t get what they were waiting for.

All that patience and quiet and good behavior waiting for their guaranteed best seat in the restaurant or airplane or head of the table, to be first through every door, was for nothing. Because they raised a generation of people who took what they started and demanded more and better, a thirty year span of babies raised to be empowered, generous, cautious, successful people, who went deeply in debt because Boomers taught us college is the only way to success, look, we opened campuses to everyone so you have to go, but we haven’t gotten to where we can help you get there so you’ll have to borrow the money -

It wasn’t enough. We want more. We want better. We expect it. We’re owed fair treatment and equal rights because everyone is a citizen of Earth, and we all belong here. We didn’t fuck up the environment and yeah, thanks for the 1980s anti-littering campaigns but that didn’t clean the air that your efforts to improve the world destroyed, so we’re going to try to fix that.

So imagine being in that position. Your dad was venerated as a hero of World War II but really he was a grease monkey who got drafted, and he called every black person he ever saw a “colored boy”, and yet these kids you raised have more respect for them than you. These kids you raised resent that you stopped too soon before rights were really equal. These kids you raised are reluctant to buy into the only measure of American success you ever understood because we learned from what happened to your retirement package, we know because you lost your house and we’re supporting you in ways you never had to do for your parents, who actually retired before their bodies gave out because success was simpler in their time.

We don’t wait for you to go through the door first at Walmart. We aren’t waiting for you.

You were so nice, though. You tried so hard to be good, your whole life. And now you’re looking 70 in the eye and you still don’t get the respect - the freedom - your parents had. You can’t flop on the couch and wail. It’s the last of your days in this world you helped build and when can you just go outside to play?! Ugh!!

So you have a gigantic temper tantrum in the only way your energy level can manage. You vote for someone who feels as you do - the world owes you for all your hard work, goddamnit, and you’ll just reset the clock to show everyone - what you did WAS good enough. Now eat your boiled Brussels Sprouts and like it, you ungrateful shit.

Very tl;dr: basically the baby boomers are mad because they never got to just say what they want like their parents. So they voted a rapist liar into office without realizing he’s going to accomplish exactly nothing.

Suckers. How about you guys take your blankies and go lay down. We’ll fix this, thanks.

[dop-jon]

A Story Told

Laying sod isn't any kind of fun. It isn't simply a matter of rolling it out. It needs to be fitted together to prevent the edges from dying. The rolls are staggered, like bricks, to keep your lines straight. It needs to be laid out within a finite amount of time or the rolls cook in the sun and rot. It sucks, and at sixteen years old, it was the worst task I ever had to do at work in a job full of shitty tasks. There I was, tho, with some other summer labor coolies, resodding the football field at the private school I worked at during my summer vacation, sweating and burning in that muggy Michigan July. Our crew leader was a fella by the name of Dick Jacubiak. He was a Ferndale Pole of the first order, a lanky Kashub with long blonde stoner hair and a small beer belly in its earliest stages of development. Back then, neighborhoods, even the white ones, still organized themselves more or less around ethnic lines. Almost every Pole I had met had lived in Ferndale, although the older ones could still trace their lineage all the back to Hamtramck, some five miles distant. Those early days of White Flight matched the Wright Bros attempt at the same; much effort and fanfare, but brief and covering very little distance. Now Dick, in most ways, resembled the Pole stereotype as I understood it. Dumb Po-lock was the common refrain for his lot. My POC friends now find this hard to believe, but it's true, and enlightening: white people hate each other just as bad, or worse, than people of color. Whites had sorted themselves out along ethnic lines long before we even considered doing that to others. One of the two worst wars this planet has ever known was fought, almost seemingly, just to make that point. So anyway. Dick. Dick embodied those traits that were taught to me to be examples of the Po-lock character. Shiftless, lazy, backsliding, gossipy, drunken, dull, common. He chugged beers before work and got high while he was out cutting grass. He talked in pauses and laughs, said "yeah" a lot, floating his hands around inside an imaginary box in front of him, like the pointing and gesturing would do in place of the words he couldn't find to describe whatever the hell he was talking about. So Dick, after getting us started on the task st hand, went up and brought his truck down onto the field, parking it in one of the end zones. He popped in a tape, cranked it, laughed with a "yea-" that cut short the h sound of the word after looking at us monkeys sweating and tugging and trimming sod rolls, and joined us in our labor. The sound that came out of those speakers, tho...I knew it was blues. I knew enough of the world to know that, and in my steady diet of classic rock, it sounded vaguely familiar, like a story I had heard from a completely different source. And then that voice; Gabriel himself would collapse in a pile of his own sweat trying to make such notes. "I got a sweet little angel....I love the way....she spread her wings..." I was struck, and there was no way else to describe it. I looked around me. My fellow coolies kept their heads down, chopping and sweating and grasping. "Who's this, Dick?" "Why that's ah, that's BB King, Jonny." No shit, huh. I bent back to my task, but every fiber in my body bent to that sound. Every story he told between songs was a gift. Every song was the warm clarity of truth and love and heartbreak and joy, every woman a goddess and a devil and The Redeemer herself, every note a precisely crafted and delivered vessel of perfection. He played other wonders that day, Dick did, Peter Tosh and Buckwheat Zydeco and The Pretenders, and on that day, and for many days and weeks after, I disabused myself of these terrible prejudices I had so absently indulged in regarding Dick. In fact, I was probably a pest about it. Whenever the opportunity showed itself, I'd bug him to play music at break or when we worked, to get that drug rush that I was finding music, and especially the blues, to be. A couple of years later, towards the end of summer, I was resolved to see these living legends, any legend really, in concert. I knew the blues to be basically a dead genre at that point. Stevie Ray Vaughan was the only contemporary blues musician with any popularity or following, the older generation having passed out of vogue. Talking to my peers, these people were ignored or dismissed out of hand. I remember Eric Evans telling me, rather haughtily, that Living Colour were superior musicians in every way, as BB only played single notes, while Vernon Reid went to Berkeley School of Music. How could such a primitivist be superior to a studied and scholarly musician. As I was headed to community college and Eric was ordained to go to U-M, he was sure that education was destiny. I knew, after similar feedback from the others in my circle, that this was not destined to be a shared hobby or joy of mine, this little unheard musical boon. Undeterred, I bought tickets with my sweat money to see a triple bill of Albert King, Bobby Blue Bland, and BB King at the recently opened Chene Park, right on the banks of the Detroit River. I bought two tickets, knowing that a free ticket down there was going to be the only way I'd be able to get a ride. I bought "Live at Cook County Jail" and "Live at Ole Miss" and listened to those two tapes on an almost endless loop leading up to the week of the show. The show was Friday night. This was Monday. I had the day off for reasons that escape me at the moment. My brother and I were outside in the dirt driveway of the shitty little rental house we lived in at the time way out in the Styx of Oakland County. Now, clothes weren't in abundance in that house for any of us. Hand-me-downs were the rule; from me to my brothers and sister, my dad, as I grew, down to me. Looking down at the ground, Matt and I, we studied the "newest" shirt that had just recently come into my possession from my father. It was this threadbare, jersey style shirt, light grey with darker grey sleeves, with a faded stencil of some trees on the front and "NOVI" written in blue down one of the sleeves. Novi was a town not far from us that was notable only for the mall that had been built there some ten years prior. That, and some mobile homes were the only structures in that town, and this was one of those cheap tourist shirts you'd buy at the local K-mart if, for some ungodly reason, you wanted a souvenir of your trip to Novi or some shit. I couldn't imagine ever wanting to wear it, much less buy one, yet there it was, one of the five or six shirts I was bound to start the school year with. We knew we were poor. Everyone knew we were poor. But I wasn't going to be that kid, so help me God. So Matt and I were out there to do what any sane 17 year old would do; we (I) were going to burn that shirt into nothingness. Throwing it out wasn't an option. It would be seen and picked out of the trash to be washed and worn again. Refusing wasn't in the cards either. An extrajudicial beating would be in store for me, and I was getting those regularly enough not to want that, either. So I poured gas from out of the lawnmower on it and set it aflame. Black smoke curled out of it as the orange flame consumed it. As fate or chance would have it, however, it was at this exact moment that my dad turned off the main road and started down our long drive. Quick to action, I stomped out the flames, shooting unspent fuel up my leg and burning myself, badly, in the process. From right above my sock up to my knee on the inside of my left leg. Thankfully, I got it stomped out and hid in the weeds quickly enough so my crime went unseen. I darted inside with Matt and went to my room to put pants on to hide my burn. For four days I went around in this condition. I worked every day in that unforgiving heat, with 3rd degree burns, blistered and heavy with yellow bags of fluid covering my burn. I even went clothes shopping with my mom, as she liked to at least pretend that I would get some clothes at some point in the near future, yet she was none the wiser. Friday came without incident or accident, and my buddy Tom came and picked me up for the show. One of the few perks of my youth was that my grandfather and uncles were stagehands. I saw more than a few musicals in the wings, in the sound booth, in the spotlight room, sometimes even in the seats with other stagehand family members. On this occasion, my grandfather knew the stage manager for Chene Park and had arranged for two all-access passes to the facility. Thanking the man, but not knowing fully what all access even meant, Tom and I took to our seats for the first act, Albert King. No one is there to see the opening act, the crowd is never into it, it was still daylight out, and I really didn't have much exposure to Albert. I knew he was a big influence on the rock musicians I had listened to, mainly Clapton and Vaughan, but I wasn't really into it, and neither was Tom. So we set out to find out what the boundaries were of these passes and walked around to the side of the stage. No one looked twice at us. Returning to our seats, we commiserated on our next move. How about back stage? Around we went, and again, not a word, not a motion made by anyone to bar our way. We pushed further and went all the way to the back, where the tour busses were parked. Nothing. Like we were born to be there. Albert's set ended, and we went back to sit for Bobby Blue Bland. Now Bobby was closer to what we understood to be traditional R&B. A crooner, tight band, almost all ballads. He sang Stormy Monday Blues and St. James Infirmary, and the black women in the audience (easily over half the crowd; Tom and I were literally the only two white guys there) just went nuts for him. I mean, rushing the stage nuts, crying out, singing along, hands in the air like some tent revival. I knew this was old shit, older than the music itself. I could feel it in me. All visceral, no cerebral, touching and feeling and hearing and experiencing. All of it. We snuck out around and watched from the wing of the stage, just out of sight. This was the pull, this was the magic of it all. I didn't even know what was happening, but I knew it was happening, and how do I always feel like this? To look out at those faces, and make these sounds, and have this, this right here, be your life? How do you tune yourself to channel this? I still wonder. We didn't even bother to return to our seats for BB's set. Even knowing every song, every word, didn't prepare me for the experience. His band was tight. It was done in the style that I have since become familiar with, like it was a different kind of showbiz. The band comes out and plays in full swing, almost two...three minutes. Then someone announces, and for all the times I've seen him since, I still don't know where it came from, he says in this booming voice, like how you'd introduce an Old Testament prophet, I'd imagine, "AND NOW...CAN WE GET A ROUND OF APPLAUSE....FOR THE KING OF THE BLUES...MR.B....B....KINGGGGGG!!!!" and then BB comes out, Lucille perched high upon his outsized frame, bows to the audience, and plays out some licks to finish the intro. It's all too much. Even now, 26 years later, that left hand tremolo reverberating in my ear. Sigh. I've seen him since, and I've seen him play better shows, but there was just no preparing me for that experience on that August evening. So Tom and I sat in the wings, I sat on a speaker, and we watched this legend work thru his set. What sticks with me most, and I'm trying not to shade this with the exposure to BB's musical influences I've since became aware of, is the utter joy his music brought to me, even at its saddest or lowest. It was a cleansing purity of sound to me, of all feelings and emotions, bound up in all the bullshit and loss and God and The Holy Ghost, all laid bare by something that takes no shape, that has no hue, but who's cry can be discerned by every heart open to hear it. I had found my religion, and I came to know it as humbly as I could. The next day, I arose from bed, strolled into the living room, and as casually as possible showed my mother the burn on my leg. She about fainted. Drove to the ER, had it lanced and drained, bandages and ointments and shots. Why didn't you tell me was really all she could offer in the way of reproach. "Because I knew there would be no way in hell that you'd let me see that show if I had that burn, even if it was properly bandaged." To her everlasting credit, my mom took that in stride. She knew it was the truth. She had no issue in withholding such small benefices as that came our way for no other reason than having the power to do so. She took me to get a check up on August 27th of that year, in the morning, and the family doctor signed off on it, saying everything looked fine. We got in the car, I was still giddy with my newfound faith, and turned the radio on to hear that Stevie Ray Vaughan had met his end in the side of a ski hill, after a concert, the previous night. And just as quickly, I knew then how brief joy was in the fullness of loss. Ah, maybe another time.

[dop-jon]

So I know you're a student of Tolkien, particularly the Silmarillion and the supplemental "untold stories". Which story is most poignant for you?

Thanks for the question!The binary tale of Finrod and Turgon always gets me. If you recall, Ulmo visits both, unsettling them both to act in a similar fashion. Finrod, friend of Man and Dwarf, of lesser stature than Turgon but more fair, maybe, delves and expands what would become Nargothrond. Turgon, mightier in the conventional sense, takes his people to dwell in Gondolin, the Hidden City, and there stays the power of Morgoth in the manner that seemed best to him. Neither story begins at the beginning, and neither do they last unto the end. They both knew that their fates were set; Finrod knew that he should never have a kingdom that a son should inherit, Turgon knew that once his secret power was made known, that his end would come as well. Further, directly or indirectly, their dealings with Man hastened that end. Finrod was bound by the Ring of Barahir, and so died as the last companion of the man Beren. Turgon's fate hastened to its end with the arrival of Tuor, though through no fault of that man. In a book filled with tragedy, their duel fates always struck me with the deepest sadness, of being moved by a force greater than their own, to accomplish for even a relatively short time a boon for their kith and kin, only to have it ultimately come to ruin. To KNOW that, and yet to still pursue the greatness they both knew they were capable of, to not turn their backs as many others did (looking at you, Thingol) even though it might have stayed their demise some small amount of years....it makes me wonder, at the end of my days, if the things that I have built with mind and craft will so endure, and for a better end, though I may not share in it.

[dop-jon]

Happy Birthday, Keef! You will always be my favorite X-Pensive Wino!

[dop-jon]

Happy Birthday, Keef! You will always be my favorite X-Pensive Wino!

[dop-jon]

So tell us your favorite ASOIAF book, why, and whether or not it's actually the best written of the series.

Thanks for the question, you talentless hack!In literature, I don't hold for first impressions. Shit is shit, and I won't go back to a bad book, but if it's an author that I want to at least extend that benefit of the doubt to, I'll revisit. And tbh, I didn't care for AFFC the first time thru. Coming off of ASOS, which contained so much, going from blow to blow without feeling like a Michael Bay mess that lurches set piece to set piece, I felt almost trapped in the POVs of AFFC with characters I didn't really identify with or feel any empathy toward. However, after finishing ADWD, the two book set up made a lot more sense, and I had a better understanding of what we were working toward. I find my spare time spent picking thru AFFC more than any other book, taking in my impressions on a chapter by chapter basis. I think Dance is the better offering so far, and I still marvel at the structure of ASOS, but AFFC is probably my favorite just because of all the world building and back story that you get. It's not high drama. It has its moments of that, but it fills in that history so vividly. Plus, any book that contains both Rodrik and Marwyn has a leg up on just about anything. Being THE Harlaw of Harlaw rings to me in the same manner that The Ned does. It contains so much more unspoken dignity then, say, Dany's exhausting role call of titles. Nerds gonna nerd.

[dop-jon]

For Ostentation And For Use

If ever there was a time that I should roll out a half-hearted creative effort that I'm likely to abandon by the time the weather threatens to become reasonable again, it's probably now. The holidays in general, and specifically the anticipation of the coming new year, tend to make even the most Mayflyish of thinkers and doers a bit introspective. I'm no different. We'll see where this little exercise goes. I promise nothing, which is a boon. I rarely deliver. I can hope for, however, some happy accidents along the way. I'd like to thank the creative minds that have overtly or latently encouraged me to step out a bit here. You know who you are, and I hold you blameless. I'll be around, and I hope you enjoy when I am. Feel free to fire me a question, and I'd be more than happy to write a circle around it and leave both of us unfulfilled for the experience. Like really good sex lulz no but seriously. Enjoy.