Back Door

My hand left my side as if it had been coiled there for years. He was the only thing between me and the back door. I was 17 and he was hazy from a couple of tall Budweiser’s. It was black and white, like a dream sequence in a Hitchcock movie. The muffled sound of my mother screaming my name …sounded far away. I saw the strained and bloodshot futility in his eyes. In those seconds he was somewhere else. He was slamming the screen door of his childhood. Hitting the cool packed dirt of a backyard path, the smell of stale beer seemed to follow him even then. I saw his eyes looking. He was watching my clinched fist plunging toward him like a comet. He had showed up to play sheriff. You just can’t do that. You can’t ride in after countless disappointments, broken dreams, and false promises. You can’t just fucking show up and get to be sheriff. He had not been home for several days. He had no idea who I was. He had no idea who he was. Something in his brain had told him it was time to play a role. I still wonder what he was thinking. How he could have possibly believed he had rights. When it hit the side of his face I didn’t feel anything. It made a quiet thud. Not like the smacking sound in the movies. It was a cold and weak thud. My arms felt empty and unattached. During the times that I had allowed myself to imagine that moment, I imagined feeling strong and vindicated. I didn’t. His eyes closed as his head jerked back against the thin dark paneling of a worn out mobile home. He fell to the floor, almost effortlessly like an obstinate child in the middle of a Wal-Mart. His head dropped and I couldn’t say anything. He just sat there staring at the linoleum. I started to cry and pushed open the dented metal door, slamming it behind me; I jumped off the wobbly concrete steps into my backyard. They say that your life flashes before you when you die. Mine flashed before me the day I hit my father.

Vegas Beauty

I am on a plane returning from a four day trip to Las Vegas. The first of the week I was attending a business meeting and I had decided to take an extra day to take advantage of the free flight and cheap room rates. I have been reading the latest issue of The Sun magazine. The Readers Write section is my favorite and this month’s theme is beauty. Coming from Vegas it is interesting to reflect on that word. I’m not writing to critique Vegas, but I do want to remember the contrast of Vegas as it relates to beauty. I find Vegas fascinating and being alone there allowed me time to sit and watch. There is plenty to see. Everything is designed to maximize engagement through fantasy. Engaged means we are spending money. Being there is like being on the set of a movie. People acting out parts, playing roles they don’t normally play, doing things they would never do back home. I am struck by our need to create beauty or what we perceive as beauty. At times it seems desperate. Massive air conditioned cavernous buildings…all designed and decorated to seem like you are outdoors … maybe walking through the streets of New York City, or Venice, or some sexual Disneyworld. Giant Palm trees evenly spaced and reaching high for the ceiling with a painted clear blue sky and puffy clouds…the illusion betrayed by an air-condition duct. Music is carefully orchestrated to add a soundtrack to the setting. At first, the illusion works. The visual impact is like watching a fast paced movie for the first time…it all looks cool…but the longer you watch…the story starts to fall apart. You realize the actor is using a stunt double. The buildings aren’t real. That woman in the tight red skirt cut way too high, twisting though Tuscan cobblestone streets in stripper shoes that get worn for one weekend …starts to look like an Accounts Payable Clerk after a day or so. The guy with the spiked-up hair and wrinkled cargo shorts sits… mouth agape, staring through sunglasses at an indifferent stripper swinging around a chrome pole. He’s getting sooo wasted in Vegas and he can’t wait to tell his coworkers back home at the Jiffy Lube…all about his raucous adventures.


I don’t believe real beauty can be bought or applied...it just happens. It happens when that woman is back at home and she pushes her hair behind her ears… peeking through reading glasses at her kid’s homework, at that moment she is beautiful, or when she lets a single tear spill out of her eye while watching a sappy movie. Sexy isn’t a tight dress and hoochie mama heels…sexy is when she slips on an over-sized flannel shirt and curls up on the couch with a glass of wine to watch Myth Busters. That guy that thinks he looks cool when he is doing his best “dazed and confused” impression…never looks cooler than when he stops in a park to pick up trash he didn’t drop… or when he spends half the night fixing the leaking sink in greasy jeans and a t-shirt. Beauty just happens.

I don’t believe real beauty can be manufactured. On Friday I rented a Motorcycle and rode north to Mount Charleston. After two days on “The Strip”…twisting the throttle, hearing that familiar rumble and feeling the engine pull me toward the mountains in the distance...I couldn’t contain my smile. It was almost like escaping from the stomach of a giant primordial beast…catapulting off of its tongue just as its mouth is slamming shut. I turned off the main road and shot across a dry cracked desert bed. As I climbed, I could feel the temperature drop. I could smell the Ponderosa Pine and the White fur that shades the landscape. The clouds seemed brighter than I had ever seen them…and they slowly drifted across the blue sky. The road twisted back and forth, digging into rock and the lush forest like a ribbon holding down a bulging package. I actually laughed out loud from the pleasure of hitting a turn just right…the bike feeling like it was on a rail. Real beauty cannot be manufactured.

I think Las Vegas is important. Like a museum, it reminds us of our mistakes. It houses our creations. It takes us to a different place for just a few hours. It reminds us that…in the end, we cannot buy or create pleasure, nature…or happiness. At 5:30 this morning, waiting on the Airport shuttle, I enjoyed watching the nights actors crawl out of dirty cabs and stumble towards the hotel, defeated in their battle to make it everything they had envisioned it to be. Those spandex dresses struggling to hold in belly’s that could no longer be sucked in. The heels are off…the curtain drops and the show is over. Jiffy Lube is feeling nauseous…and the morning sun burns away the backdrop.

Riding Billy Quick

My father was a Linthead. In the 50’s the textile mills still had life in the South, and people who worked in the “Cotton Mills” were called Lintheads because the constant drifting cotton would stick in their hair. My father, his dad and brothers and most of my relatives, all worked in a cotton mill. My grandfather worked an opposite shift from my father so they would share the same work shoes. They lived on a “Mill Hill” which was basically a neighborhood of clapboard houses that were owned by the Mill and leased to the workers. The houses were identical and were lined up side by side. My father lived in the same Mill house his entire childhood and I remember visiting there when my Grandparents were still alive. There was a screened-in front porch that had steps that went directly to the street. Recently I was thinking about a story my father would tell : On the Mill Hill the school was always within walking distance. My father was a skinny small kid...but he had a friend named Billy Quick who was very big, in a country boy kind of way. He wore overalls to school and hardly ever talked, but he was a friend and protector of my father. Every morning before school my father would wait for Billy at the bottom step in front of his house. When Billy walked by, my father would jump on his back and ride him to school. Some days when Billy got to my father’s house, and he wasn’t standing on the bottom step, Billy would stand waiting for the slamming screen door... my father would come running out of the house and hop on his back. In a way, it seemed Billy enjoyed giving my father a lift as much as my father enjoyed the ride.

Billy Quick was a simple kid, with no future to speak of. He had aspirations of working at the mill and someday making it to the “weaving room” at the cotton mill. The weaving room was a sought after job for some reason…there was a little more pay...and maybe there was less flying lint....I don't know. My grandmother worked in the weaving room for many hard years. Billy Quick would, like my father, quit school early to go to work to help support his family. He would later find a wife and live the rest of his life in abject poverty. The Mill would close down, the textile industry would move overseas and the town would dry up to become one of many such ghost towns in the South. Billy Quick never made it to the weaving room where he could make the “real money”. Billy moved through the rest of his life working odd blue-collar jobs, searching for happiness and contentment. Billy may have never realized that his life had value. No one probably ever told him it did. He never knew that the simple kind gesture of carrying my father on his back to school every day would, in a small way, help carry my father through a hard life. It would help mold my father’s personality and outlook, ultimately influencing my life as well. In his life, my father would grow to over-come many obstacles and hardships. He would have four successful and healthy sons, travel, and eventually maintain a comfortable adulthood.

Billy thought he was carrying a snot-nosed 60 pound little boy to school, but Billy did more than that. He carried my father ...

Oil Heater

Oil Heater

At 5 years old I was standing in the threshold of our three-room cinderblock house, listening to a policeman tell my mother that my father was just fine…but involved in a bad accident. It wasn’t until I saw him on the news that night, being cut out of a mangled 1968 Cougar, that I really knew how badly the policeman had stretched the truth. My father was in serious condition. He had driven into a telephone pole at 90 miles an hour in the rain. The pole snapped and fell through the roof of the car that was bent in the middle like a fortune cookie. My father was meant to stay alive that day. Somehow he managed to crawl into the backseat before the pole fell. It crushed both of his legs. Had he not done that,  the pole would have landed on his head. I remember many scenes from those days. I remember going to see him at the hospital. He had a full body cast from his chest to his toes with a board separating his legs. He was to spend six months in the cast and six more in braces. We had no medical insurance, no other income, and my mother was very pregnant with my second brother and couldn’t look for a job. In the early 70’s they did not have food stamps. I remember welfare food. It came in giant silver cans with generic black writing on them that simply stated that “Peanut Butter”, “Beans” was inside…. I remember people we didn’t know walking around the neighborhood collecting money for us. The gas station down the street gave us $25 dollars. I remember my father itching in his horrible cast and us trying to scratch him with coat hangers. I remember helping my mother drag his rigid encased body down the hall on blankets just so he could have a change of scenery. I remember handing him tools as he lay in bed and put together a swing-set that had been given to us. I remember another policeman showing up at our door to arrest my mother for writing a bad check. I remember the policeman looking at my father, unable to move, then my mother, pregnant with two kids clinging to her legs. I remember him asking my mother not to write anymore bad checks…and he left.

I remember the night my father couldn’t sleep.

The house we lived in had a fuel oil heater in the center hallway that heated the tiny rooms. The heater made a ticking sound. I remember how the fuel oil smelled. I remember standing in front of it in the mornings trying to stay warm. That night, the night he couldn’t sleep, my father, still in a body cast, lay quietly in the darkness, helpless to even sit-up in bed. Something was wrong. He stared at the burnt orange heater that sat ticking in the hall. Late that night while he watched…the oil heater burst into violent flames. My father screamed in terror, knowing that he was completely incapable of doing anything to save himself or his family. My mother jumped out of bed and with my fathers’ instructions, put out the fire with a blanket.

 I remember us sitting up the rest of the night, cold and afraid to go to sleep.

When my father finally got his cast off he was fitted with braces down both legs. I remember him teaching me how to take them off at night so he could sleep. I remember he had to walk with a walker. I remember my little brother stealing his cigarettes and standing just out of his reach…laughing.

My father is an auto body repairman. Since he was fourteen he has been swinging a hammer at cars. I remember him going to work with his leg braces on. He would lie down on a creeper (a flat board with wheels on the bottom) and roll himself around the cars so he could work on them. He had to make money soon; otherwise we were going to be evicted from our house. My father understood accountability. The day he slammed into the telephone pole, he had been drinking too much, as he often did. He was accountable for the fact that it made him incapacitated. He was accountable for the fact that his wife and children were living on welfare food, that his legs would never again be normal, and the fact that it would take many years for our family to financially recover. He didn’t blame anyone but himself. He didn’t sue the bar that sold him alcohol, he didn’t blame the weather, or the car…or even bad luck. My father took responsibility for his actions, pulled himself onto a creeper, and went to work.

Walking Home

Walking Home

Dodging shallow, muddy pools of water, we walked the ruddy dirt streets from the orphanage back to the temporary apartment that was our home for just under a month. My newly adopted children Dima and Vika walked with me and as we traversed the two mile stretch of road in the tiny Russian village, my mind drifted between the reality of the moment and what the future would look like for my current family of four with three new additions. Dima was walking slowly…pausing occasionally to play with my digital camera. Vika followed closely and maintained her usual posture of casual indifference. Once we reached sight of the sagging apartment building I turned to herd them into the dark acrid hallway. Dima, the strong thin one who had seen way too much ugliness in his eleven years, was no longer behind me. I turned to Vika, his friend and soon to be sister, and without the benefit of speaking Russian, made ridiculous gestures attempting to communicate “Where is Dima”? Vika smiled slightly and shrugged her shoulders. I hurriedly sent Vika into the apartment and ran back outside. The courtyard was empty of children yet littered with rusty ancient playground equipment and a scary colony of feral cats. My initial feelings of bewilderment transitioned to concern. Everyone in town knew that Americans were here, as they often are, to adopt one or more of the two-hundred orphaned children that reside just outside of town in the old dilapidated school house. Americans, in the eyes of rural Russia, are money. The village was immersed in poverty. Villagers who had been conditioned to depend on the red blanket of socialism were now finding it difficult to adapt to the labor requirements of capitalism. Many scratched out gardens in their front yards and traveled out of town by train to work, while others spent their entire day in a vodka induced haze. My awareness of the potential for extortion became more acute and my thoughts raced with images of Dima being hustled away to some dank, sour place and held for money. My pace quickened as I explored the busy primitive streets, a spectacle of worry among the sullen faces that had surrendered to the environment of hardship. I considered finding some sort of law enforcement to assist me, but given the language limitations, decided to exhaust my local search first. For over, two hours I scoured trash strewn alleys, evading snarling yard dogs stretching the limits of their chains. Finally, I stopped to reconsider my approach to this gut wrenching situation. I sat on a concrete wall, tired and feeling incredibly vulnerable, I considered what to do next. Here I was in a place so foreign to me that I couldn’t read a stop sign. I felt helpless and exposed knowing that corruption and lawlessness were things I had never had to deal with before. I carefully weighed my options. I would have to find the local social worker that was assigned to us and get her help. Standing to leave I looked down the street and spotted Dima, casually strolling down the side of the street, still looking at the digital camera looped over his neck. The emotions…concern, fear, panic, dread, from the last two hours, morphed into anger and I ran toward him. Hearing his name he looked up and upon seeing my face, quickly dropped his head like a dog scorned. I made wild gestures of anger and disbelief, grabbing his arm and shuffling him to the apartment. Once inside I grabbed the English to Russian translation book and quickly flipped pages to find the exact word that would capture how I was feeling. How do you say “really really pissed” in Russian? I looked down at him, his big brown eyes, the scar on his face a permanent record of some cruel past experience. At that moment I realized that he did not understand. No one had ever cared if he was missing. For his entire life he had been able to wander and explore on his own schedule without being accountable to anyone. The idea that I was worried was as completely foreign to him as this place was to me. Looking back at the book I changed my search and found the word “love”. That was what I wanted Dima to know. I wanted him to know that the veins ominously protruding from my forehead meant love. I kissed him and wanted to cry. Later that day we both looked back through the chronology of photographs captured during his two hour journey. There was a photo of a little dog with muddy legs, one of a sleeping cat. There were several of Dima posing with a group of nurses at the local infirmary. Dima had been recording his world… preparing to say goodbye.  

Russian Taxi

Russian Taxi

For those of you who have traveled to a country that doesn't speak your native language, you know how insecure that can make you feel. I felt a little insecure as I stood at a dirt crossroad in the middle of a small village in Zhukovka Russia. The airlines had delivered our missing luggage to the wrong place (a Russian Orphanage) and I had to figure out a way to get 13 bags from the orphanage to the tiny apartment we were staying in, without knowing the address or directions to either place.

Oddly, the taxis in small town Russia have no markings to indicate they are in fact...taxis...you just have to know that most every car is a taxi because everyone else walks or rides a bicycle. After waving down what appeared to be a taxi for hire, I rolled out the only thing I knew to say..."Zhukovka Internat" (Zhukovka School) and the driver squeezed me in the backseat with two other people. The cars in the village and elsewhere are mostly tiny Audi's...dilapidated and dirty. They are driven with the gas pedal pressed firmly to the floor. After dropping the other passengers, we arrived at the orphanage and I somehow...using silly looking gestures and incredibly poor Russian, communicated that we were going to need two vehicles to haul all of the bags. By some diplomatic miracle, the taxi driver got on his radio and called another driver. Upon the second cars arrival we loaded my bags into two vehicles. Gravel spitting from under the tires...both cars sped back down the dirt road ...but there was just one problem...I had not told them where we needed to go. I kind of knew the general direction of our apartment, but the driver I was riding with was following the other taxi to a destination completely unknown to me. I began gesturing wildly with my best "Where are you taking me?" look. The driver finally...without taking his eyes off the road...said "Moscow"...WHOA!...Nyet Moscow!... Nyet Moscow!!! I yelled. Moscow just happened to be a 10 hour taxi drive away. He looked at me like I was a lunatic, then radioed the other driver and they both turned into the local bus station. When we finally got stopped, they were both ready to be rid of the bald American with all of the luggage.

Russian males are very independent and determined...they do not like being told what to do and they do not suffer fools. We stood there at the dusty bus stop...surrounded by mumbling curious villagers...both of them staring at me...somewhat irritated...but not knowing what to do next. There was a strange silence for just a few seconds... We stood there facing each other. Here I was in the middle of Russian with no clue of where I was...how to get where I needed to go; no way to call anyone for help and no one that could translate my English. Do you know that point that happens sometimes in life when things become so ridiculous that they turn almost comical? Well I had hit that point. In defeat...I simply smiled, which was apparently exactly what I needed to do. I saw their shoulders slump and they smiled back...I had broken through some boundary. They went from being determined and irritated business men, to two guys who wanted to help me find home. I made some sort of "follow me" gesture, they relented and we made our way through the muddy streets of Zhukovka until I found our apartment. We unloaded the bags and I happily handed them 700 rubles (about $25). They drove away happy...

Life was a Stingray

Life was a Stingray

I had to squint to see it but there was no question that it was the one. My daughter and I had been on our father-daughter date and were doing some window shopping before going home. I say window shopping in the truest sense because all of the stores were closed. It hung upside down from the ceiling and seeing it made me smile. Growing up I lived in a neighborhood full of kids. We all had bicycles but most were pieced together from other bicycles to form a two wheeled rolling Frankenstein’s monster. My backyard was littered with the skeletons of bike frames, stiff rusty chains, twisted and clinging to their sprockets.  My bike was usually a hybrid of Christmas bicycles that I had received over the years. The extra set of forks I hammered onto the existing ones gave my machine a chopper like feel that you couldn’t buy in the store.  I would pull the nose of my banana seat back so it would force my butt into the tall sissy bar. That made my profile “Easy Rider” cool. Clothespin an Ace of Spades in the spokes and you would swear a tricked out Harley Chopper was coming down the street.

As cool as my creation was, I still longed for the ultimate bicycle. A bicycle that symbolized success, speed, and the feeling of freedom you get when you straddle the seat, reach for the ape hanger handlebar, and squeeze its ivory grips. The Schwinn Stingray was the coolest bicycle on my planet. It had a metallic blue banana seat, a fat slick racing tire on the rear and even a stick shift on the top tube that made all eight year old boys paw at the earth and bay at the moon. To have one was to elevate your social standing beyond the mass of Huffy riders. Kids that rode Stingrays rode with the confidence of Virgil. They sat high and pedaled with authority. The screech of that wide back tire was a siren to the ears of lesser machines. I have seen Nirvana, and it rides a Schwinn Stingray. So, here I am…forty-one years old…still gazing at it through a dirty Minneapolis store window, a world away from the sweaty ring-necked days of summer.  I can finally afford it and it has come back to taunt me….to suck me into believing that my 200 pounds can still fit in that beautiful blue metal-flake vinyl seat. I drift to visions of 30 yard tire-marks down my middle-class suburban streets, wheelies ridden for unreal distances while my neighbors stare in amazement and wonder…their kids gawking with jealousy. As I reach down to shift into third my daughter taps me on the arm and asks if I am okay. I look at her and remember that life went on without me ever having a Schwinn Stingray. 

Uncle Leon

Uncle Leon

I never did like my Uncle Leon. I feel like I want to use the word hate, but my grandma told me never to say that I “hate” somebody. He was actually my Great-Uncle… but it doesn’t really matter. He is on my list of “The Top Five Most Obnoxious People I Have Ever Encountered”. When I was growing up, I would often see him at my grandparents’ house. He was big. He had a giant head with one of those brutal looking flattop haircuts. His clean-shaven face was always red from a lifetime of alcohol. His forearms were huge and he always reeked of Aqua Velva. His voice was loud and harsh and he laughed the laugh of demons. When I think about him I mostly remember pain. He had this incredibly annoying habit of grabbing me and squeezing my head in his massive forearms. Once he had me locked into position, he would thump my head with his Navy ring until he figured I had enough. Yes, he was in the military…by God. Anyone who had not been in the military was a “Damn Hippie”. Me, my brothers, even my father, we were all “Damn Hippies”. I hated hearing his voice when I walked into my grandparents’ house. Whenever he came into a room, everyone under five feet tall would walk out. He knew everything…just ask him. He could solve the world’s problems. Step one would be to get rid of the “Damn Hippies”.

Leon was a professional barber. He gave me my very first haircut in the drivers’ seat of a Bass boat parked in his back yard. I still believe Leon is the reason hair won’t stay on my head. He would have made a good barber in hell, doing flattops and shaving the necks of devils. He could tell them jokes and they would have a good laugh.

I remember one hot Southern summer, sitting in a swing in my grandparents front yard. The grass was dry and prickly. Leon was leaving in his big sagging Fleetwood Cadillac when he tossed a lit match into the yard, immediately setting it on fire. The entire front yard was blazing as Leon pulled away, smiling, his big red arm hanging out the window.

The last time I saw Uncle Leon he was crippled, he had diabetes and he was in a wheelchair. The evil laugh was gone. He could barely raise his arm to shake my hand. His disposition was humble, almost pleasant. He had cookie crumbs on his bottom lip. His eyes had that strained look of desperation and sorrow. He was just an old man in a wheelchair. I suppose he had reconciled with the demons that had once inspired him. My Uncle Leon died a few years ago. A sad and lonely man with no kids and a legacy of ugliness, I don’t hate him anymore. Maybe I never really did.