H said I threw D under the bus in my latest Solstice signoff, delivered just a week ago. He’s probably thinking that I’m ready to revise my recollections of many dead friends, he’s right in that regard, but he nearly died of blood clots close to his heart a year ago, so he’s assuming he’s on my to-do list, but people have died and there’s too much to say about the deceased before I harangue or herald H.
D died almost 10 years ago, from bladder cancer, which he had suffered from for years but refused to tell a soul or see an MD, instead relying on aromatherapy his wife promoted, and prayers, or maybe indulgences, since in his last months he was intent on wheeling an old priest to church in his chair, so he could say Mass for the palfrey few who attended on weekdays. D or Kosmo was “cowboy jihad” on the internet, finding ample support for his conspiracy leanings, introduced to the nefarious witch hunt by his son, which act he admitted regretting, but he had long pursued Kennedy killing subterfuge in all its versions, so the internet offered a vaster forum for deep state lazy imaginings. I had fun with the Paul is Dead conspiracy theorizing in college, but it was simply our intellectual Dungeons and Dragons counteraction to heavy studying. D was ready for more secretive suggestions when he favored Bush over Clinton by saying the “worse, the better” but I think he tended to believe in Bush before he knew he was behind big Pharma through his VP.
D’s family came from Nebraska, and he grew up near Cure d’Ars on the east side, with lots of siblings, Polish Catholics, conservative albeit you might have tagged him as a rebel since he painted, dropped out of CU, and threw his beautiful girl friend over for a younger dame he married, sired two kids, and barely made ends meet since he followed his own path of making just enough money to survive, painting houses since he seldom sold any of his portraits and landscapes, showed them once some 40 years ago at the old Wazee Supper Club when it was under the viaduct where his wife worked though his friends begged to buy a picture here and there, and now nearly 10 years ago his closest acolyte and friend of mine has catalogued his art and entrusted it to D’s wife and sons to bear witness, sell it, preserve it, but they’re all more than willing to trash it since that’s what he did regarding his family, neglecting to tell them that he was dying. Am I too harsh? So D was for most of his life, never giving an inch in argument, leaving parties by the back door, the French exit, hardly offering thanks for the memories, the good times. He was good for a laugh when he was high and pointing out the absurdities of politics, but don’t expect empathy or encouragement from ole D. He drove ATVs and rode horses herding goats down near Trinidad the last few years of his life, where he could drink and paint and get away from it all: you can Rest in Peace grazing in the grass of your life. I’m over you though you occur to me daily.
Just saw some article in the Times about whether philosophers should be therapists. D would have liked and laughed at this, as he proclaimed himself an arbiter of life’s choices, the restless, lonely path he took. I didn’t read the article since I don’t care to be confirmed once more in ideas I regard as obvious — philosophers test the questions of morality, mortality, language, government; and therapists handle similar questions as they relate to the individual relation-wise. I think planners should be therapists, since they’re in charge of the connectors that make a community. When people lose those connections because they move away, abandon their roots, get off the grid, when they rely on vehicles to get them where they want to go, on the internet to make friends, on fossilized institutions to allow them spiritual guidance towards a life beyond death, then they quit relying on themselves to ring someone up, walk down the block to join friends, carouse at an old guys party, join the crowds on First Fridays to see art, meet the artist, talk the higher plane, not attend mass, like catholic youth are counseled to do for nine consecutive months to insure admission to heaven — that was kid’s stuff. The only connection on the astral plane is via city sidewalks, pavements, surface streets, not the highways that bisect communities and take people out of town. Suburban enclaves that manifest neighborliness through covenant restrictions, cul-de-sacs, and back yards without alleys strangle community because they’ve limited connections, back fence conversations. Connector streets create patterns in a city, and that’s urban poetry, inclusive, ebullient, evocative, ever changing. I love walking the flagstones of old Denver. They tell my story and maybe yours.
Why the rant about dead friends, followed by ruminations on the city grid? At least D spent most of his time riding the streets of Denver, as did M who I’m also reconsidering in memoriam, even though he passed 30 years ago, but having a Christmas time gathering with old classmates from high school spooled my thoughts about living in the city, since the brothers at the luncheon were exclusively living in the burbs, except for the two friends I drove to this Arvada restaurant that another classmate owns. We were the smart guys, the three of us, back when schools tracked students, and the three of us are living in Denver in homes that so many people of our generation abandoned for the suburbs, in the white flight of the 1970s, and the allure of spacious homes and park like lawns that secured entry into the expanding middle class, built with MBAs on financial molehills made to look like mountain sanctuaries. It was always the schools were better there, for my kids. Luckily I spent the summer after my senior year of high school working in a warehouse in the bottoms of Kansas City, commuting everyday from Raytown, promising myself I would never commute again. What a waste of time and energy it was, and these jamooks from high school are still fooling themselves over their fake and bankrupt heroes, as though they never knew that Big Time Wrestling in the days of Dick the Bruiser and Gorgeous George was all a scam. No doubt why 45/47 supports big time wrestling, he’s the king of scams and just wants his name shouted from the mike within the golden ropes of the mat.
G who I grew up with has already confessed to resigning from the mortgage business back before the Great Recession of 2008, when he realized that the banks were swindling people into buying homes they couldn’t afford; he has also said he never should have sold his parents’ house by Rocky Mountain Lake Park — it was small but right on 46th across from the park. G went to work for Regis maybe 20 years ago in fundraising as an alumni liaison, so he knows something about tact. Not like the fellow at Christmas lunch who got up to recite some stupid jokes à la Carson’s Carnac — he be forty years late with these jokes and they stink, talking homophobia and partisan politics, and in the parking lot he’s telling another guy about how he wants to preserve conservative values. That’s what most of these jamooks are about, they voted for Trump and still believe his immoral grandstanding. When my two friends got back in the car to leave, Rilke, the person to be most admired for his helping the poor, serving the infirm, teaching the disabled, said it was wholly inappropriate — we may not return to the fold. But we’re the three who still live in the city, and our connections are tight, to our families, to jobs, to grocers, to neighbors, that the rest of the bunch sacrificed years ago, driving everywhere and now complaining about the traffic. The three of us have little to say about motor congestion, since we don’t contribute to that polluting phalanx of the middle class who manspread its legs along the Front Range.
I’m inclined to think that I’m smarter than most people, but have never admitted it aloud or even in writing, probably due to my mother more than any other person, although my wife has kept me educated and ambitious, maybe in a survival mode, now she even says I’m powerful, but what I mean is that I’ve always excelled academically, rationale-wise, but I’m learning that I may be brilliant having never thought this my whole life, as a generalist always wanting to know more about something else after having barely mastered the subject at hand. (Donna’s girlfriends, old friends threw her over 20 years ago because they apparently agreed she was egotistical, not calling her out, but whining like middle-schoolers; these so-called friends were in their fifties, so I guess Donna just careered past them — I have to admit I’m proud of her, and occasionally proud of me.) What does having a high IQ back when they tested for intelligence even mean? I’m always a student, and now realize that I know many things across a landscape of subjects. Always surprised that other folks don’t know music all kinds from Chopin to Arvo Pärt to Hank and Merle, Roxy Music to Raymond Scott; or fashion or design, architecture à la Liebeskind and Ponti; or literature or art or plants trees perennials greenhouse construction rock houses flagstones metal roofs or mid modern homes food and nutrition tapas and small plates and politics and history? What do people think in their macMansions fronted by bluegrass lawns that suck the planet dry, or their mountain condos fishing or biking or listening to the summer orchestras? Is this all there is, is there any more? They talk contractors and cabinets and washing machines, without having ever built something themselves. My wife and I are designers, which can encompass more than even artists, but it’s the practical arts, and I never specialized to the extent that I saw in most professionals, who professed to know everything in their field, whereas I was always grasping for more knowledge about the peripherals, the origins, the consequences, the general view. Almost 40 years ago a writer and philosopher in landscape design school intoned that all the action was on the edges, and that’s what I’m seeking, life on the border. It’s that wide ranging curiosity and comprehension that I call statistically smart. It’s why most people who first meet me think me stuck up, because I’m quiet, observing, looking them in the eye, waiting for them to say something I haven’t already guessed at.
J died just the other day, December, from the long term effects of emphysema, which I expected him to die from decades ago. He noticed me in high school nearly 55 years ago for my shirts and matching socks, color wise, which effect or affect he thought cool; it was nice to be noticed since I was otherwise quiet, and he suggested I date one of his girlfriends who he undoubtedly instructed to kiss me since I didn’t know much about girls and sex since I grew up with a family of females who kept all that dating innuendo to themselves to keep me pure, or maybe they never assumed to know what guys want. Music was important to me as was writing and movies and I think J and I connected on some of those planes even though he was rich by my standards until I actually visited his house I thought so, it was a blonde 50s ranch near Montview and Quebec and was no great shakes but he knew that and sometime after high school he started looking for his birth mother because he was disgusted by his middle class business father, and he loved Kerouac and so he wanted to caterwaul around the city writing poetry and whoring, and I mean that because he talked about some dame on the second floor of a downtown walkup who he had visited and frequented and I had a hard time thinking this was still a thing, but J was living the rogue life, and he’d been a top baseball prospect but he fretted that away drinking and doping, so he became a literary light amongst our group of friends early in his 20s, already married with a kid and bouncing around thinking that’s what writers do, probably more like Cassady than Kerouac.
J and D cast themselves as bohemians, sporting thrift store clothes, tweedy jackets with khakis, buying pot from a now famous comedian who dormed at Regis College when it shared a campus with the high school, they watered golf courses at night after dropping out of college, up in Evergreen and then Park Hill, where they could drink and smoke dope and drive Cushman carts around the courses setting sprinkler risers in shifts. They did not long for degrees, careers, or commitments. A few of us joined their scrabble lot at times in our twenties, but we finished school, always worked, whereas J and D made their ways unbeholden to society or family. They are dead, and me is beholden to some good times from their lot.
I don’t remember what J did many of those years in our 20s. As smart as he was, I expect he assured folks of his worth, but soon disappointed, as he was determined to write, read, play the Neal Cassady role of driven vagabond while still keeping a wife and kid in stead. His philandering finally irked me enough that I didn’t want his company or camaraderie, his boisterous hankering after his mistress, his debased familial regard. My sentiment applied to most of the guys who hung around drinking and doping and saying little while we listened to Bob Marley and Pharaoh Saunders Archie Shepp and Lou Reed but I finally took the wives and girlfriends to the gay Broadway where we could dance and that led to me taking up with C who was J’s wife in a tumultuous affair that J finally broke up and I fled back to my college steady in Chicago; this was almost 50 years ago. I missed J’s memorial last night at an AA meeting hall — although we had seen each other over the years, the occasions were scarcely friendly, a loss for both of us. His bookstore on upper Larimer was the height of his ambition as far as I could tell, maybe his writing but I’ve never read it. A close friend said the writing was fine, but he’s said as much about mine. I didn’t think I was welcome to honor his memory, but then again, most people had abandoned J. Like D, he retreated to the welcoming arms of the church, in his case subsidized housing for the homeless near Immaculate Conception Cathedral. Sounds like Kerouac craving to me.
When I returned to Denver after a stint in Chicago, I arrived energized after seeing the Stones and Bruce and burly bearded drag shows, working as a computer programmer wearing Pierre Cardin suits loving Roxy Music but not the Windy City weather, so I broke with my college partner and found the same old crass cruel creatives in Denver. I wanted to collaborate, thought that the lot of us could write our different versions of 50s 60s 70s provincial life growing up in the Queen City of the Plains, Mile High Denver, not Dallas but Dirt Dynasty on the TV, 40 years ago I suggested this journal gazing, but my friends who had some notion of responsibility who had jobs and grew up in North Denver were usually dismissed by the likes of J and D, east siders who traveled on the bus across town to attend Regis, at least the first two years of high school. That ride through downtown must have attended them to the peripatetic urban vibe, the lure of downtown, and although I only rode the bus occasionally to my stop by the fire station at 36th and Tejon, I had been riding the bus far longer than most of these high schoolers, since I rode it from 44th and Federal to where my mother worked near 17th and Humboldt from 3rd to 5th grade. Like my whole life, I knew I experienced and learned more than I revealed, gave it up to only a few friends who gained the long and wide lonesome perspective of who I was. J modeled himself after Kerouac, found the writer’s house in Lakewood, opened up a bookstore, wrote poetry, lived on the lam after finding redemption through Alcoholics Anonymous; but I’m the one who road the rails, mopped the Coliseum after the Stock Show, worked for the Colorado and Southern and apprenticed as a taxidermist, drove a cab, became a master gardener, all those things that marked a bohemian lifestyle. I’m still kicking, took a licking, still ticking like a Timex.
So I dream of catching the #6 bus up the street from St. Catherine’s, 60 years ago, riding it downtown to transfer to a #17 or whatever coach went out 17th Avenue to Humboldt, to where my mother worked for the Zarlengo doctors. Those Regis boys were in the back of the bus when I was taking it cross town, when the bus driver asked me after a few rides how old I was, I was tall for my age, and I told him I was over 6 and under 12, and sat down, some of the high schoolers sniggering at my smart answer. I would sit behind the driver in the first two-seater; the first bench faced the aisle and was reserved for the infirm. A blind beggar would often sit on the bench across, rolling his boogers between his fingers. The driver kept a screen rolled down behind him, to deflect the spit wads shot by the high schoolers from the rear of the bus. This was the 50s so most kids walked home to mothers housekeeping fathers toiling away at jobs, but I took the bus crosstown to where my mother worked as a receptionist, she knew most of Denver’s Italian community since they favored her doctors the Zarlengos. After transferring downtown, where that blind beggar sat on the sidewalk asking for coins in return for pencils, at 17th and Stout, I would catch the red and white bus out 17th to Humboldt, past the Purple Onion and Folklore Center, places I was always curious about. Most days I would do homework in the lobby of the medical building; other days I would wander the neighborhood, now called Uptown or North Capitol Hill. They tore down the building my mother worked in for so many years, where I found more whorin’ ala explorin’ than J ever enjoyed, long before I met D and J.
What’s with these dead or forgotten souls that irks me now? My wife keeps telling me I don’t recognize what she does for me, the vacations, excursions, galas, and gallery openings that she wants to attend nonstop. I thank her and compliment her on her up cycled clothing that is the talk of the town. How does my haranguing dead guys validate me? We don’t know who we are relative to another asylum soul until they’ve passed, and we can’t change what we were to them, although we can start to finally assess what they were to us. I was embarrassed thinking of it later in life, but my mother gave me a red sweatshirt back when sweats were new that said, “it’s hard to be humble when you’re the greatest” and I bet it was all in caps and I wore it religiously, and that’s a good word for how I respected my mother. I did what I was told and seldom strayed from the program of getting good grades, scholarships, defining a path in life. I scarcely ever questioned, but was curious, kept the exploration within bounds to please her. The secret was she was a big city Chi-town woman who got taken by a Southern man left holding a boy who she put her dreams in. She brought up a smart boy, 40 years old when she gave birth so I could’ve had some conditions, my wife always says deficient or brilliant when a baby’s mother is that age. Mom made me aware of the world and through her example of trial and effort how to win, how to do what I wanted since she didn’t always get her wishes. She had moved three young daughters from Chicago to New Mexico to Denver after being widowed, and then took up with a salesman from Alabama, living on the edge Mom was. She had a taste of the good life after growing up with a mother who ran a neighborhood store and a father who painted houses. Her younger brother had drowned when she was 18; she went to college for a year, then married a detective and birthed three daughters. She attended FDR’s 1932 nominating convention in Chicago. The family moved to a new house in Chicago Heights, then her husband got sick and died. Keep calm and carry on she did.
Like the straight and narrow path I followed through school, the streets where I grew up in North Denver were on a grid, and beyond the grand City Beautiful parkway Speer Boulevard that traversed the city, I was unaware of suburban layouts that channeled cars onto major arterials and frustrated through drivers in neighborhoods where the streets curved and ended in cul-de-sacs. The Scottish neighborhood near 32nd and Zuni that comprised winding streets named Dunkel and Argyle gave me a taste of country living albeit the houses were too small, shotgun, working class, but I found the layout confusing — my paper station where I picked and folded the Denver Post before delivering it was in an alley off Zuni; I think I only once helped deliver papers on those winding streets that probably defined the Highlands for its settlers who bought the cheap land across the Platte, alongside the Irish and Italian immigrants who founded North Denver. It would be generations before these immigrants moved to Berkeley or Applewood.
Downtown Denver extends a curious site plan since it grew up around the confluence of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek, with the correct compass grid applied after its origin. 30 years ago I imaginatively speculated that the diagonal nature of the downtown district afforded most people a view of the mountains in three directions, a pleasant amenity. The locals on the Northside favored simple things, straight forward trades and business, whereas the residents of East and Southeast Denver impressed me as more sophisticated, people who wanted covenant communities, eventually outfitted with gates like the Polo Club. When the North Denver Italians wanted less city living, more a middle class enclave beyond the borders, they moved to WheatRidge and Lakewood, where the streets were still gridded. Not until you reached the rich suburb of Bow Mar did a person encounter the winding streets of the eastern and southern suburbs. A few streets wound along the ridges that fell to the western valleys between Denver and Golden, but most streets still followed the compass layout of streets platted throughout the West.
Yet most of my high school mates moved to the south suburbs when they raised families like stock brokers. New houses that were affordable with suburban lawns that mimicked parks, no alleys since alleys where you dumped your trash invited trashy strangers, burglars, ne’er-do-wells, and of course there was white flight from the city to the novel landscape of Highlands Ranch 50 years ago, with its curvilinear pavements where kids could play in privacy fenced backyards or walk the streets devoid of hotrods because there was no telling how to get through the hood unless you lived there. These are third, fourth generation transplants who got lost gazing at their prosperity. But J and D remained in the city, where they could hobo the alleys and hear the tunes spun by their hearts. They never made much money, so the big houses and suburban lawns were out of the question, reserved for fellows in finance who got MBAs, who lacked imagination. No doubt this affinity for the city kept us allied to each other.
I learned the streets and avenues and places and parkways and boulevards of the Queen City of the Plains riding my bike throwing papers, delivering telegrams, commuting cross town in traffic, biking to work, never owned a car, so the straight surface streets were my track, my marathon. I suppose what bothers me about the ‘burbs is their exclusivity, their heralding the same types as moi who live next to me who talk like me and covet me, their covenants of me myself and mine. Too many times I’ve explored the curved country roads of the new neighborhoods developed outside the urban core and wound up in cul-de-sacs that threw me back onto the connectors that delivered me to these dead ends. I would just boomerang back into the city, where plenty of neighborhoods seal their approval with distinct nationalities, but Denver has usually allowed integration of types, except for the redline districts of North Capitol Hill, where blacks were excluded from buying homes across the line, but that has changed over the last 20 years. West Chicago and Oak Park were separated by a street, just like Race Street in Denver, which was close to the redline real estate demarcation. These days, only the suburbs seem ultra white and christian, and that’s mostly to the south and east, extending beyond the early country club territories. Denver even has a RedLine Art Center, where you let it all go when you cross that red line.
M was the first friend who died of AIDS. CL’s beau died from a transfusion early on in the plague. So, my two high school buddies were changed by the epidemic. We had a long history before that, outsiders from catholic prep schools. M lived near Athmar, in a house on Clay south of Mississippi, and CL lived in the western burbs that were old, and she went to St.Mary’s way southeast. I lived in North Denver, so we were friends living on the edges of the city, but that rendered us close pals in our nondescript neighborhoods on the West Side.
M moved back from Chicago as a librarian 40 years ago. I remember he took me to a drag club that featured a burly queen who sported whiskers. M had one of those two-dimensional pictures of Christ in his apartment that changed depending on your perspective, the one that wore a crown of thorns before it glammed you as a true-blue Christian with his Anglo eyes. That was the absurdity of times-they-are-a’changin’ in the 70s, when Christ looks out from the window of a gilded frame about to be crucified but allures like the drag queen you saw last night clubbing.
He died too young, and so did many gay guys in the 90s — at least M had the pleasure of becoming a godfather to my son, his best friend until he was twelve, when he sat by M’s bed as he was dying, after asking us why he didn’t play tennis with him anymore, after D his mother and I stopped pedaling compassion because all hope was lost for his recovery, our son still sat by M, the best friend who puffed his cheeks when he didn’t get what he wanted, and had settled into a full-cheek lips pursed silence as he fretted away. He puffed his cheeks in silence once when we were driving to a kegger that CL knew about near Daniel’s Park long before it was developed and preserved as Cherokee Ranch, back when natives held pow-wows there. Not sure what made M upset, maybe we didn’t find the spot, but he played his vain game of silent Dizzy Gillespie cheeks, and frustrated the lot of us all the way back to the city. I’m tempted to throw him under the bus, too, for making stories and telling lies, to me, my wife, incongruities that are only now coming to light after disputations with D my wife, but maybe it’s memory and how we all misconstrue the details and then build layers of flakey phyllo into a croissant of a recollection. I still have the ofrenda my son and I made for M after he died, with its rhinestone earring and racquetball glove. My friend Rilke asked me how I remember these lines and stories, and I tell him I’ve been writing all my life that even in the midst of an episode I recall several versions or interpretations of the facts and when I don’t even have those, I make up the rest as alternative facts, as much as writer historians like Greenblatt did with Will in the World: this is probably what happened given the context and facts that I have, about the puffing of the cheeks and other episodes of missed memories.
Bike Mike died during the pandemic, alone in an apartment just east of Broadway, the street where he hung out for most of his years. He became a friend after becoming a tenant on our property, and those relations sometimes conflicted. I didn’t know much about Mike when H recommended him to us for the rental. I learned what a fine videographer he was, a mensch of an artist, and also how he did exactly as he pleased. He lived next door for over 20 years, a constant companion and eccentric who helped with computer problems, explaining them for far too long to people who wanted a solution in no time, always the teacher but never understanding work that didn’t allow perfectionism, he pushed our limits with his colonization of trash, anything that came in the mail, piling it in his living room, temples of cigarette butts, and when we said it was our house, our property, he deemed it as such, cleaned the refuse, but soon rebuilt his empire of waste, an immersive art project while the first national performance artists were appearing at The Bug. He said he should have told us about maybe losing his glasses in the toilet. He drank himself delirious, bought the bar drinks, then would have to borrow funds till his next paycheck. He said he would observe the fact that it was our property and house, and he was only renting it, but he couldn’t help himself. We told him to get out, and he cleaned the cottage before he left. I saw him a few times after that, usually at the Irish bar off Broadway where Bike Mike was a staple. H always said he repaid his loans, but he still owes me $40 from the last time I saw him, before he died. H and R and I toasted him at the bar a year after his passing. The barkeep fondly remembered him.
My college mate went into hospice just the other day. I poured myself a glass of bourbon and put on Julie Driscoll. We listened to her back at Lake Forest 50 years ago. DR was an acerbic soul from Wisconsin, which I learned from staying with his family over holidays since I had no money to go home for every Thanksgiving, Wisconsin was a state that produced progressives as well as McCarthyism, I don’t mean Eugene, although Minnesota is the same kind of progressive cum-lade conservative state since George Floyd was murdered there and the anti-vaxers got hold of the place. Prince was the same progeny, making the best sexy r&b ever while petitioning for the Witnesses, which might have been just a riff on a Marvin Gaye song. I noticed DR when he was in his cups as a freshman, regaling guys leading their dates back to the girls’ dorm at Deerpath, sitting in front of North Hall, giving everyone a piece of his mind about the formalities of dating. He was loud, abrasive, and entertaining — no one took offense. We became roommates as freshmen found their compatible others, and so began a friendship that found me getting to know his family, staying with Ma and Pa in Cedarburg on holidays when I couldn’t return home, even hitchhiking down to South Carolina one Spring Break to where they had moved as DR’s dad was transferred there as a manager for Square-D. We toured about a few days on that trip, drinking Rebel Yell and visiting Francis Marion’s grave, the Swamp Fox of Disney fame.
And yesterday DR died. S who was the Admissions director at LFC called me to say that he had talked to DR over the weekend, and he was garrulous as ever, but according to his brother-in-law grew comatose the last two days. I was happy to hear that he was obnoxiously loud without being spiteful to the end. DR’s wife texted me to say that he had died, but she had read to him a note I had sent saying my time in college with DR were good years, and I was listening to the music we enjoyed, the CTA album, Gary McFarland’s America the Beautiful, and Bill Evans, whom DR introduced to me. I just learned that Evans was a heroin addict, alongside other jazz greats like Charlie Parker. I wonder if DR knew this. We roomed sophomore year in a dorm set aside for frat members who preferred soul music and 50s rock and roll over blow out parties full of dames — we liked it like that, and they were willing to cut me slack on dues as long as I bartended for their beer glugs a few nights a week. The frat boys tolerated my long hair and dark glasses, a freak on their rolls, because I was crazy enough to play a quadrophonic album I had of John Phillip Souza marches at full volume on Saturday mornings, to get the weekend wonking.
DR smoked a lot of dope that year while I was protesting the Vietnam War, when I was considering my options as regards the draft, leaving campus for over a week hitchhiking to DC before driving to Boston and then back to Chi-town, so far behind in my studies by then that I no longer thought about dropping out since I was in danger of losing my scholarship, then arranging study abroad in Berlin for the Spring, DR and I diverged in our pursuits, albeit we remained friends the last two years of college but I did not live with DR. He worked in the admissions office for a few years after graduation, and I think he told himself he’d had enough of LFC forever after, since I only met him once for a reunion although I urged him plenty of times to join me. While I was in graduate school I visited DR and his family outside of Boston, where he lived an American life in the suburbs, like where he grew up in Wisconsin, whereas I was always exploring an urban existence, on the edge, even though it was Denver, a cosmopolitan province. I was living on the industrial grid while he enjoyed his country roads.
I bought birdseed yesterday for the two feeders in the yard. DR had shown me at his suburban home how he fed the birds everyday, something he no doubt grew up with. Outside of dogs, I had never spent time caring for animals or wildlife. My mother had always considered cats and dogs as practicals, the cat her mother kept in her little grocery to clear the place of varmints, her first collie-chow mix protection for my older sisters after the move to Denver, and my German shepherd to accompany me on my paper route after I was robbed one night collecting bills, named Ginger after my mom’s dog which must’ve been the only pet she ever had. When we visited 30 years ago when my son was 12, DR introduced me to feeding birds as an integral stake in a homeowner’s stewardship of the stead. My son introduced his kids to urban skateboarding, which I’m not sure he appreciated given his suburban lifestyle.
In recognizing the faults of my friends, inexorably after their passing, I find myself competing in my head with those who once friended me having rarely called them out in person. I should be having this conversation with a coterie of pals who knew the departed, but I can’t comfortably speak ill of the dead. I seldom spoke up under any circumstances, unless I was called upon, so much so that an associate professor in grad school midway through the year told me to ask more questions because they were always insightful. I typically listened to everyone else in the class to see if my queries were answered before rousing more discussion. From friends I learned as well, only defending myself from their accusations when it breached my good record of deeds and attachments. The dead souls I regaled may have said some spiteful things about me, but they also invited me to be part of their worlds, and for that I was usually grateful. I could enumerate the good times as well as the bad vibes, declaring it a wash, but memory has brought more pain than salvation. I’m learning to lean on my regrets for redemption, my thoughts about how I was maltreated or ignored, when I wanted M and D and J and Rilke to each write their Denver stories so I could collage them as a writerly montage of the times, at the start of the last half century, to document my generation. Now must I write and stage a memoir in situ, to castigate and celebrate my friends and enemies, and maybe trace their roots and branches across the city pavements, to let the streets talk for them, and situate the evidence in a salon to exonerate me for my quietude?
PS I Love You
Memorial today for A, or Mr. J who did all those crazy fun things his parents scolded him for that his friends admired him for all the same and so his theatre students came down stage, and his sons celebrated him, his long suffering wife thanked them all saying she missed her couch used in a production but the slides show them all enjoying life except for A’s last hospital stay and I’m playing the Beatles because I remember hearing Till There Was You back with A, a pretty song when we were 13 years, 60 years ago, not quite understanding the undertow of desire and fleeting love but A photographed birds that two sons in soliloquies saw them winging: the fleeting, the swoop, the scoping eyes of the birds, just like the dames that A and I dated, back when he knew more than me and gave it all up for his students, whereas I held back and am still coalescing that furtive glance into my life by all those who know me. I picked up an old copy of Seven Gothic Tales by Isak Dinesen from my shelf the only book I ever stole from a host on one of my hitchhiking tours and found an article I had clipped about Mr. J who was teaching the youngsters to communicate in a drama program the clipping inserted in the book where thirty pages were missing which I found reading The Supper at Elsinore and now he’s missing I so want to talk to him again and so I will in my Beatles’ dreams.