BY way of lightning (c) 2007
I strummed with my finger tips and a pick close to the guitar’s pick up so that I could hear myself trespassing youthful organized melodies. I stared out the window and the clouds came close to the ground. I swear that I felt something at the same time that I heard the first of the storm’s thunder roll. Then I put together the tightest lick on my guitar ever. Everyone started staring at me. Immediately, the storm infiltrated the amps and caused them to hiss. At that point I felt David. But I came to doubt my enlightening experience because one of the kids proclaimed that my guitar was playing hot and sounded like a burned out pawn shop guitar. I stopped playing, turning away to walk to the window and hide my tears. I saw the rainbow and sun’s rays now shine as I felt like David had never left me.
During the final minutes of the lesson I asked one of my fellow students to teach me Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You Were Here,’ a song that was one of Dave’s favorites.
video of "Wish You Were Here" cover below
___________________________________________________________________________________
BY way of lightning
It’s been almost
a decade since I last saw David. We were childhood friends. And later in life
we traded in childish games, like hide and go seek, for thousands of gallons
worth of liquor and beer and other substances; while we shared the woes of lost
loves, bad childhood memories and how the world had wronged us.
I was a clingy
young adult using the ole’ ‘Momma and Daddy ruined my life so now they and the
world owe me’ route to keep myself enabled. I was existing in my Mom’s garage
apartment and Dave had his own house that he got through aid of his uncle. An
uncle he also worked for doing air conditioner work. I’d come over to Dave’s
house to hang out after he’d get off of work. We’d listen to music for hours.
There he taught me how to play chess, and would always fix me one of his
delicious steaks. At around two a.m. I’d always still be drinking while good
ole’ Dave was passed out. I’d usually leave around the time the sun was first
making its presence known. Then I’d sleep the day away, and visit a few other
friends while Dave was at work.
Dave tried to get me on working with
him once. But that stretch only lasted a few weeks before Dave, his uncle, and
I agreed that everyone would be better off if I didn’t work there anymore. What
did I care because the job was beneath me anyway? It was voluntary economic
slavery.
Dave, every now and then, would cleverly
preach to me about doing the right things in life. For example, I remember he
assured me that I wasn’t an alcoholic yet, but maybe well on my way to becoming
one. He had been in those AA loser rooms where folks had traded in their
affluent lifestyles for group home living. We’d toast to such things that we
were better than, like fake rich people, snobs, and hypocrite church goers who
lied about their lives and repented every Sunday just to indulge in their
secular fancies again. Dave adhered to the philosophy that if you’re going to
do something do it right. This concept of doing something right was greatly
followed when it came to getting inebriated, If you’re gonna’ get drunk do it
right, get tore up. At first he’d drink more Black Velvet than I would. But, it
didn’t take long for me to build up my tolerance. And when I did I resembled a
dog that would drink his own vomit. I would drink, puke, then drink more.
Dave would listen with patient ears
as I developed longer periods of psychotic escapism. These were periods in
which I would read into everyday events as being a spiritual map. Examples
would include: speaking of how the rain was God’s tears, and the steam rising
from the streets would be spirits rising from the underworld.
My symposiums would last for hours
and I’d try utterly in vain to keep my stories in theatrical tone to themes of
Dave’s music selection that would be blaring out of his thousand dollar stereo
system. Music that was Danzig, Queen, and Boston
Every now and then I would record my
own ramblings on a rinky-dink cassette. My music came mostly from using kid’s
keyboards. I’d let Dave listen to my sounds every now and then and I remember
him commenting once, “You ought to write a book, you could call it Confessions
of a Crack head.” He’d always follow with a condescending laugh.
The date of July
6, 1996 began a week filled with bad events. Starting off, my car blew up in
front of my grandparents’ house. I was convinced that it was Satan himself
coming down on me. It just all seemed so real to me and I felt justified, after
all the date was 666.
I was in a mind state where my
perception of reality was leveling out in between black outs. A couple days
later my parents cut me off financially. Which lead me on a violent, tempered
binger in which I threw items I owned off of my roof top, and as these items
fell to the concrete I screamed with the utmost conviction that I ruled the
world. With the broken keyboards it was “I RULE MUSIC!” with the left over
school annuals, it was, “SCREW THE EDUCATION SYSTEM!” with a few old
‘so-called’ happier times family photos it was “SCREW MY FAMILY!” with the
Bibles it was, “I’M BIGGER THAN GOD!” and so on and so on.
Dave helped me clean up the mess,
urging me to find a job while comforting my psychosis by rolling up weed we
smoked with Bible pages; “We gonna’ burn in hell for this!” we joked as we did
in chapters from Revelation.
I became convinced that my RED DOG
beer bottle caps were writing my own personal horoscopes like “Follow the Dog”
and “Lead, don’t follow.” One morning I
planned to go to bed by three and wake up by seven, put on my best thrift store
bought dress clothes and walk the streets searching for employment. I was
thwarted everywhere I turned by the weight of the sun bearing down. The alcoholic
vapors surfaced my pores, leaving prospective employers to give me an ugly
look, saying they didn’t need help. And as I walked away I heard their harsh
mocking about how crazy I was.
A line from Bob Dylan’s song sang to
me one night, Join the army if ya fail
and Dave playfully commented, “That’s where you learn how to be a real man.” In
between the buzz and a moment of egotistical faith I fancied myself in Army
fatigues carrying around an M-16 and shooting up bad guys like they did on G.I. Joe. But realistically I couldn’t
picture myself being one of them because I was usually bullied in school. Yet,
Dave sensed me pondering the fantasy and further ensued on the optimistic parts
of such a lifestyle, such as mentioning how the government pays for college.
Now getting free money set off a light bulb in my head. I could get all the
booze I wanted. Of course, I’d have to leave the weed alone. And that just
didn’t seem cool at all. With that fantasy quickly fleeting we continued on
with our ritualistic binge. However, the fancied thought of another chance at
life stuck with me like the irritating hook of a bubble gum pop song. Only this
time the hook was BE ALL THAT YOU CAN BE.
The line haunted me so much that a
week later I found myself in the Army recruiters office. I consciously sat on
my hands to vainly hide the shakes of two day alcohol abstinence. The recruiter,
with eagerness, was so enthusiastic it seemed to be fake, and tried to sell me
on the peaks of Army life. Then when he walked away to get the predictor
equivalency test, my eyes fixated on a manual on his desk that read verbatim
what the recruiter said to me, like a telemarketer’s script. It even had the
cheesy greeting of Hello my name is______ and yours.
Follow
by a strong hand shake.
“Well, Roman,” the recruiter pauses
to hide the manual, “here’s the test.” He hands me a number two pencil, a
bubble sheet, and the five page test. Fortunately, by now my hands had ceased
shaking. Thirty minutes later, the recruiter took the test back up and
disappeared into his office. I knew for sure that my score would be lower than
low thus disqualifying me from a new chance at life. The recruiter had his head
down when he returned. He was pretending to be studying the test score. I
quickly rubbed my eyes like I had some sort of allergy, in order to hide my
tears of rejection. When I looked up I was met by his warm smile, “This is a
fair score…”
After that I
stuck with the safer alternative of whiskey and beer, and ran on the high
school track in preparation for boot camp at Fort Leonardwood , Missouri Fort
Lost
And my rifle replaced my bottle. Yes
indeed, I shook and hallucinated off all the toxins I consumed back home. Even
saw skulls in the moon. When I had phone privileges I’d call up Dave. He’d be
so proud of me. Yet, it became too distant for us. Or was it because Dave
represented a part of myself I could never go back to?
The Army life took me to foreign soil.
In those lands, and in the army, I saw others deteriorating from similar methods
that I once subjected myself. While stationed in Korea
The phone calls home to family and
friends, especially David, lessened and became a conscious nagging of an
emotional tie, an emotional tie that I learned to ignore by staying busy
working. When I did contact home I found myself afterwards full of memories
that I just couldn’t relate to anymore, memories like scenes to a movie that I
had never seen.
The world seemed to change during
that four year US Army hitch. I think back to a security briefing I had in the
Army, a video personifying the ideology of terrorism being two animals: the
ferocious tiger that preys on fear, and the other being a sheep that gets
killed for being weak. That personification makes sense when I combine it with
conceptual propaganda such as a collage of fanatic attacks across the globe.
Among them, the USS Cole and the bombing in Oklahoma
I saw planes crash into buildings;
and America Satan , America
An Army Command
Sergeant Major told us once, “There’s no need to go back home to your friends
because they’ll still be doing the same thing that they were doing when you
left.” That sentence, standing by itself, was enough hook many to reenlist. As
for me, I didn’t want to feel like I was being enabled by anyone anymore. I
remember hearing various accounts of soldiers dying within weeks after retiring
because of not knowing what to do with themselves as civilians. I don’t want to
end up like that.
Upon
my honorable discharge I became a school teacher. One day I heard some of my
students discussing music that Dave and I would listen to. I was haunted by
their conversation. For days I thought about old times with David but there was
no way to get in touch with him because in May of 1999 lightning struck Dave,
killing him instantly. I have had many
dreams at night where David was still alive and living a couple streets over.
I’d go visit and the mood of the visits would resemble that of an old relative
one felt involuntarily obliged to torture themselves to see. There would always
be a torturing silence, because I had everything in my head scripted of what we
would talk about and what we would do; yet when I was in his presence he was
indifferent, hardly speaking a word. He acted like I was an inconvenient
blemish to his day.
After a while, I felt that the only
thing I could do to have any sort of closure with him was to fix my Kramer and
take guitar lessons. A little over a
year ago I swallowed my pride and presently I’m the oldest student trying to
keep up with nine and ten year olds that sound incredible.
On May 31, I woke up from another
nightmare about Dave, feeling glum throughout the whole day. Outside it was
dark and gloomy. The weather seemed to personify my feelings of wanting to cry
but being unable to. It seemed to take great effort to even make it to my
guitar lesson. I found myself obsessively thinking about how the Lord reached
his arms from Heavenly skies, wrapped his hands around David and took him home.
I took that Kramer in my hands and waited for the rain to bring him back.
I strummed with my finger tips and a
pick close to the guitar’s pick up so that I could hear myself trespassing
youthful organized melodies. I stared out the window and the clouds came close
to the ground. I swear that I felt something at the same time that I heard the
first of the storm’s thunder roll. Then I put together the tightest lick on my
guitar ever. Everyone started staring at me. Immediately, the storm infiltrated
the amps and caused them to hiss. At that point I felt David. But I came to
doubt my enlightening experience because one of the kids proclaimed that my
guitar was playing hot and sounded like a burned out pawn shop guitar. I
stopped playing, turning away to walk to the window and hide my tears. I saw
the rainbow and sun’s rays now shine as I felt like David had never left me.
During the final minutes of the
lesson I asked one of my fellow students to teach me Pink Floyd’s ‘Wish You
Were Here,’ a song that was one of Dave’s favorites.
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