Flashback: An Essay

Flashback



Take a guy.
Let’s say he is about my age: old enough to own a place and pay almost all his bills sometimes; young enough to understand that he is not getting any younger. Add a dose of fresh alienation—not enough to be unhealthy, of course, but enough to enable him to function in a world full of imbecility and indifference and all those unattainable happily-ever-afters awaiting him on the other side of his flat screen TV. Take this guy and give him enough stability so that he has no excuses, but plenty of alibis. Most likely, he is utterly average in every regard, except for the fact that, unlike almost everyone he knows, he is aware of it. Finally, add the oncoming collision of a twenty-year high school reunion and there’s no choice but to buckle up and insert all applicable clichés, complacent epiphanies and the half-earned angst that is awaiting an ideal opportunity to boil up to the surface.

Time to pay tribute. Yes, at this point it would seem appropriate to tip the 40 and pour out some beer for our dead homeboy. But we don’t because we are not drinking beer. Also, he is not dead, and we are not in a music video or even a bad movie, and above all, we are too cynical, self-conscious, or married to imitate such affected gestures. Unless, of course, we were being ironic, but it’s too early in the evening for that type of commitment, so we’ll stick to doing what we do best: retelling stories that never happened exactly the way we insist on remembering them. No harm done, a little bullshit and bourbon on the rocks never hurt anyone. Besides, I am increasingly aware that it is because these stories are so obviously embellished that we need them to be true. Add a few hours and more than a few drinks and once again, here we are: backs to the future, looking in the mirror for someone who should be standing alongside us.
This is not exactly what they mean by flashing back, and yet I’m trying to stay in the moment, knowing I can if I try hard enough. But first I need to make sense of that old saying, how does it go? If I knew now what I didn’t know then? No. If I knew then what I did know, now? I don’t know. I’m here, but now—and not for nothing—I’m recalling the mistake I did not make, almost two decades ago.

Remember Love Boat? Not the TV show, but a blunt laced with PCP, also known as angel dust. The boat. This was the holy grail of illicit drugs, and considering the fact that all drugs were illicit, period, even a dumbass underclassman knew this was filed under Fucked Up. I didn’t know shit but I knew that alcohol was off limits, marijuana was out of the question, and Love Boat was officially off the charts. This was the stuff that longhaired actor took an accidental hit of and then quickly found himself perched on a rooftop, trying to fly (or perhaps that was the surreptitious tab of acid in his fruit punch, same difference). We saw that movie in the ‘70s and it scared us even straighter. Nevertheless, every so often when we were shooting hoop after school, some older brothers would show up, commandeer the court and show us all the things we knew we could never do. Inexorably, one of them would see us seeing them, raise his eyebrow and say the dangerous words: “You lookin’?”
Most likely, the question never presumed a possible transaction, and was more an offhand (but not ironic, because nobody knew what irony was at that age) way of reminding us, at once, who they were, who we were, and most significantly, who we would never be. But some other kids were in on the action; they had to be. Why else would we constantly be on the receiving end of these perfunctory solicitations? Eventually, we agreed that it could only be one group of unusual suspects: the freaks. Older students, the rock concert t-shirt wearing army of outcasts; the rebels who at one time had been athletes, or nerds, of drama dorks, and then popped through the pimple of post adolescent purgatory and found themselves born again as deadbeats. The ones, we belatedly recognized, who saw through the self-immolation of Izod shirts and feathered hair, the ones who shirked intramural activities and the safety of numbers, the ones who could no longer belong to any Key Club that might accept them as members. The ones who never even got hassled by the jocks because they simply were not worth the aggravation; a cafeteria-style ass kicking would not earn a striving sophomore any status. These were the guys, everyone knew, who dared to flick their middle fingers at student governance, decorum and the future: they were going nowhere and seemed to be in a real hurry to get there. These were the ones, we decided, who had the audacity, when the brothers asked if they were looking, to say yes.

Just say no? Remember, this was a world before computers and consoles and cell phones and even CD players. Not an innocent era, by any means, but a time when some of us read books because we couldn’t think of anything better to do. A time when growing pains were the physical kind and the one thing everyone agreed upon was that we couldn’t get older quickly enough. A time, most likely, that comprised the formative years so many adults feel an almost unbearable longing for, mostly because whatever it is they were feeling can’t ever be felt that way again. Sentimental? Shit, I still find myself craving the same things I hoped for then: a pretty girlfriend (remember going steady?), a decent report card (also known as a performance review), to be considered cool by the types of people who are considered cool, and mostly to be accountable, at last, and free to do whatever the hell I want when I grow up. Someday.
We didn’t know how much we did not know, but we knew what everyone else seemed to understand. Such as, the U.S.A. could kick some Soviet ass if it had to (ask Rocky), that God existed (and, assuredly, was a Capitalist God), that he who dies with the most toys wins, and we all knew exactly what we’d become after graduating from our first or second choice colleges: some of us would be practicing L.A. law, some of us would be sporting Top Gun bomber jackets, some of us would get wealthy on Wall Street, and the rest of us would have the old-fashioned types of jobs that you could actually describe in one or two words. What we were not going to be was forgettable. We did not know where we were headed, but we were emboldened by an instinctual understanding that our parents’ wallets would insulate us from too much reality, or at least break our fall if any of us tripped climbing up that American ladder.
Not quite everything we believed turned out to be wrong, and life is usually kind enough to wait a while before it reveals some of the answers to questions you never knew needed to be asked. But even before graduation we were disabused of at least one illusion that took us down a notch or two: it wasn’t the freaks that dared not to just say no, it was ourselves.

Not me, you understand. I was too chickenshit, or at least too Catholic, to dabble in the dust, and while I reckon there was a vague contentment underlying that decision, I am even more relieved, looking back. See, I went to college, and I saw the reefer (smoked it too), smelled the shrooms (ate them too), saw the unsnorted remnants of white powder under the noses of blissed out fraternity brothers (fortunately for all involved, I did not have the funds for that type of fun). And, obviously, the alcohol. None of us were ever the same after those first dozen or so hangovers: no matter what it dished out, we kept going back to the unwell, looking for something to…what, exactly? Provide pleasure? Instigate adventure? Derail inhibition? Seek fleeting solace from the cold, cruel world? Sure, all that crap, but something else as well. There is a reason the most expensive advertisements are still allowed to promote an activity that kills more kids each year than any boogeyman on amphetamines—or Nancy Reagan for that matter—could ever conceive in their darkest dreams. There is something that alcohol almost, but never quite delivers, that keeps everyone in the game. Just like back in the day, there’s safety in numbers, and it would sure seem Un-American to cast aspersions on something so many people need to believe in.
Nevertheless, I saw a handful of buddies brought low, churned up and rehabbed before they turned twenty-one, and every year at least one friend or acquaintance finally finds something else to look forward to on Friday afternoons. What I’m saying is, I’m lucky. Because I never pushed my luck and ended up biting something that bit back and wouldn’t let go. But if I knew then, what I know now, I may have unwittingly joined a few of the guys—who got better grades than I did—when they took trips across town in a borrowed car.
Get this: not only were some of the guys we knew in on the action (and for the record, as far as they knew the freaks never touched the stuff—more irony wasted, like everything else, on the young), their escapades were abetted by a teacher. Put another way, a teacher at our school was paying them to make drug runs. To an adult, today, this shouldn’t seem shocking; indeed, it is practically expected. But that is only because we are too well acquainted with irony, which merely proves that we no longer have the capacity to surprise ourselves, if we ever did. In any event, it turns out that the mastermind of these Love Boat runs was quite possibly the least likely culprit and therefore (in hindsight?) the most obvious. Mr. X., as he was not known, since this is not his name, was at the time—and still, in my mind—ageless, simply an adult, although he could not have been much older than thirty. If this story were depicted in a movie, the car the kids borrowed would have been nice, perhaps ironically nice, instead of the unremarkable piece of shit it actually was. And, crucially, Mr. X. would be played by George Clooney, or a lesser star that still emanates the slick celluloid charisma no real people can ever obtain. In the movie, the teacher would have a tragic flaw: a college football injury that derailed his obvious path to the pros, or some type of self-loathing resulting from a dark secret that he finally confronts in the end. Or something similarly redemptory, and ridiculous. In truth, Mr. X. was a mess—not quite morbidly obese, but working on it with the inimitable dedication of a junk food enthusiast. To look at him, even then, it seemed exceedingly improbable that he was once a varsity wrestler (in another state, in another world) and an offensive tackle. Well, it was a little easier to imagine him as an offensive tackle. And he had the pictures to prove it. Nonetheless, those days behind him, he had really gone to the (hot) dogs, a second-rate high school jock who had peaked at age seventeen, then metastasized into a third-rate high school geometry teacher. At least, looking back, he’d had the educational upbringing (in another state, in another world) to have sufficiently mastered mathematics. Today, after TV and YouTube had their way with him, he would have been fatter sooner, and the best he could have hoped for was teaching P.E., although (again, ironically) the gym teachers are in better shape today then they were then. Hopefully they are dressing better as well.
Even today, it’s difficult to determine which revelation is the most unsettling: that one of our boys was casually smoking Love Boat with older, cooler guys (it was enough that, as a junior, he could hang with the senior wrestlers, the ones who walked through the locker room like Greek gods with acne), that he could dabble without fear of addiction (he could hit it and quit it, precisely what the rest of us, with our after school special sensibilities, were terrified of being unable to do), or that the assistant wrestling coach, and teacher (!), was a more than recreational user. He was crazy, and brazen, enough to loan his car, and his funds, to a group of varsity lettermen so they could cross the bridge into D.C. and get the goods. Or maybe they snuck right across town, in broad daylight, to the basketball court, near a neighborhood that was verboten even before rap music, and guns, were invented.

You know how this story ends: nothing happened (wait for the movie). The star athletes went off to school on scholarships and our boy, we assumed, grew out of his bad habit or, with his willing accomplices removed from the scene of the crimes, had no one to instigate further misdeeds. Mr. X.? Long gone; no idea where, not even worth Googling. Besides, unless he found Christ or Jenny Craig, the smart money says he’s currently kickin’ it in his oversized coffin. Full disclosure: it’s not his fault that I never understood parallelograms or gave a good shit about the Pythagorean theorem (remember that? Me neither), but he certainly didn’t do much to ameliorate my apathy.
In any event, everyone had plans before graduation; everyone had plans for after graduation as well, but that’s a different story altogether. Some of the guys were still pilfering liquor from their parents’ supply—that eternal fountain of youth; some guys (the smart ones, the lucky ones) were still trying to get laid for the first time before high school ended. Allegedly, some of them succeeded. Some people were busy doing whatever it was everyone did before you could live your entire life online. The rest of us, bored and boring, not knowing enough to be careful what we wished for, felt begrudgingly grateful to stand on the ostensible threshold of adulthood. We posed for pictures, we put on the caps and gowns, and eventually, inevitably, we strolled across that stage.
But one of us wasn’t there that day: our boy, who need not be named, and in the interest of fuller disclosure, was only on the periphery of my circle (that would need to be addressed in more detail for the movie). Still, we knew him, we grew up with him, and those of us who weren’t doing the things he shouldn’t have been doing were just as surprised as everyone else when, (it seemed) he was abruptly yanked out of school in the middle of the year. Just like that, he was gone, sent to one of those discreet asylums that only upper-middle class parents and pop stars from the cover of People magazine can afford. He wasn’t there, but he was with us, ensuring that we did not, in the name of good dumb fun, become unwitting apprentices to the Sorcerer who, with one angel-scented spell, could send us careening into an early adulthood. Or, even worse, some of the lives none of us would ever have imagined ourselves growing into.

Every Day I Have The Blues

Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.
Now that’s a song, a blues. The real item. Not to be confused with the cookie-cutter, paint-by numbers, copycat slop that most people think of when they think theyre thinking about the blues. These days, it seems, anything goes. Anyone can sing the blues. And they do. Its not unlike whats happening all over the place, to all types of music: there are no prerequisites or apprenticeships; there is no perspicacity, and no shame. Like so much of what passes for music today, it lacks that dirty authenticity, and conviction. There is, in short, no soul. It’s clean, polished and feeble. In a word, it’s fashionable. The point being, you arent going to find many folks who really know the blues. Of course, you dont sing the blues to talk about someone else; you speak up because you feel obliged to account for yourself. Whats it all about, then?
The Blues Ain’t Nuthin But A Botheration On Your Mind.
Yeah, what he said. Listen:
I’ve been down the road and I’ve come back
Lonesome whistle on the railroad track
Ain’t got nothing on those feelings that I had.
Doesn’t that make me sad? (You don’t say). No. In fact, exactly the opposite; it helps. Life might leave a mark, but music is always medicinal. Make me sad? No; happy movies make me sad. Manufactured moments sold on shelves are too easy to see through. Sparkly-toothed simpletons who tell us how to live leave me cold. Too-cool commercials give me cancer. And, of course, the ingenious march of a million soulless pixels remind everyone of everything theyll never obtain. Reality is never enough, so sometimes anything approximating art will suffice. I would, for instance, love to instigate some excitement into my own humble narrative. Unfortunately, a fight scene is not feasible; a car chase is too much to ask for, and a love interest would appear to be out of the question. And so: its just the music and me, as usual. As always, this isnt all that I need, but its more than I should expect, especially at night.

Rage Against the MFA Machine

Intermezzo: Art and Life

The people I’ve known in MFA programs (yesterday, today, and probably twenty years from now) get taught to write.
Or, they get taught to write short stories.
Or, they get programmed to write short stories.
Or, they get programmed to write certain types of short stories.
And?
The language is usually okay, although clichés are dispensed like crutches in an infirmary. The effort, for the most part, is there (no one, after all, would take the time to take a crack at serious writing unless they wanted to do it right; the only exceptions are the ones to whom it comes easily and who write the way most people urinate: often, every day, and it’s mostly water, or the other sort: the ones who don’t have time to actually write because they are talking about all the books they have planned out in their pointy heads, not only because it is less complicated to discuss ones brilliance at a party or in a bar, but also because there is always an audience, however reluctant). The underlying impulse, the central nervous system of these short stories, always at least approximates technical proficiency.
So?
What we wind up with is a story that avoids everything the young writer has not experienced: love, fear, empathy, and understanding. For starters. Style over substance equals an anaesthetized aesthetic; a soulless solution for a problem the writer created. And the short story, upon inspection, is a shell that reveals its non-essence. Poetic pronouncements of some of the important things the student does not understand.
In other words: short stories that might sell. Short stories that strive to be successful. Short stories for readers with short memories. And in some cases, a star is born.

Boy Do I Wish Bill Hicks Were Here

(Sigh).
Was just re-watching the recently re-released Sane Man DVD (if you haven’t seen it, get thee to a video store–and pick up the equally invaluable ‘live: satirist, social critic, stand-up comedian’ while you’re at it) and, inevitably, felt the painful pangs of regret: the almost incalculable void his absence left. and i’m not just talking about comedy, because he was self-evidently so much more than just a comedian (and just comedy, when done at its highest level, is quite sufficient, and close-to-impossible to pull of…quick, think of how many stand-up comics from the past two decades not named richard pryor whose work can be returned to repeatedly, with renewed joy, enthusiasm and reward? the list is short: carlin, chris rock, the lean and hungry, less solipsistic seinfeld…and perhaps the pre-lobotomized dennis miller. what else ya got?). Admittedly, it’s a pretty facile formulation to just assert “so-and-so was so much more than just a (insert endeavor–be it artistic or political or social–here)”. But the fact remains: Bill Hicks was (or should i say is? Yes, i should) more than a comedian. That’s the main reason it is never not a little painful to watch him work: the way his mind worked, and worked around the obligatory idiocies that even mediocre comedians routinely beat up like fish in the proverbial barrel. He took care of the light work as an appetizer; it was when he set his sights on politics that he sailed into the stratosphere, and i can’t help but believe–however naive i may be–that we would have been so much better off to have his voice to lampoon the Bush juggernaut when it actually might have made a difference. In other words, we’ve (finally?) crossed the threshold of tolerance (proving that the average american, even some republicans) are usually about 2-3 years behind the curve of Fox-news fed spin: I mean really, is there anything being said about, say, Iraq that wasn’t abundantly obvious to anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of the middle east waaaaaaaaaaay back in 2002? The only thing more intelligence-insulting than craven sell-outs like Colin Powell and the litany of chickenshit career officers who are only now coming out to attack the utter incompetence and mismanagement of the Iraq imbroglio (now that is has become politically expedient, if not imperative to do so), is their having the temerity to imply that they have known all along how wrong it was. Gee, thanks for speaking out now fellas. It’s nice to see that similar sentiment, which was roundly assailed as everything from liberal cowardice to outright treason less than 18 months ago, is now seen as valid and sound insight, when uttered by opportunistic politicos, running the gamut from Andrew Sullivan to the always insufferable and shameless Newt Gingrich (hey guys, I’ve heard that freedom fries go nicely with crow). Ditto the hijacking (for? by?) the religious right lunatic fringe, which, as usual, was dismissed as just that (lunatic and fringe) when it was ostensibly less threatening issues like the tragicomic “debate” about teaching “intelligent design” alongside evolution or the cynical bottom-dwellers who advocate putting the 10 Commandments outside of court buildings; but eventually, inevitably, it was a bridge too far during the Terri Schiavo farce, when the Big-Mac(hiavellean) Bill Frist–in a twist that could, and should, only befit a politician–tried to bolster his presidential chances and instead deflated them, thankfully, once most of the population saw through him as the feckless, lightweight, meddling mediocrity that he is. The questionas usualremains: what took so long? Did it really require almost half-way into a second term for folks to figure out that everything this administration touches turns to doo-doo? Its refreshing, of course, to see the spiraling approval ratings for Bush and company (anyone see that response Cheney got at RFK? That was a surefire Tivo moment, if I had Tivo), but its pathetic that it had to come to this for people to wake up. What was the tipping point? I maintain there wasnt one (though New Orleans served as the final piece of evidence that only the true believers could continue to deny), but rather that this entire misadventure has been a sort of imperfect storm of incompetence, close-minded myopia and cronyism masqueradingas alwaysas Capitalism, and that if you fuck up everything you do, sooner or later reality will catch up with spin. But getting back to Bill Hicks. I cant help but fantasize, even though I know in the darkness of my heart (or brain) that it wouldnt have made a damn bit of difference, how refreshing it could have been to see Big Bad Billy tearing into Bush. And Cheney. And Condi. And Rummy. And Wolfowitz, Powell, OReilley, et al. Just seeing the wonderful way he eviscerated Bush Sr. (and Reagan, and Quayle) in 1989 when Sane Man was filmed is enough to make one salivate at the opportunitiesAmerica, post 9/11, would afford him. But its also almost quaint to think about the (gasp) good old days (!) when making fun of Dan Quayle was part of any astute satirist’s game plan. Although the rich-get-richer religion of the GOP was alive and well right up until Clinton kicked down the barn door, (giving the Enron gang a respite, or time to regroup) and the woes of those on the other end of middle-class were as deadly serious as they remain now, it still seems like the world was a lot smaller, and a lot less apocalyptic than its become. And as easy it might be to blame much of this on the self-hating sociopaths who flew planes into our buildings, how much more comforting is it to (rightly) ridicule these repressed religious lunatics who fancy a few dozen virgins handpicked by Allah awaiting them than it is to consider our own democratically-elected (sort of) leader rebuking his father’s advice prior to the ill-begotten Iraq occupation, claiming he listened to a Higher Father who may or may not be his personal consigliere in matters of the impending clash of civilizations? Maybe there are times when the stakes are too serious for a comedian, even one who could be called, without hyperbole, a statesman–albeit a sardonic one–and when you can no longer look to music or movies or, have mercy on us, even the media to make sense of things, its up to us to save ourselves.

Cinderella Takes A Magic Carpet Ride And Sails Right Out Of Cliché

Cinderella Takes A Magic Carpet Ride And Sails Right Out Of Cliché

March 29, 2006
Wow.
Talk about clichés.
Okay, let’s talk about clichés.
When it is impossible to avoid cliché (because usually you want to do anything you can to avoid cliché, unless you don’t know better, in which case you may be a cliché without ever knowing it and ignorance, of course, is bliss), you are usually in that rare territory that transcends cliché, a place that obviates cliché, you are experiencing something bordering on sublime, the type of feeling that compels forced and fake imitation. In other words, cliché.
So how to talk about GMU’s improbable (impossible? inconceivable?) run to the final four. Can there be occasions that are so cliché that they get beyond cliché, exploding cliché, requiring a reevaluation of how clichés are classified and what they are capable of inspiring?
Enough.
Let’s put it another way: the GMU Patriots are in the fucking FINAL FOUR!If you watch college basketball, you love this story; if you watch sports you love this story. If you don’t love sports, that’s okay, you can get behind the underdog. If you don’t love underdogs then you are a Republican. Actually that is not right. Republicans (the politicos in particular and not the simpletons who support them) love this story—fantasize about it, in fact—because it is the one in a trillion type fairy tale that gives them the opportunity to pretend that the distressing majority of events are, of course, owned or co-opted or created by the unimaginably wealthy who are too powerful to need imaginations. (Indeed, I’m not entirely unconvinced that this entire GMU turn of events is not some elaborate scam engineered in the brilliant rat brain of Karl Rove in an attempt to deflect attention from Bush’s spiraling approval ratings…if I take this nightmare scenario to its illogical conclusion, the Patriots pull off the most unlikely of all wins Monday night, and inexplicably call me up to the podium—because, naturally, if it’s bizarro world, I’m there, and courtside—and as I step foot on stage and reach for the trophy, Tony Skinn rips off his mask to reveal that he is actually Dick Cheney, who proceeds to punch me in the balls…)
But seriously, this is too serious to make light of, and it truly transcends politics. And sports. And what can (and should) usually be shrugged off as the sophomoric rituals of collegiate competition. This is the real deal. Even if you are not an alumnus the bandwagon is big enough: hop on and enjoy this ride.