I grew up in a big Catholic family with twenty-three first cousins but by the time I was in eighth grade half my aunts and uncles were divorced. My mom remarried and my stepfather, who was an ordained Methodist minister, turned out to be psycho. My mom threw him out of our house soon after my thirteenth birthday, but the two-year marriage had left me quite damaged. (I am summarizing for people who might not have read my synoptic “From Boom to Bust” thread.) I discovered a new world view in the book, Dune, and found myself embracing humanism. I have talked about reading a lot of sci-fi and philosophy. What I haven’t mentioned much is the television show Star Trek.
Star Trek was airing in prime time when I was six and seven years old. I mentioned sitting with my dad in the big easy chair watching it with him, being terrified yet fascinated. By the time I was thirteen the show was in syndication. We would get home from school and be on our own for several hours before my mom got home from work. I would watch an episode of Star Trek almost every day. Eventually I had seen every episode multiple times. Two of my best friends were also into it: Chuck and Alan. (I have already mentioned both of them. Chuck and I started out in beginning band together in eighth grade, having been friends since kindergarten. Alan was the airplane nerd from the Bay Area whose mother was the school librarian.) Chuck and I were obsessed with the show. We bought and read books about it, including the making of the series and the science upon which it was based. Chuck’s dad was an architect and we both had taken drafting in eighth grade. We set about designing our own starships, drawing up detailed floor plans and doing our best to sketch the shapes of the ships. We got into philosophical arguments about specific episodes (we would rarely agree on anything).
We were all somewhat secretive about it. You have to understand: back in those days Star Trek was just this campy, weird show that had been on for only two seasons. The entirety of the Star Trek “universe” was just some re-runs on afternoon TV. People who were really into it were considered weird nerds. It wasn’t something to brag about. But actually it was a bold and innovative concept which with the potential to become a new religion. Instead of ancient myths involving warring tribes in the Middle East, we are given a mythical future, wherein mankind has overcome our barbaric past by means of science and reason. On the bridge of the Enterprise we have, in addition to the All American Hero captain Kirk, a black woman, a Russian, an Asian, and an Alien working side by side. In 1967, in the middle of the war in Vietnam and the nuclear standoff with the USSR, this was a shocking vision of the future, almost too much to hope for. I grew up doing bomb drills in school. We all figured we might be wiped out in an atomic holocaust at any moment. Star Trek offered a vision of hope for the human future. It wasn’t mere entertainment: it was philosophical speculation of the best kind.
One day in high school this guy who had recently moved to our town from the Bay Area appeared on campus wearing a Star Fleet shirt and Vulcan ears. Everybody was talking about it and laughing. “Have you seen ‘Spock’ yet?” I had to admit he looked pretty good: he even had the haircut. It turns out my friend Alan was hanging out with him. Alan and I never hung out at school together. I would go to his house for sleep-overs and such, but I don’t think anyone really knew we were friends. I’m not sure why, but it felt like something I wanted to keep secret. Anyway, he called me one day and asked if I wanted to go to Sacramento to a Star Trek meeting. I had no idea there were such things, but I said yes. The three of us, Alan, “Spock” and I carpooled over to a lecture hall at Sac State where the meeting was held. There were mostly grownups there. I was considered pretty weird by most of the students at my high school, but even I was saying to myself, “Man, these people are really nerdy.” And the atmosphere! It was very serious, as if we were in church. There was mention of Star Trek conventions, which sounded amazing. But the room got very quiet when someone who had recently returned from a meeting with an affiliated Star Trek club in Los Angeles gave us all an electrifying update. There were talks — just talks at this point — about the potential for a Star Trek movie. Word was that most of the original cast had signed on to the idea, and there was funding and studio interest as well. It was likely to be a full-fledged feature film! Holy cow! I sensed the tension mounting in the room as people were afraid to hope yet were exuberant at the thought of it. You may be laughing now, but seriously, for Star Trek aficionados it was a first glimmering of the glorious future to come in the following decades.
My love of Star Trek was a secret I shared with just two special friends, but perhaps it showed up with my band friends whenever I rolled out my Spock impression. While Captain Kirk resonated with my heart, especially reminding me of myself in elementary school, Spock represented what I was striving to become during my teen years. Having emerged from puberty being prone to emotional hysteria, Spock’s disciplined dedication to the principles of logic captured my own struggle to use my awakening mind to override my turbulent emotions. I amused myself endlessly trying to craft Spock-ish phraseology. I remember one time during band rehearsal when Tana turned to me and said, “Ooh, I love that harmony.” I responded with, “I agree: the nodal interference in the overlapping wave forms produced by the oscillating columns of air does produce an effect that is most pleasing to the ear.” She looked at me like I was nuts, then burst into laughter.
My wife is a pediatric occupational therapist. She works with all kinds of kids and knows a lot about neurology. She tells me I have “sensory issues” and she could have helped me with them as a child. Actually, she says she could help me with them now, if I were willing. I’m thinking about it. What I do know is that my hypersensitivity as a child really impacted my life in both positive and negative ways. Take music, for example. I hear things in music that others don’t, like bees see colors that are beyond what our eyes can process. The positive side of this is that I am a good musician. The down side is that I can’t filter it out. Just the other day I was in the grocery store to pick up three items. Several times I had to stop and gather my thoughts, because I lost track of where I was and what I was there for. It’s not dementia. It was the fucking music that was playing in the background. It’s always been a problem for me. I’m supposed to be choosing a loaf of bread and all I can think about is the fact that they opted to use trombone for that musical phrase. Add narrow aisles and lots of people and we have all the ingredients for a psychological breakdown. I avoid stores and other crowded places. I have been to one or two big rock concerts in my life. The only way I survived was by allowing myself to break from reality and float in a borderline dream state. Utterly overwhelming and horrible. Even when it was Springsteen. If it hadn’t been for the beer and weed I would probably have made a break for it like I did at the haunted house. I have never understood how “normal” people can enjoy the things they do.
I went with a buddy to just one high school dance when I was in tenth grade. As you would guess, it was nightmarish. I tried to “dance” one dance, but the sight of all the other kids having such a great time as I wondered where the exits were made me sick to my stomach. I didn’t understand how guys got the courage to ask a girl to dance, much less on a date. My lame attempts with Trisha and Tana stand out in my memory because I had finally developed enough self-confidence to make a move, but the humiliation and remorse sent me reeling back into my cave. It’s important to note that all this was happening in the immediate aftermath of John the Cat’s death. And while I do recall sobbing myself to sleep one night soon after the tragedy, they were bitter tears and it didn’t help. I mentioned earlier that John kept the nightmares away. Now they were back, and it was brutal. I mean the content of the nightmares was often brutal. The worst involved coming upon a cat that looked like John and seeing that it was mortally injured. As it cried out in pain I knew the only thing to do was end its misery. So I grabbed a shovel to do the deed, but you know how in dreams sometimes it’s like you’re moving through molasses. I tried, but while each blow made things worse, the cat wouldn’t die. Being torn between horror and frustration caused me to wake up. I have had variations of that nightmare many times since. Other nightmares involved fist fights, again where I could barely move, or finding myself on a battlefield with bullets and bombs flying, stark naked with nowhere to run. Or being chased by a demon and, my escape being blocked, forced to turn and confront the monster only to see that — as if to mock me — it was wearing the face of Walt, twisted snarl and all.
All this talk of nightmares and dissociative states of mind brings up a crucial memory. I was seven years old, I think. We were camping in the redwoods. In the middle of the night I had a nightmare. In my dream I am wandering around the campground in the dark, barefoot and lost. Then there is a bear, which sees me and begins pursuit. I’m trying to run away but — molasses of course. I see a camper trailer up ahead and I make a bee line for the door. I feel the bear right behind me as I grab the handle of the screen door and try to turn the knob. It’s locked. I’m dead. So I snap awake, only to find myself standing exactly where I was in the dream. But now I’m awake and I can see that there is no bear. Completely freaked out, I begin banging on the door and screaming. Some old guy comes to the door saying, “What is it?” He opens the door and sees me, knows I must be lost. I had been sleepwalking again. He was kind and reassuring as he helped me back to our tent about fifty feet away. I found my sleeping bag and went back to sleep, my family completely unaware of the incident.
I told that story to illustrate what it feels like whenever I am triggered and begin to dissociate: panic is near and it’s hard to discern what is real and what is exaggerated by my imagination. If it’s a physical threat I might react violently before I even think. If it’s some kind of emergency my mind will snap into a hyper-alert state, completely depersonalized, as if some other grownup has taken over and I am just a spectator. If I am overwhelmed by sadness and grief, I simply lose track of myself entirely. It’s like a fugue state, but I still know who and where I am. Have you ever walked into a room and just stood there because you forgot why you were there? For me it’s like I have forgotten who I am and why am am alive — why anybody would want to be alive. I am completely detached from all feelings and motivations. Other times I am debilitated by strong emotions, but I can’t bring to mind any particular reason why I would be having them: the connection between the emotions and their source has been ruptured.
I remember one time when I was thirteen, not long after Walt left. For no apparent reason I decided to leave the house without my glasses on. That means the whole world would be a blur and I wouldn’t feel safe at all. But I just wandered down the street, then over to the next block where a busy street cut through the center of town. It was a residential neighborhood with nice houses, but there was plenty of traffic. I wondered what would happen if I just laid down on the grassy strip between the sidewalk and the street, like I was passed out. Would anybody notice or care? If so, I would pretend to be unresponsive. So I did it. Lying in the sun feeling the cool grass against my cheek, I listened as cars whizzed by, letting go. Giving up. Refusing to go on with anything. A car pulled up. I heard the door close followed by footsteps. High heeled shoes? A lady’s voice: “Young man, are you ok? What’s wrong?” I refused to move, feigned sleep. She touched my shoulder, “Are you all right? Do you need help?” I suddenly felt bad for her. She was so kind and concerned! I opened my eyes and saw a nicely-dressed, conservative-looking woman with gray hair looking at me with a worried expression. I said something like, “I must have fallen asleep.” She probably thought I was drunk or on something. If she knew the truth, that this was a cry for help, I don’t know what she would have done. I desperately wished she could just take me with her, away, anywhere. Give me a new life. Sheepishly, I stood up, brushed myself off and headed home. I never mentioned this little experiment to anyone or reflected upon it much, but it felt like I was wanting to end my life, psychologically, but unwilling to inflict any violence on myself to achieve it.
John’s death left me empty and numb. Unsurprisingly, the dark and cold of December have always been devastating to my mood. I listened to music and read books. I couldn’t feel my own emotions so I immersed myself in the emotions of others. I read short stories by Kurt Vonnegut, a gothic romance “My Cousin Rachel” by Daphne du Maurier, “A Bridge Too Far” by Cornelius Ryan, and — at my sister’s suggestion — “The Left Hand of Darkness” by Ursula K. Le Guin. My crush on Trisha became obsessive and I began talking about it with my therapist. I told him I was having trouble wanting to live. I was going through the motions of my very busy life and doing my best to mask the existential crisis I was in. There was a bright spot, though. Trisha wanted to audition for the part of Ado Annie in the Spring musical, “Oklahoma!” and she asked me to help her rehearse it. We met several times in a practice room at school. I played, she sang, I coached. She could really belt out a tune! I felt there was no way she wouldn’t get the part and I am afraid she might have been convinced by my enthusiasm, biased though it was. But she didn’t get the part. Actually, it wouldn’t have mattered how good she was, she wouldn’t have gotten the part. Our drama director, my dad’s old friend and comedy partner, casted the leads before he even picked the plays: the auditions were just perfunctory. Or maybe a good opportunity for kids to practice auditioning, but the die was already cast. My hopes of a rekindling with her were dashed when she seemed to withdraw from me in shame. I felt like I had let her down.
January came and rehearsals began for the show. I was the rehearsal pianist. In my ten-part thread I wrote about how busy my schedule was at that point: jazz band before school, symphonic and marching bands in the morning, jazz ensemble during lunch, music theory last period. After school I would ride my bike across town to play the piano for voice lessons, then back to school for musical theater rehearsal. It was brutal, but it was also addictive. Whenever I was playing an instrument it forced my attention to a focus. My breathing was regulated, the time was structured, and my nerves were soothed by the sounds. Music was my medicine, and I think it saved my life. It also provided a ready-made social life. My brother Dan, a year older than me, had been mostly invisible at school. But his friend, Kit, had been cast as Will the cowboy (the lead) and he convinced my brother to try out. Turns out my brother could really dance! All told, there were about one hundred and fifty people involved in the production when you count cast, crew, and musicians. It was the first time my brother and I had overlapping social circles, and the first time many of my friends learned that I even had an older brother. When we both starting going to cast parties a whole new dimension opened up in my life.
I realize that the last two posts made me look pretty gay. While I proudly claim the label “queer” for myself, I have sometimes been told that bisexuals don’t really exist. Contrary to popular opinion and some very flawed studies, bisexuals are real. I have debated about telling the following stories, but I feel that it is necessary to set the stage for the following post (A Dark Winter). Alcoholism involves a physical addiction but is often fueled by emotional and spiritual deficits. To recover I had to come to recognize that I was “soul sick.” My soul sickness began before my addiction developed. Even after I knew it was bad for me I continued to drink because it was the only medicine I had that assuaged the deep anguish I felt. Now I will place myself on the autopsy table for a forensic investigation into some of the underlying conditions that amplified my disease. I hope my honesty makes up for the bad impressions you will get from my behavior.
When I was in sixth grade I was pretty uninhibited, often playing the role of clown in class, and very active on the playground. I teased and flirted with the most popular girls in class because I didn’t see why not: I was a boss. I remember hanging out with Lisa and Katie at Lisa’s house on a few afternoons. There was quite a bit of off-color humor, as you would expect with eleven-year-olds. That year for Halloween our town put on a haunted house. There was this old mansion on the edge of town that was in the process of being restored by the historical society. It was made available for the purpose and I suppose a lot of work was put into it. These days it’s not unusual for organizations to put together such things, but at the time it was very new. Everyone was excited to go, and a group of us including some of my siblings went together. I clearly remember going through the first two rooms, the horror displays, the jump scares, the arms reaching out from hidden places to grab at you as you passed. At a certain point something weird happened in my brain. I remember feeling disoriented and dissociated. Suddenly my legs were moving in a new direction without any accompanying thought. I suppose my prefrontal cortex switched off and the animal parts of my brain took over. I somehow got past the workers who were shouting, “Hey, kid, you can’t go that way!” and evaded capture. In serpentine fashion I darted through across three rooms and found an exit. Once out in the safety of the cool night air I took a deep breath, relishing my return to consciousness. When my group came out a few minutes later they were saying, “Where were you? We lost track of you and didn’t know what happened.” I was ashamed of the fact that I had panicked, but was also a little bit proud of my daring escape. Their security was weak. Perhaps they didn’t anticipate any of their victims making a break for it.
Over the summer leading into seventh grade I got a girlfriend, Kelly. It began with playground flirtation. I remember being at my dad’s house for a couple weeks after that and thinking of her obsessively. I was lost in fantasy and imagined her thinking of me too. I sensed the potential of — what? I didn’t even know. But when I got back in town, saw her again, and learned that indeed she had been thinking of me the whole time I was gone it was pure elation. This was my first experience of someone I really liked liking me back. That Fall we were “boyfriend and girlfriend,” which really meant that we continued to spend time goofing off on the playground at her condominium complex and talking a lot. I believe we spoke on the phone as well. One day in October she said to me, come over here, there is something I want to give you. We went away from the playground to another courtyard. “What?” I asked. “Come over here,” she said, leading me into a recessed doorway. I stood with my back against someone’s door as she turned. Smiling, she placed a hand on each of my shoulders. “Close your eyes.” I did, still clueless. All at once I was awash in the sweetest sensation: her soft lips planting one careful kiss on mine. I was overwhelmed. I did not reciprocate, but I could think of very little else for the next few days. But I guess with what was going on at home I somehow couldn’t go any further with her and I cut things off suddenly. For decades I regretted the hurt and confusion she must have felt at me breaking up with her for no apparent reason, but it was a bit like my escape from the haunted house. I couldn’t have told you why I did it. After that I became increasingly shy and inhibited about my crushes.
One of the themes of this blog, a main theme actually, is the dangerous destructive potential of low self-esteem. I think my parents were misguided on this subject. Perhaps as a mix of Catholicism and Twelve-step ideas, I was taught that pride was a sin, humility a virtue, and that “ego deflation at depth” was good spiritual medicine. Whenever my parents perceived that I was getting “too full of myself” they would tear me down verbally. Of course, with Walt it was physical too. Today I understand that self-esteem is different than pride. “Pride” exists as a poor substitute for self-esteem, often activated in response to accusations or insults. It’s natural. Being called “queer” in a derogatory context made me militant in my denials. I finally developed some real self-esteem in my fifties, thanks to going back and finishing my undergraduate degree, and also meeting the love of my life during that time. Her humorous yet loving acceptance of my foibles has helped me to accept that, while utterly unique and weird, I am just like everybody else in that I deserve love and happiness just by virtue of the fact that I exist. I don’t have to “earn” it — it’s a birthright. That, my friends, is self-esteem. My parents weren’t given anything approaching unconditional love growing up. They worked hard to prove that they were of value in the world, but somehow never seemed to really believe they had succeeded. As a result they were very good people, but deeply insecure nevertheless. In my teen years I was plagued by the same sense of inadequacy and it permeated my awkward attempts to gain notoriety through my musical activities.
On with the next story! I met Tana when I was in tenth grade (she was a year older). I sat next to her in marching band class as she played tenor sax and I played baritone sax. Tana was very intelligent and we joked around a lot. She was unusually close to her mom and was active in her church. She was tall and thin, and to be honest, I didn’t find her physically attractive at all. But I loved our friendly banter and I relished how our friendship grew over that year. Enter Trisha. The first Star Wars movie was released over the following summer and made quite an impact. The fact that the music stood out enough to make the album a hit made it all the more popular with us band nerds. That Fall (now I was in eleventh grade) a new girl showed up in band playing French horn. She had recently moved up from L.A., had tacky dyed blonde hair, a curvy body and a cute face. Most sensationally, she had a bubbly-yet-nerdy personality that made her the focus of attention for me and my male friends. We couldn’t get enough of her! I had seen Star Wars in the theater once or twice. She told us she had seen it a dozen times and she knew people who had over a hundred viewings under their belts. She talked a lot about how amazing L.A. was, and hungrily soaked up all the attention she was getting. In a small town she was suddenly a big fish.
After seventh grade my “romantic life” had devolved into fantasy-driven, super-secret, excruciating crushes from a distance. With the girls I was friends with I could joke around easily, but when I developed a crush on someone I became quite shy. Trish was a little different because we were part of a friend group (comprised of her and a bunch of guys who lusted after her), so while my crush was secret (barely, I guess), I was able to be my usual boisterous self. We all had a lot of fun that fall. The marching band had been fundraising for a year to make a trip to the Mother Goose Parade in El Cajon, down in San Diego County. That meant travelling by air, which I had never done. The parade was scheduled for the Sunday before Thanksgiving. We were playing “Ease On Down the Road” from The Wiz, and the band director’s concept was for us to come to attention, play about eight bars of “Over the Rainbow” while standing still, then start marching to the upbeat popular song from The Wiz. Cool! But we didn’t have an arrangement of Over the Rainbow. The director asked me if I could take this piano arrangement by George Shearing and score it for marching band, writing out all the parts. I could do that! I gained even more notoriety from that accomplishment, as not too many high school juniors could have done it without help. My “ego” was growing.
I hadn’t had anything to drink since the infamous champagne incident before ninth grade, but some of the guys I knew from Jazz Ensemble were partiers. They invited me to go for a drive with them one evening and we cruised Main Street, drank beer, and smoked a joint. I was not used to this form of male companionship. They asked me if I liked any girls (no doubt they had heard the rumors about me liking boys). I said, “Yeah, I think Trisha is really hot.” They started shouting things like, “Yeah! You should bone her!” I was pretty uncomfortable with that attitude, as I already knew her well enough to know she was not that type, appearances perhaps to the contrary. She had no sexual experience. But I felt the peer pressure to make some kind of move in her direction. As the trip to San Diego neared, I somehow mustered the courage to call her. I told her I really liked her, thought we would be good together, and asked her if she wanted to hang out with me at the San Diego Zoo, which was planned as part of the trip. She said yes! I was euphoric for about three days as I kept our arrangement secret from the rest of the guys. I was lost in a world of fantasy that included walking around holding hands, maybe sneaking a kiss in front of the giraffes. The night before we were to leave on the trip I received a phone call. She said she was worried that maybe I wanted to go off alone with her, which would probably alienate the other guys and mess up the friend group dynamic. I learned she had actually been a chubby misfit in L.A., had lost weight and dyed her hair over the summer, and was making a new start of things. She told me she had worked hard to develop an outgoing personality to build up a social circle and didn’t want to ruin it.
If I could travel back in time as my sixty-two-year-old self and talk to sixteen-year-old me I would say, “Dude, you got this. She likes you. She wants to go out with you, but she doesn’t want to ruin the trip for the other guys and destroy what she has built. She’s opening up to you. Just play it cool on the trip knowing that you are going to start dating afterwards. Make a plan to go see a movie with her.” But I was an insecure dork, and I felt myself spiraling into despair. I told her I understood, but once on the airplane I couldn’t bring myself to try to sit near her or speak to her, even. I sulked the whole way. She seemed hurt and confused. My mom would have derisively told me to get off my pity pot. Ugh. The trip turned out to be very fun anyway, but I just couldn’t get past the feeling that I was not good enough for her. On the flight back I sat next to Tana. We had been good friends for over a year but she knew nothing about my failed attempt to get something started with Trisha. After take-off I suddenly, without really thinking about it, put my arm around her. She accepted it, and we sort of cuddled the whole way back. I was weirdly gratified when I saw that Trisha had noticed us before quickly turning away. Revenge? What a dick, though. Arriving back in town, Tana took me aside and said that us being a thing was probably a bad idea. She was right, but it was a second blow to my pride.
I never apologized to either of them. The common denominator in all of these stories is that under certain stressful circumstances I would act or react in ways I couldn’t control or even explain. Apologizing or salvaging the situations in some graceful way was simply not within my capabilities at the time. Not long after that weekend Tana’s mother died suddenly. I’m sure it turned her whole world upside down. The following semester she was like a different person: she had ditched the horn-rimmed glasses for contacts, lightened and styled her hair, wore make-up, and now had a stylish wardrobe. Soon she was dating one of the most popular guys in the senior class and became part of the “in” crowd, partying a lot. We never really spoke again.
As for Trisha, our friendship was rekindled when I helped her rehearse a number to audition for the Spring musical. Judging from what she wrote in my yearbook the following year we must have become good friends by the time I graduated, but I am sure the San Diego incident was never mentioned again.
When I was in sixth grade I had a posse. I was the chief instigator and center of attention for a group of about six guys that I had known since kindergarten. Our desks were pressed together right next to the teacher so he could keep an eye on us and redirect our attention whenever necessary. It was often necessary. When the constant giggling at my little quips escalated to raucous laughter, it would be time once again to send me out to the hallway so that things could cool down. This went on all year, and I loved it. Poor teacher. But he was great, the only male teacher I had in elementary school but a true classic, from Boston. We California boys loved his accent. But in seventh grade it was just me and Chuck, both lonely misfits who constantly bickered with each other, resentful of our plight. I will have a lot to say about my relationship with Chuck in another post. I mentioned him when I told the story of how we entered beginning band together in eighth grade, and how we were made fun of by the more inveterate members of the advanced bands.
One day between classes I sat down at the piano in the band room and played some ragtime, rolled out some improvisations as well. One of the kids from Symphonic band, Robert, heard me and got very excited. As his friends began to arrive he told them, “Hey, listen to this guy play: he’s really great!” A crowd gathered and I became a somebody. The beginning band wasn’t good enough to perform anywhere, and I still felt like a guest in the band room, but Robert invited me to hear the Symphonic band perform their winter concert. Robert was a percussionist, the good kind. He could read music very well and played the glockenspiel, xylophone, and timpani in addition to all the drums. I arrived at the concert that evening feeling like I was crashing a party or something, out of place but eager to hear the music. I sat near the back of the auditorium, but when Robert looked up from tuning the timpani he saw me and…smiled. Just a simple smile, notable for its lack of self-conscious reservation. No hedging or goofiness. Just, “Hey, you made it! Glad to see you.” I felt welcomed, and confused. Guys didn’t just smile at other guys, I had learned in seventh grade. You don’t want people to think you’re gay or something, I had learned. But, no, he just threw me an easy smile and I think it may have changed my life. After that I felt like I belonged in the band and the band room. By the end of the year I began to be the center of a new circle of friends, and I liked it.
In summer school Robert taught me to play timpani and encouraged me to fool around on the other percussion equipment, showing me how to interpret drum notation. I was learning tuba and bassoon on top of baritone sax. It was a fun summer during which my friendship with Robert grew. I mentioned in a previous post that there were several boys who vied for status of “best friend,” and I wouldn’t ever grant any of them that title. But forty years later I looked back and realized that Robert really was the best friend I had in those years, even though I had never really noticed. I took him for granted because I could: he was so loyal and patient with my awkward social convulsions. Near the end of that summer, when we were fourteen, his sister got married. I should say something about Robert’s unusual family. Robert’s parents were members of a social club near my house, notable for the swimming pool enclosed by a fiberglass fence, with a clubhouse that was basically a private bar. His dad and dad’s best friend were gym teachers, I think, and the two couples had long taken family vacations together, camping at the beach and such. I think they liked to party. Anyway, some years before I met Robert, his parents and their best friends decided that they were married to the wrong people. They all divorced and remarried — each other’s spouse. The two families continued to get on great with each other, and the numerous children of the two marriages mixed freely and were allowed to live in whichever house suited them. I had never heard of such a thing! But they were all very nice people. His sister’s wedding reception was going to be held at the social club, and Robert told me he might be able to sneak a bottle of champagne out, so I should be ready. That Saturday afternoon Robert quietly arrived at my house with not one, but two bottles, still cold since the club was a block from my house. We snuck out to the detached garage about sixty feet behind the house and locked ourselves in. All I remember is how good it tasted. We laughed and joked around as the effect grew. I had never been drunk before, but by the time my bottle was empty I sure was. What I didn’t know was that Robert had already consumed a whole bottle on his own before arriving at my house. After finishing what turned out to be his second bottle, he threw up. Then passed out. I tried to get him back to the house, but he threw up again and collapsed in his own vomit. I couldn’t rouse him.
My mom and brothers and sisters were sitting watching TV together as the clock neared 10PM. They started as they heard the back door slam open, loud footsteps coming through the laundry room, kitchen, then dining room. As I entered the middle living room (still one room away, but they had a clear view of me by now, and they knew it was me because I was yelling, “Mom! Mom!” the whole time) I suddenly tripped, did a shoulder roll and popped back up, continued running. That’s when they noticed the blood running down my forehead. They assumed I had been in some accident or been beaten up. What had happened is that I fell on the back steps (didn’t feel a thing) in my haste to get some help for my possibly deceased friend. I told them that Robert had passed out and I couldn’t wake him. My mom jumped up and headed to the back door while my older sister Karen, now eighteen, laughed her head off. She knew immediately what was going on, and thought it was hilarious. Robert was fine. My mom called his parents and they laughed the whole thing off, saying, “Well, you know, boys.” My mom was mortified. I was grounded for a month.
When school started we told the story to the other boys in the band (I was now in Symphonic!) and they got a great laugh out of it. We gained a lot of status, as none of them had ever done anything so outrageous. The group of us adopted the name “The Chompain Bunch,” pronounced with a bad impression of a Mexican accent. I had a new posse. One day after school, not long thereafter, I heard a commotion in the hallway outside the band room. When I came out to see what was going on I found Eric holding a very tiny, very wet kitten. “Someone just tried to flush this kitten down the toilet!” We didn’t believe him at first, but he said he heard the voices and the toilet flush before the boys ran laughing out of the building. He had gone in to the restroom and found the kitten still in the bowl. We all formed a circle to look. He was adorable, a tabby, and happy to be held in someone’s arms. “What do we do with him?” everyone wondered. I sensed that Robert was about to say something, but I blurted, “I’ll take him. I’ll keep him.” And Eric, who had found the cat and was still holding him, said, “OK, but you have to name him John, since that’s where we found him.” And that is how I came to possess my very own cat.
John was the best thing that had ever happened to me. He was sweet and playful, no trouble at all. He slept with me every night. I remember one night having a dream where I was being attacked by a rattlesnake. I struggled with it, but it kept trying to bite me. Finally, in desperation, I attempted to stick my finger down its throat, and it stopped. I snapped awake and saw John sitting there nonplussed, shaking his head and opening and closing his mouth. My finger was wet. I remember when we took him to get “fixed,” how he wobbled around the house as the drugs wore off. He was always a good sport about anything like that. During the time I was skipping school, later that year, Robert was the one who would drop by on his way home and hang out with me, just to make sure I was all right. One day he skipped too, and we hung out all day. He played with John, whom he loved, while I played the piano. Even after I started going to school again six weeks later Robert continued to come by often. We spent many hours together, talking about music, life, people, stuff. He loved Rachmaninoff as much as I did, and I loved the way Robert smiled whenever I played ragtime. He let me borrow an old set of bongos and taught me to play them. Robert was great. One Friday in high school we stayed after school and he taught me the “timp-tom” part of the cadences we used in marching band, which he normally handled. The timp-tom is a set of three tuned drums you wear in a harness. The next Monday during Marching band rehearsal I played the timp-toms while Robert marched with the bell lyra. We had fun, but the director said I couldn’t do that again: I was needed on tuba.
Back to ninth grade: one Saturday Robert was over and I was practicing bassoon. I recall my mom and several family members were there. I glanced over and noticed that John had fallen asleep in the empty bassoon case! Robert laughed when I pointed it out. I put down my bassoon and quietly crept over to where John was snoozing and gently closed the lid. Even full grown, John was always a petite cat. I latched the case. No sound from within. Laughing, I gently picked it up by the handle and walked all the way through the house with the bassoon case hanging at my side. As I passed by my sister Jenny she asked, “Where are you going?” When I told her what was up she followed me. When I got to the dining room I set the case on the table with care, popped the latches, and opened it up slowly. There was John, now awake, totally chill. I went and grabbed my mom’s instamatic camera and snapped a picture, which is the only one I have of him.
In the Fall of 1977 the nation was riveted by the airing of the mini-series, Roots. I think it was the first time white Americans focused their collective attention on the history of black people in our country, and it was a shock. My whole family watched. It would be difficult for me to over-state the impact that show had. I was instantly in love with LeVar Burton, of course. Everybody at school was talking about it, too. It pained me to have to miss two episodes due to evening marching band practice. That Thursday I returned home from practice at around ten, sad to have missed the show, which my family was still talking about. I looked around. “Where’s John?” I asked. My sibling’s faces dropped. “Oh,” they threw glances at each other. My brother, Dan, said, “John got hit by a car. He died.” I demanded to see him, disbelieving. Dan explained that a neighbor who lived around the corner had seen it happen and recognized him, calling our house. Dan, Jenny, and Drew raced out to see him, but apparently he was so badly injured they didn’t even want to go near the body. They had called Animal Control to come pick him up. So I never saw him again.
Something changed inside me. It was as if giant steel doors were slamming shut, one after the other, like on the beginning of the show “Get Smart.” I loved John the way only a child can: without reservation, without limits, without thought of self. He was the perfect cat. He had been my constant companion for two years. He kept the nightmares away. Now he was gone. I somehow knew I could never love anyone or anything the same way again. Now I would always have to guard my heart a little against the possibility of loss. Ten years later I “inherited” a female tabby named Cygnus, who had been in the family for about eight years. I loved her very much, but it was never with the same abandon with which I loved my little John. I was numb. But when Robert came over and found out that John was dead, he cried. How I envied that.
[Me on the piano, Robert on the timpani, and Eric (who originally rescued John) on the flugelhorn, photo for a newspaper promo for a high school concert.]
This thread was only supposed to be a handful of posts but it turns out my life has been pretty complicated. As we get into my high school years the cans of worms that open up are too numerous for this thread, so I will unpack them in future threads. There will be a thread describing the awakening of my mind through reading philosophy, sci/fi and fantasy, which led to readings in mathematics and science, social psychology, and military history. There will be a thread on my involvement with music, how it saved my life and gave me an identity leading to endless opportunities. There will be yet another thread on how my alcoholism developed over a ten year period leading to a very hard bottom at the young age of twenty-three. Another thread will deal with my misbegotten relationship with an eighteen-year-old schoolmate that began when I was still sixteen, and how it contributed to my utterly disastrous early adulthood. And there will be a deep dive into my psychological problems, a many-headed hydra that still horrifies me. But for now, let me just tell a couple more stories and sketch out the logistics of how I emerged from childhood a member of Generation-X.
As the winner of the High Achievement music award I was given a scholarship to go to music camp. This was not a mountain retreat. It was held on the campus of a major university, hosted by the conservatory of music there. Kids came from all over the country. It was amazing. There was a junior music camp comprised of two-week sessions through the month of July, and a senior music camp that lasted the whole month of July, for older high school students. There was some kind of mix-up which, by the time the dust settled, resulted in my attending the month-long senior camp as a bassoonist. Many of my friends from junior high school were attending the junior camp, and I turned out to be the youngest student in the senior camp. There were sections for choir, band, orchestra, and a piano master class. As a budding pianist I was particularly in awe of the musicians in the piano master class who all seemed to be leagues ahead of me. One day I managed to find — unlocked — one of the practice rooms with a grand piano. I had recently purchased a copy of the Brahms piano sonata in F minor, so I settled down for a first run-through, sight reading, never having even heard it before. While I was still midway through the first movement there was a loud knock on the door. Oh no! I was not supposed to be using that piano as it was reserved for the master class students, and I was a mere bassoonist who had just turned fifteen. I sheepishly opened the door to see two of the guys from the master class. One had just finished high school and was going to attend UC Berkeley the following year. The other was from Las Cruces, New Mexico, who was about to start his senior year of high school. I had heard them both play: they were the best in the class. They together shouted, “Who are you?” I told them I was sorry to be using the room as I was just a lowly young bassoon player, and they replied, “Oh, no, you go ahead and keep playing. We were just wondering who it could be who had the chops to play the Brahms sonata so well. We know no one in the master class is playing it.” I told them I had just bought it and was trying to sight-read it. They were amazed to hear that, and told me I was going to have to hang out with them. After that they took me under their wings and at lunch they introduced me to the master class instructor, a world-famous concert pianist. I was euphoric. I ended up paling around with them all month, walking on a cloud. They told me, “Next year you have to sign up for the master class.” It turns out I did attend the master class two years later, but those details will have to wait for the music thread.
I was also embraced by some older orchestra musicians, one a brilliant violinist and pianist who later became a professional, another a clarinetist who was pretty obviously gay. One of their friends, an alumnus of the music camp who was now in college and also pretty queer, came to visit one day and the next thing I knew I was whizzing along in a car with them to go to a music store. It was strictly forbidden to leave campus except on supervised activities, so I was risking being sent home in shame if it were discovered, but I was too jazzed by all the attention they were lavishing on me, telling me how talented I was and treating me like a king. The visitor and I got to talking about Rachmaninoff and being bisexual — it seemed a natural blend of subjects at the time. At the music store he bought me the score of Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini and said, “You better know this by the next time I see you.” I have never quite mastered it, frankly. Perhaps I wasn’t as good as they thought, but my self-esteem was rocketing upward at the time. And yes, even then I understood that this was grooming behavior, but I didn’t care. They treated me respectfully and I didn’t feel in any danger. I don’t think there was any.
My high school years were dominated by music. I had jazz combo (on piano) before school, symphonic band (bassoon) and marching band (tuba) during school. At lunch time the jazz big band rehearsed (baritone sax). Last period I had music theory. After school I went to the voice teacher’s studio to accompany piano lessons (paid), and on Saturdays I taught piano lessons at the local music store. In the evenings in the fall we had marching band practice for the Friday night football games, and in the spring time we had musical theater orchestra for the big spring musical production. I was busy. But my brain having awakened, I was also taking all the college prep courses, including chemistry, physics, Spanish, psychology, creative writing, rhetoric, etc. I was one of the top students by now. One day my creative writing instructor, a hip/cool veteran of the Vietnam conflict, asked me to stay after class. He asked me what I planned to do for a living after high school. I said, “I’m kind of thinking composition.” I meant becoming a composer of music. I dreamed of writing movie scores while I improvised on the piano for hours at a time. But he thought I meant English composition and said, “Hmm, I wouldn’t recommend that path for most people, but I think you could actually succeed at it.” He entered my name in a national creative writing competition, but I freaked out and never submitted anything. Awkward! Then my chemistry teacher took me aside and said, “You know, this is a thankless profession and I wouldn’t wish it on an enemy, but you have a special gift. That presentation you did in class reminded me of your father. You could be a great high school chemistry teacher!” The next year my physics instructor took me aside and said basically the same thing, but for physics: “That presentation you did on diodes had everyone hanging on every word!” Finally, my band director asked me to sit down in his office during my senior year (I had never even set foot in his office before!). He asked me about my plans for the future, and by then I was planning to attend the University of California at Santa Barbara for chemical engineering (long story, see girlfriend thread coming soon). He said, “Oh, I thought for sure it would be music. And I would say, don’t even waste time going to college for it. You should head straight down to LA and start doing studio sessions. You’re already better than half of those guys. You know everything you need to know to get started.” Man! I was flummoxed. Too many choices for this neuro-divergent to possibly process. So I went to UCSB because I wanted to learn to surf.
When my older brother, Dan, graduated, he went to live with my Dad. That left just three of us at home. I enjoyed having my little sister in band with me my senior year — she played clarinet. My little brother learned the drum set and played in a punk metal band when he got to high school. As my own graduation approached my mom decided it was time to sell the old Victorian house I had lived in since birth and move ten miles to the university town where she worked. The escrow closed before the end of the school year and I had to commute the ten miles to finish the last two weeks before graduation. It’s all a blur, but it pretty much ruined the end of my senior year for me. I wasn’t able to celebrate with my friends properly. I never even picked up my diploma. The graduation ceremony was pretty cool, though. There were nearly five hundred students in my senior class. Normally the entire symphonic band would sit on the football field endlessly playing Pomp and Circumstance while the students filed through to get their diplomas. This was a bummer for the dozens of seniors in band who would have preferred to be with family and friends. This year the jazz combo volunteered to play instead. There were only six of us — piano, bass, drums, guitar, saxophone and trumpet — so that freed everyone else up. We played it straight: pomp and circumstance in all it’s regal solemnity. But after a few choruses we mixed it up, doing a blues version, then back to straight. We did a country version, a rock version, and a jazz version too. The crowd loved it!
By the time I was in college my younger brother and sister alternated years living with my dad and I was starting to lose track of where everyone was at any given time. The childhood home was a thing of the past and we were scattering into our adult lives. My older three siblings are all classic Baby-Boomers in their general outlook on life. But I became much closer to my younger siblings who came to define for me the attitudes of Gen-X. We were essentially latch-key kids, on our own for the most part through high school. We each had to carve out a life for ourselves with very little parental guidance or support entering adulthood. All six of us meandered through our twenties, working hard just to survive. We all turned out very different, but we all made it. The older we get, the more we appreciate each other.
My mom was a powerful woman. She was very intelligent, hardworking, and had a strong will. Her biggest failing, in my opinion, was that she was groomed from an early age to serve the patriarchy. She deeply believed that men should take the lead in things and that her role should be supportive. Yet she held the greater power in her relationship with Walt. It was her house. He needed her to help him write his sermons. She made the important decisions behind the scenes, and he must have resented his dependency. Although I never saw him hit her, she was cowed by his temper. He would call her “woman” in a derisive tone. I one time saw him grip her upper arm, hard enough to leave a bruise. There was a time she brought him a plate of toast that wasn’t burnt enough for his taste, and he tossed it back at her. But in the end she sent him packing. His sudden transformation to meekness and his apology to me, after two years of tyrannical domination, left me shell-shocked and confused. At least he was gone. We all felt a sense of relief and liberation in the aftermath.
My mom made some big mistakes raising us, but now she did something very right. She hauled the six of us into family counseling. Steve was a PhD psychologist and licensed family therapist, and he was great. I remember all of us sitting in a big circle in his office for several sessions, and as I recall it was a lot of fun. He had a calm and cheerful manner that got us all to loosen up and talk about our feelings. I remember there were these oblong pillow things with handles like swords that we could fence with. It was good times, and it wasn’t long before he said, “I think you all are doing quite well and you don’t need to keep coming back at this point. Except I want to continue to see Kirk.” Wow, I felt so special! I mean that in a positive way — I wanted to keep coming, and never thought about why I might be singled out in a negative sense.
So every week it seemed, for the next three or four years I went to see him. In 1974 most kids didn’t have a therapist, and I thought it made me cool. A year into it I bragged about it to my friends at school and they thought it made me a dark and complicated badass. They already thought I was a musical genius. When they asked me if it meant I was crazy, I said I would ask the therapist. He said, “No, you’re not ‘crazy!’ I would just say that you are emotionally disturbed.” That satisfied my friends and me. Steve and I talked about my life history up to that point, trying to identify the turning points. I talked about the pants-down spankings, the way I felt singled-out by my father for extra punishments. I decided I must remind my dad too much of himself and so I got on his nerves. I talked about the Catholic school, the bullying. I talked about how Walt seemed to be a cross between Adolph Hitler and Barney Fife: an insecure loser who overcompensated by being a dictatorial douche. But mostly we talked about the bullying that was ongoing: the jocks at school who were always calling me “faggot,” “queer,” and “fairy,” pushing me in the hallways and punching me in the stomach. “What do they think they know about me?” I asked. “Are you gay?” he replied. And that started a long series of conversations about my sexual orientation. He was a good therapist. I never felt judged or in any way unsafe. I could have told him everything, but I withheld a lot. Maybe it was my age. Maybe it was the desperate need to convince myself that the bullies were wrong about me. I think if I believed that everyone could see who I really was and what had happened to me, if I thought I had failed in my attempts to keep the truth veiled, I would actually have killed myself. So eventually we succeeded in getting me through high school in one piece, but the deepest darkest stuff remained buried.
My sister, Karen, started working as a waitress in a small family-owned Mexican restaurant when she was sixteen. She spent a lot of time at work because she loved it. They were wonderful people, very kind, and she was a gifted waitress. One day, a few weeks after Walt left, I came home from school hungry. I looked in the pantry for something to eat and we were out of everything but pancake mix and such. I said, “Mom, there’s nothing to eat!” She was sitting at the kitchen table and, for only the second time in my life, I saw her bury her face in her palms and sob. “I’m so sorry, we don’t have any money. We may have to go on Welfare.” That very moment my sister walked in, home from work, and said, “What’s going on?” My mom seemed so ashamed as she explained the situation. Karen said, “Mom, I’ll loan you $75 so you can get some groceries, and I’ll ask at work to see if we can get you a job.” So for a while my mom bussed tables while my sister waitressed. It must have been a hoot. It wasn’t long before my mom got a part-time job lecturing at the university, and a year later she landed a great position at a community health research clinic as “Director of Intervention” in a multi-year, nationwide study. Like I said, my mom was a powerful woman! Her boss was an internationally-renowned epidemiologist, a Persian MD who got all the credit while she worked herself to the bone cleaning up the messes he created with his imperious arrogance. He was not good with people, but she was. She spent the rest of her career there, working fourteen-hour days to make that place a success. He eventually lost a class action lawsuit for harassment brought by all the other employees. She was probably his chief enabler. But at least we had enough money to get a stereo system, a microwave oven, a new car, and a color TV with cable. We were finally middle class.
Halfway through my ninth-grade year the bullying was getting to be too much. My last period of the day was Physical Education. Whenever PE ended, school was out, and I often found myself face to face with my tormentors. Billy, in particular, was not the scariest, but he was the most persistent. The scion of a very wealthy family, he seemed to take special delight in saying things like, “Kirk, you’re a ‘fairy’ nice guy!” One day he said to me, “You’re such a queer,” and I replied without missing a beat, “You wish!” There did always seem to be a sense of yearning in his pretty blue eyes, so I was calling him out! He responded by physically assaulting me with punches and kicks. I managed to escape and headed toward the band room — a standalone building not far away where my friends and I met up every day after school. That was the very last time I attended PE in junior high! After that I skipped PE and meandered my way over to the band room during seventh period. The band director was a sweet man and never questioned my presence there. I would greet my friends when they arrived after school as if nothing irregular was going on. My sister Karen was off at college now, and I had moved into her old room at the front of the house. My siblings were relieved when I moved the piano into it. They were annoyed at how much I practiced, and this made it less intrusive.
Since my mom was working so much, we younger four were pretty much on our own most of the time. My older brother, Dan, had a motorcycle and a job as a dishwasher at a restaurant on the edge of town. He was gone hanging out with his druggie friends much of the time, and that left me with my sister, Jenifer (two years younger) and my brother, Drew (four years younger). We took turns making dinner, which we would warm up for my mom when she dragged herself in at eight or nine o-clock. She would eat and then promptly fall asleep on the couch while we watched TV. By ten someone would run her bath water, then we would herd her off to the tub. We took turns waking her up, helping her out of the tub, drying her off and getting her moving towards bed. This is how we lived. After a few weeks of skipping PE, I started skipping school entirely. I would get up as normal, make my lunch and load it into my backpack with my books, then head out towards school. I found if I walked halfway to school before turning around to go back home it allowed just the right amount of time for my mom to leave for work. I would sneak back into the house and play the piano all day, talking to the composer Beethoven, whose spirit I imagined sitting at my side, coaching me and discussing his music. He was as weird as me, and we vibed together as I developed a special affinity for his piano sonatas. These were the happiest weeks of my life up to then. It was so nice not to have to deal with school anymore.
One Saturday afternoon my mom was reading the mail and she said, “What is this?” I looked at the letter she handed me. It was from the Department of Juvenile Justice. It said something to the effect of “Your son, Kirk, has been declared a habitual truant and will be made a ward of the court if you don’t respond by” such and such a date. Ooops. She looked at me in pained confusion. “But I see you leave for school every morning before I go to work!” Well, actually. I asked what “ward of the court” meant. She said, “They’ll take you away and put you in foster care, probably a group home somewhere.” What, no more private room with a piano?! This was a crisis indeed. “I’ll call Steve,” she said. I still can’t believe how people rallied on my behalf. I’m so lucky. Steve said he was willing to sign a release to get me out of PE for the rest of the year, and the school counselor told me the principal said they would only accept it because Steve was a doctor of psychology. The only caveat was that I would have to take one more semester of PE before I could graduate from high school in three years. Whew! And the band director said he was perfectly happy to have me as a student aide last period for the rest of the year. I couldn’t believe it, I was getting everything I wanted. But they said I had to sign a written contract, which I was to draft myself. So I wrote up a contract saying I would attend every class until the end of the year on the condition that I didn’t have to set foot in the gym again, and if I had even so much as one unexcused absence I would immediately be made a ward of the court. “Wow, that’s pretty draconian,” Steve commented, “Don’t you want to give yourself three strikes or something?” I straightened my back and said, “I don’t see any reason would I would have any unexcused absences.” So we both signed it. I discovered that merely by showing up to all my classes every day I could easily get straight A grades, and at the end of the year I was even presented the “High Achievement in Music” award in front of the whole school. To this day I still believe that if I had gone into foster care I would have died of a heroin overdose or suicide before the age of twenty. Thank you, Steve, you are still a hero to me!
kirkwise 