To My 4 Dead This
Year
Mom.
Last I saw
you I was still marveling after years,
that you had
shrunk, from a heavy woman
of 5’7” to a
birdish collection of bones
in sallow
skin that came to my chin.
Though you’d
been dry for years your brandy
had
dissolved much of your body
and its
ability to repair itself,
and cigarettes
had begun carbonizing
your lungs.
Eventually
there wasn’t
enough energy to produce mania,
a quiet,
tearful paranoia
replacing
the manic rages and their true madness.
I remember
you mug of E&J Gallo in one hand,
Merit Ultra
Light 100 with a 2 inch ash in the other, eyes hooded like a dozing lizard,
Telling 20
year old me “You do whatever you have to to survive”.
I did. And,
eventually, to survive, I stopped talking to you.
I remembered
one of the only requests you ever made (demands being your usual mode),
that you be
cremated and scattered at the Wiggly Bridge,
a place you
so adored
you pictured
it during a failed hypnosis session to stop smoking.
I scattered
you on the incoming tide, after some of my friends
and some
employees of the hospice told happy stories of you.
While I was
glad to know my memories of you
weren’t the
whole of your impact on the world,
I was left
with questions: why wasn’t I worth that much effort?
Why wasn’t your
son enough reason to get help, why didn’t I deserve this caring woman my
friends got?
Realizing
those questions showed a still burning anger,
I thought
about your 2 most important, and unintentional lessons, taught not by your words,
but the example of your life:
1. Repentance
is just a word, apology is meaningless; reformation is what matters; forgiving
the unreformed invites further hurt.
2. If you
can decide to fix your broken mind, then you owe it to others to do so.
Watching as
the in-rushing water took you to the peace you never found alive
I wondered
how many
times the tide will cycle
before I
have peace with my memory of you.
Professor A
Allan. I’d
wondered what became of you.
You, the
Elvis Room’s resident psychotic, entertaining and annoying the teens and 20
somethings with your weird.
Large,
bearded, in your 40s, surrounded by legend. According to rumor a former surfer
who could be seen in the background shot of some movie.
One evening,
as you made bizarre
and
offensive
comments to women
laughing
your “Hoohoohoohoo!” laugh,
I asked you
a personal question.
You seemed
not to care if you offended, so should take it as well as give.
“How long
did you spend in the hospital?” I asked.
“I was there so long I was part of the furniture. I was there so long they made
me an aide. But you’re kinda little.” They’d just make you a herpe.” And,
having hit the high note, you left the room.
Always
offering one of your cigarettes, Dorals, pointing out that they had part of
your name in them “Doral. See? Dor. Al.” Which seemed to mean you had to smoke
them, and why wouldn’t anyone want one?
And you had
that cigarette sex metaphor joke, the only thing you ever repeated in linear
fashion, something about the Lucky Strike Hotel, where “He slipped his filter
tip into her flip top box”. I meant to record it, but never got to it.
I asked you
once
“What
happened to you?”
And you
stopped being silly,
became
focused, telling me
that your
girlfriend had slipped you LSD
while in
college,
that you had
never wanted to try it,
weren’t
interested,
but she
didn’t care what you wanted,
and one
moment
you and she
were in your room
and the next
(you remember) you were in the hospital,
and nothing
was right again,
and they
gave you speed,
“Do I seem
like a speed type of person? No! I’m a downer type of guy, but oh no, they knew
best!”
The whole
story came out quickly,
dripping
venom, even after 25 years.
Boundaries
transgressed again and again,
and a
permanent alteration of your life,
putting you forever
in someone’s care.
You were
never just entertainment to me again after that.
Sometime
after that conversation you addressed me as “Doctor Chris!”
I replied
“Doctor Allan!”
“Doctor? Me?
Oh no! No, no, no. Not me!” you explained something about too much time, focus,
work.
“All right, how about Professor!”
“Hmmm…Yeah!
That works! I teach ‘em, you treat ‘em!”
From then
our greeting was
“Doctah C!”
“Professor A!”
“Indubitably!”
Your life,
before it ever intersected mine, was a story of making the best of it, building
from ruins.
I learned
from you that, when given a choice, take it.
And there is
always more than what stands before me.
Goat Ears
You probably
didn’t know
that you were
called Goat Ears.
The name was
given you
by one of
the kindest people I’ve ever known,
who never
swore,
but had to
tag you somehow
to fit your
demeanor:
loud and
arrogant. Nobody with Goat Ears
could be so
great as you thought you were.
I found the
Maine firefighters announcement,
the morse
code heralding your passing,
the
tributes.
I felt two
powerful emotions,
a relief
akin to liberation
and a
shocked resentment that they didn’t know
what
they were
honoring.
I was 7,
maybe 8
when it
started. You would have been 14.
You were my
first carnal knowledge,
unwanted,
disgusting.
You would
bring me gifts sometimes, toy trucks and the like.
In front of
others you would knock me down, and run away laughing.
I aged out
for you around 11.
I hadn’t
perspective enough to be grateful,
but life was
less awful.
I reached
adulthood, and sometimes wondered how many new kids were suffering my fate.
I dreaded returning to York
knowing you
were on the Fire Department,
terrified
I’d be injured
and you’d be
in the ambulance,
fearing my
reaction not yours.
A few years
ago I heard you’d reached 500lbs.
I knew you
had to be suffering in that shape, and was glad.
I heard that
you had been seen
after
attending an accident
running into
a convenience store
and cramming
down 2 loaded hotdogs,
uniform
shirt still covered in another’s blood.
That stuck
in my mind:
that’s
eating disorder behavior,
eating as a
drug
to escape
stress.
It’s common among
victims.
I wondered:
were you not
born
the thing
you were,
but made
that way?
Did someone
touch you,
and fill you
with self-loathing
as you did
to me?
Realizing
the pattern fit,
I felt years
of my hatred
warm
replaced
with pity.
Robin
I don’t
remember liking
Mork and
Mindy that much.
But your
stand up
in my teens
was
brilliant.
I tried to
imitate your fast-talking
silliness in
conversation, and talked myself down rhetorical cul-de-sacs by quoting you:
“I had to
give up drinking; I used to wake up nude in front of my car with my keys in my
ass saying ‘it’s fine, it’s just flooded”.
“Uh, dude, you
don’t have a car.” I was 15, and couldn’t argue.
But you were
always entertaining,
and I tried
to tell myself that was all.
It wasn’t,
of course.
I owe you a lot.
When I was
17, Dead Poets Society came out.
A friend and
I went to see it.
At that
point I clung to life by chewed nails,
Depression
always looming untreated,
feeling no
value in life
but the
moments of thrills and entertainment
and drugs.
My driving
motivation was to not feel bad.
Dead Poets
Society may not sound like a film made for psychedelics, but I took a tab of
exquisite acid (Woodstock, I believe, after the peanuts character), because that’s
what I did then,
and went to
the theater.
It could be
said
that I was a
little too
into the
movie
that night.
I heard the gun shot that isn’t in the film;
when Charlie
punched Cameron I shouted “YEAH!”
and when Cameron
mouthed off more I shouted
“Hit Him
Again!”
And when the
boys climbed on their desks
I had to
hold on to my seat to not climb upon it.
But I wasn’t
just tripping face; I was opened to the message as well.
I was the
same age as the boys in the film.
And, like the
character Todd Anderson, felt that everything inside of me was worthless, or
embarrassing.
He composed
that poem about the “Sweaty Toothed Madman”,
not making
it up, but letting it out,
because what
was inside him
was real and
vital,
and worth
hearing.
Your Mr.
Keating leaned in and, as the boys wildly applauded, said to him “Don’t you
forget this”. I felt you said it to me, and I haven’t.
You told me
it was okay to be me, to write as me.
And I’ve
written poetry ever since.
My life
would have gone a much different,
perhaps
shorter
way
had that not
happened.
My words
brought me validation,
let me feel
my life was
justified,
whereas,
before
I’d always
just tried to avoid hurting.
That way lay
drugs and death.
I’d
forgotten the sheer impact of that movie
on me
until I
heard you’d ended yourself.
I feel
guilty
somehow
that you
gave me such a gift
and now there
would be no way for me
to repay it.
But a gift
is given with no expectation of return.
So I’m left
with sadness,
But also
life,
and
so much gratitude.
Chris Walters
August 21, 2014
