The Crime of the Ancient Asshole

Like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, doomed to tell of his thoughtless crime until he died, so here am I; skipping a year only made everything worse.

And, like the wedding guest in his epic poem “The Rhime of the Ancient Mariner” (It is an ancient Mariner, and he stoppeth one of three), I now stop you, dear reader, and grasp you by your arm. You are trapped, bound by fate to read my true story of Christmas, tragedy and loss, and of warnings concerning things not yet come, but which surely will. Sit back, and give me your attention.

It was Christmas Eve, 1994. I was recently separated from my wife, forced out of home, away from my children, Beth, age eleven, and Michael Jr., age seven. It was hard on them as well as myself; we were so close. I packed their lunches, took them to school, picked them up, made snacks and ran and played outside, I helped with homework, and read stories at bed time. You can’t be closer than that. And when you get pulled apart, there’s no pain like it. At least that’s what I thought.

How wrong I was would become clear.

That year, that first year, I did not want to see them for Christmas. I had no money for gifts, not anything at all to even resemble a gift. And so, after years of lighting up Christmas morning with toys, this year I wasn’t going to feel much like a daddy, and certainly not a man. It was cold that night and for some reason, darker than any night I had ever seen in desert or mountains. It could have been my perception, probably was, but my heart was equally dark. Black, lacking any of the sentiment or cheer I had felt when I was with them. I was not going to visit them.

I had an infection in my left eye. I would awake every morning, a Krispy Kreme glaze of white over my eye and eyelid, I’d steam it away, and have to repeat cleaning it several times in a day. I planned to go to the hospital, so after work at Papa John’s, I killed time so that I would get there very late and there wouldn’t be too many people in the Emergency Department waiting room.

Having Christmas tips, (enough that I indulged in a Wendy’s Triple for dinner), a friend told me about how my plan for avoiding my kids on Christmas sucked. He was young when his parents divorced, and he would visit his dad every Christmas. He said, “I didn’t care what he gave me, or if we sat and just watched TV. I just wanted to be with my dad”. That was the first lesson I would get that night.

I arrived at John’s Hopkins Bayview Hospital at eleven or a bit after. The waiting room was stuffed with sick people and, worse, many were children. I felt guilty as I signed in. Told that it would take time to be seen, I went outside to smoke. It was dark there in the parking lot, and this time not merely by my soulless perception. I lit a Winston and a soft but pathetic voice behind me made me jump: “Got a light?”

I could only barely see him, there in the dark. He lit the Bic I handed him, and in its glow, I saw something I have never forgotten: a black man, black as coal, the face being lined and aged as that of one who has been to Hell and only halfway come back. Part of him was still there. I was filled with pity. My fear of him was gone. Here was a man I wanted immediately to hug. I often wish that I had.

“I’m here trying to get committed,” he said, and the sadness poured from every word. Like the Mariner’s wedding guest, I would hear his story; I was helpless to do otherwise.

“I’ve been — I lost my family. I lost everything. I had a wife, two kids, great job, house, two cars, even a boat. One day…”

One day his wife and children were killed in a car accident. Three lives were ended so suddenly that no human on this planet could ever tell him again that God is real, that it was fate, or that any reason under the sun had a part or explanation in or for such a horror.

“I went into the bottle after that,” he said, “and I never came out. I lost my job. Then my boat. Then my car. When the sheriff came to get me out of the house, I swung on him.”

He had lived on the cruel and merciless streets of Baltimore ever since. And aged grievously. Here was a man so beaten down by tragedy that he was not living, but merely surviving. He was so tragic to me that I felt tears in my eyes. A security guard came out and yelled at him to get inside. He was supposed to be on suicide guard, and the guard had let him slip away. And was castigating him for it. Before he turned to leave me, he said the saddest thing of all: “I just want my kids back.”

Well. I never saw him again. Next morning, I called my ex. I said I had nothing to give the kids. I didn’t feel right visiting. She put my daughter on the line. Beth was far wiser and kinder than anyone I’ve ever met. She said, “It’s okay, daddy. Your gift can be that you love us.”

She melted my heart. Standing at a public payphone, I silently wept. And I remembered the two lessons given me the night before.

And so I crossed the Francis Scott Key Bridge, went to visit, and we did lots of hugs and talking and I never again looked back, except Christmas time, when I honored my teachers: a friend who taught me that no gift is equal to a father’s love for his children, nor is their love for him, and one very broken man who pulled his heart out and let me see the ghosts of Christmas Future.

I skipped this story last year, but this year I realized that I never told it for myself.

Because it does no good to me. I learned the lessons and I acted on them.

But that’s not the point of the story. Like the Ancient Mariner, I am bound by honor and fate to retell this shamefully selfish plan I had in 1994. The man whose face was blacker than a New Mexico night taught me about boundless love, unbearable loss, and how he just wished he could have another chance, how he wished his children could have another chance. I could not feel his grief, but he did make me feel guilt.

The story I tell is now identical to his. Although many Christmases and birthdays would pass after 1994, and we made great memories and and went on epic adventures, the times came for me to lose them both. And that is why I’m writing this.

I want you to think about this: you never know how much time you have with any loved one, be they family or friend, and now, especially now in these busy, frightening times, you should always put them first and spend every second you can with them. Because tomorrow, they may not be here anymore, nor ever again to pass our way. You will be heartbroken. Feel guilty. You will cry endlessly. And the holidays. Oh, the holidays! They bring a special pain, one you cannot escape. No amount of alcohol and no drug can deaden it. Can’t even moderate it. Substances merely make everything worse.

You may find yourself even hating this time of year, full of bitterness and unable to see any good in the world.

Beth died in 2012, Michael Junior in 2018. The last time I saw him was Christmas Day 2017. I spent years never being able to control my anger, my grief, my bitterness. When my son died, we had mourned Beth together. When he died, I was dropped into bewildered despair. I went crazy and I went to Hell. I started this blog afterward and tried to give an accounting of myself because I hated myself and I secretly wanted everyone else to hate me, too. I wrote terrible things. What I wrote was always true and as faithful to memory as I trusted them to be.

Now, after trying to reconcile with other family members, and in so doing help them to see that the hurtful things I said after Junior’s death were uttered or written by a man no longer sane, I’ve regained what little bit of honor I had before my children died. An apology when forced is difficult to utter; but one truly meant chokes up the throat and releases tears of guilt you never should have retained at all.

Yes, mental illness does play a part in this tragedy, but so do other things.

Things like remorse, pain, loneliness and emptiness. Regret. Guilt. Ever looking backwards, living the past again and again and again, a prisoner in my own mind.

But it does not do to trap yourself so, holding yourself hostage for terrible things for terrible reasons. You cannot live; you’re merely surviving.

It is far better to live as best you can, and, like I, finally climb a peak where the air is fresh, vision ahead is clear, and to my back there is only the best of what I left behind. The climb stripped me of regret, remorse and guilt. I am not on the highest mountain, but neither am I still in Hell.

I prefer to remember a time when I was younger, and I ran with my children under gray skies and blue, laughing every step of the way. We were so free.

Now, I have faith that they live in Heaven.

Still…this time of year…I do miss them.

And so, my story. And my fated mission. I hold it to be an honorable one: I never told it for me.

Dear friend, I tell it for you.

Every day, tell those you love how you feel. Hug and kiss them when they’re with you. Resist argument and bring the subject up: what if you didn’t have each other? There’s no time for fighting. No tomorrow. Nothing to take for granted. Remember that.

I release you, friend. Go in peace share this post, tell others how loss truly feels. Especially with things left unsaid. Life is like that. It knows how to be cruel.

May the season bring you joy, and a bit of peace. God bless; be well.

Like A Blind Man In A Chess Tournament

Science likes to play with our heads. You know that, right? It tells its students shitty things that they then must pass on to us, the little people. The uneducated, unsophisticated, the workers who have no time or will to do their kind of legwork. So we do weird things in turn, mocking everything they say and dismissing it all out of hand.

Memories, they say, are unreliable. On that single premise of something that is really far more complicated and much more deep, courts of law have believed or disbelieved, and it’s always been a problem, but now, much worse. If a witness for the state can be taken apart sufficiently to cast reasonable doubt in the minds of the jury, a guilty rapist or killer goes free. Or an innocent man goes to his death because doubts as to the memories of defense witnesses have been used with great success.

One night I went somewhere with a friend. I cannot remember the year but I can place it in the autumn or winter for certain. It was 1974, or 1975. A dark night I can never fully remember or forget, nor will I dishonestly fill in the blanks. There are names I remember but will not use. It’s just because somewhere in this dissipated soul of mine, I keep finding something good that won’t let me do certain things. I won’t say I’m a good person. I just have my limits.

What prompted me to open with a few observations about memories and science is that this night haunted me for years. And, I suppose, if I’m writing about it now, the haunting continues.

All I can tell you is, a close friend in my neighborhood had a big brother. Not blood; a volunteer from some non-profit organization called Big Brothers. The volunteers were given a young man who had no father in his life, paired with him on the goal of mentorship. It was a time when we had naive and altruistic idiots who worked for free to get brownie points for college education and credits.

This one cold night, I was invited by my friend to go along with him and his big brother to a weenie roast. Some place called Benfield Park. I don’t know if that was a real name. It was in Benfield, near Severna Park. If such a park existed then it’s had a name change, or, more likely, been bulldozed for the Interstate 97 freeway, or the fucking business parks that are a blight to once peaceful and green suburban hoods or forest land. Either way, no such park exists today. Have to admit that I did at least check before writing this; such a horrible night deserves to be researched, as I would hate to disappoint any sensitive fucker out there with letters behind their fucking name. That’s not a nice thing to do, and besides, I’m already ceding to their demands by admitting this night is a brief fragment of memories broken with blanks between them.

I don’t know what I was thinking. Perhaps it was autumn, not winter, because my mother would never have allowed me out without a coat if she’d known how cold it was going to be. But I had nothing but T-shirt and jeans. And in the dark, I sat on the top of a picnic table, feet on its bench. Cold and shivering, pissed because people I did not know were there, and in a situation like that, I didn’t function well. I said nothing and I did nothing. And I shivered. My teeth clattered. And I was full of fear, full of anger. I did ask to go home. I was ignored. Now, hate filled my soul. In the darkest of nights. In the bitter cold.

The truth is that even had I worn a ski parka, I’d still have wanted to go home. These people alternately ignored me or looked at me like I was some fucking idiot, and when, finally, the big brother decided it was too cold to remain there, he drove us to some house. I supposed he lived there. It was bright and warm. I was more pissed, felt like a prisoner, because that meant I wasn’t going home anytime soon. Someone popped some popcorn. They didn’t have that carcinoma-inducing microwave shit from Conagra back then, and I didn’t care for any no matter what. I wanted away from all these people I didn’t know. And I don’t remember when I finally did go home.

You can do all the Psych 101 you want, but would you mind me saving you the trouble? You take a sheltered, controlled, abused kid and without warning throw him into a situation like that, and you’ll get nothing good from it. I was too dysfunctional. Too traumatized. Too fucked up. And no matter how traumatic that night was or wasn’t, I never forgave. I never forgot. And if the story ended there, I’d really like it; I’d be happy to to leave it alone.

But none of my stories ever end well. In North Shore on the Magothy, the uppity neighborhood I grew up in, I never forgave. I never completely forgot. The back yard where I’d once played with plastic soldiers and dinosaurs and steel Tonka trucks, unaware that the fucking neighbors all let their cats out at night and I was sitting in a litter box, was landscaped, an in-the-ground pool was put in, and grass was finally grown. It was prettier, but still Hell. The neighborhood became a place of hell even outside of my yard. The bullying at school went on and on. Bullying in my neighborhood was replaced by avoidance. My friend with the big brother was the last I would ever have there.

Once my anger could no longer be contained, when calling the Mr. Softee man’s sexual habits into question no longer provided an outlet, I embarked on a mission of revenge. My favored method was property damage. Vandalism. Hit people back in their wallets. But somehow I always fucked up. I was seen. And that frustrated me more because you can guess how my father reacted. In a state of frustrated anger, it’s a bad idea to even leave your bedroom much less the fucking house. At my friend-with-the-big-brother’s house I stood and threw a rock through the plate glass patio door of a house occupied by a family I hated for no particular reason. He told on me. The neighbor came round to my house one night telling my father to fork over half a grand to pay for the door. If I had dared speak, I’d have called bullshit on the amount. I got called to the porch, my father asked if I’d done it. I said no. I blamed my friend, who of course ratted on me. That didn’t sit well with the neighbor, but my father didn’t like that fucker anyway. He was adamant. He told the guy to get off his porch and never set foot on it again. Or else.

Inside, my father did a funny thing: he failed to question me even once as to my guilt. My father never brought it up again. And he was like that, and he may have been a monster and he may have fucked me up for life, but when it came to defending me against another person, he fucking took up for me and he never left a doubt that if they persisted he was going to throw down. I’m grateful for that.

Still, the story goes on. I never saw my friend with the big brother again. But life is a real motherfucker. I did run into the big brother again.

Two years passed. He shows up at my church, and he’s my Sunday school teacher. And I grew to like him. That’s absolutely ridiculous. Soon he finished God college, became a pastor, moved away.

Stories like this, you know, can’t end there. He left his church on the Maryland Eastern Shore, came back to his old home, became the pastor of a church near Millersville, north of Severna Park, where I’d spent that night freezing in some park that no longer exists. I passed the church one time and saw his name on the sign. I stopped in to see him. He was, I imagined, an old friend.

He was a kind and decent man. But I was by then no longer a minor. I had a stormy relationship with a girl I used for sex and affection, because I didn’t know what to do. I was lonelier than most. More terrified, more haunted than most. I didn’t want to be alone. Somehow, she loved me. She wanted me to be better. She really cared. One day we were in my car and a song that was still hot came on.

“Listen to this. It’s you,” she said.

“You see the world through your cynical eyes,

You’re a troubled young man I can tell
You’ve got it all in the palm of your hand
But your hand’s wet with sweat and your head needs a rest

And you’re fooling yourself if you don’t believe it
You’re kidding yourself if you don’t believe it

Why must you be such an angry young man
When your future looks quite bright to me
How can there be such a sinister plan
That could hide such a lamb, such a caring young man

You’re fooling yourself if you don’t believe it
You’re kidding yourself if you don’t believe it
Get up, get back on your feet
You’re the one they can’t beat and you know it.”

And she was right. She loved me. Enough to have watched me go through inner pain and let it out in anger. Enough to see me in the lyrics of a song by Styxx released a year earlier. We had great sex. We loved kissing and holding hands and going to movies and watching Saturday Night Live. But I don’t believe I was capable of loving her. At least, not in a healthy way. The relationship was doomed.

She asked me to seek help. If I didn’t change, she knew she couldn’t have me. I went to the pastor who used to be my friend’s big brother. I trusted him to do things that couldn’t be done.

In the end, even he grew frustrated with me. He drove me to Crownsville State Hospital so I could commit myself. It was a betrayal I never forgave. He drove away and left me. I hated him. And if the song by Styxx applied, then it was incomplete; I was worse off than that. I never saw my girlfriend again. Never saw the pastor again. I’ll never trust a pastor ever again, either, and I won’t even go to a church for a fucking wedding.

I left them behind. I didn’t know what I was doing; I was surviving but without any idea how to survive, like a blind man playing chess. It can be done with a computer these days, if the player can remember where every piece is on the board. And memory, that’s a transient and mischievous thing.

If you were shown a Fibonacci series of 50 numbers on a paper, and given seconds to see it, could you remember it one second later and repeat it? Of course you couldn’t. But a mathematics professor could, because a few remembered numbers at the beginning would tell them what comes next. They would know.

But if you go wading into the poison of the internet, memory is often discussed as infallible. The most notorious example is the Mandela effect. People swear Nelson Mandela died in prison and that they remember it clearly. But he didn’t. They remember a different spelling for the cartoon series “Looney Tunes” and swear the Berenstain Bears children’s books used to be the “Bernstein Bears”, and that some inter-dimensional event occurred which deposited us in a parallel world.

People believe strange shit, while ignoring established facts, empirical scientific data. Climate change is an imminent threat, but people still claim that it’s either a lie or a natural phenomenon. I’ll get a lot of satisfaction if I live to see waterfront property sunk like fucking Atlantis; I’ll watch the news and roll over laughing as the rich fuck themselves and realize it too late, because I’m an asshole and that’s what I’d do.

It’s amazing, though, that science questions the reliability of memories, yet those memories are often cemented forever by unlikely chains of events we couldn’t see coming even if we were especially gifted with precognition. I judiciously contemplate my memories. I do. My mission here is to let you see me as I was, as I am. To be as vulnerable and honest as can be. Hopefully you learn, and never wind up like me. Hopefully you see something in yourself that you can change. If you want help and you need it, go find it. Don’t be like me. It’s okay to ask for help. It wasn’t when I was young.

These days it’s hard to muck out what’s going on. We’re in an existential crisis as a country and a species. Lies surround us like a Dolby system. Our lives depend on many things. I’m not optimistic. I’m still cynical. Still doubtful. I see evil everywhere.

But if I can give you hope, then today I choose to say this: the death of an American legend always hits us hard. That’s because we have the amazing capacity of love and deep despair. If there can be no appreciation of the light without the darkness we all face, then I give you the shocking and heartbreaking loss of Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna this past weekend. I see people mourning. Honoring him with shot clock violations, wearing his jerseys, leaving mementos at an impromptu memorial outside Staples Center. I see people from all walks of life in grief, sharing memories. Shedding tears. Heartbroken, devastated. You know, as hard as it is to even think about, people are showing us all what makes humanity better than racists and other evil people make us believe we are. There is hope. There is. As long as we can love and grieve such a loss, we can overcome any evil.

And don’t worry so much about memories; I believe that there’s a good reason for their capricious nature. We don’t remember everything wrongly, mistakenly. Some details may become obscure or muddled, but so long as we’re honest, it doesn’t matter. If you’re asked a question you can’t answer, then do not try to. We’re all just surviving. Nowadays that’s hard enough.

And yes. Blind people do play chess.

And yes, they’ll kick your ass.