With each passing hour, I get more protective of my time and, more precisely, how other people sometimes waste it. I do not like this from anyone but from dysfunctional family members it nearly turns me criminal. Time wasted dealing with the narcissistic, selfish meanderings of knee-jerk, neurotic control freaks is taking its toll in a way that, stopping short of jail time, will have me, at the very least, ignoring their existence for the rest of eternity.

I don’t really care what these emotional vampires do with their lives as long as it doesn’t involve the manipulation of other people, namely me or my loved ones. I will admit fully to being as much of a neurotic train wreck as the next person but I don’t believe my failings should be used as a weapon.  However, there are those in my surrounding family that do, and I can’t stomach it any longer. It’s been building for years and, as the calendar seemingly picks up speed, I get more repulsed by the same old tired game.

Besides my worthy character traits, I can be sullen, sarcastic and a general curmudgeon but if you ever catch me using any of that to twist you into a pretzel you have my permission to apply a swift kick across the head.

In an extreme way it reminds me of the feeling I have whenever I read about a combination homicide/suicide. Instead of the transgressor alleviating the world and themselves of an unmanageable existence, they need that one last desperate move of ultimate control that they were unable to exercise over themselves when they were alive, so they take innocents to hell with them.

That, in a much more passive form, is what some of my family members do. They can’t manage themselves so they apply management to others by clever means of manipulation. I call that ‘dicking’ with someone and, I don’t know about you but, I hate that with the passion of a thousand suns since it results in a simple interaction being mangled and distorted and that results in hours of wasted time fending them off.

I realize that the fictional character, Don Quixote, was relatively delusional but, that taken out of the equation, the pure act of fighting a windmill is an excellent analogy since it involves trying to smite the constant ’spin’ and all of that flailing away expends tremendous amounts of energy that could be better utilized elsewhere.

So what is it with the desperate need to ‘dick’ with people…to turn some of life’s most benign negotiations into an act of domination?

AND NOW FOR A MORE DIRECT COMMUNIQUE SHOULD THE OFFENDERS EVER READ THIS:

What the hell is wrong with you?

Do you have any idea what a pox you are? Whatever people say to your face, believe me when I tell you that no one, except those with your same mental illness, like this and they wish you would go away and mind your own business.

When we’re young our thought processes don’t include much personal maintenance. Youth doesn’t have to think about eventual degradation because, for the most part, every thing’s in working order and body parts can still take a fair amount of abuse without something falling off and rolling across the floor. This is the magic of youth and it’s the same way we feel about a new car…what could go wrong? It’s new, it’s hot, it’s clean and ready for a long and distinguished run. Why even think about it?

At 58, I’ve got an entirely different perspective on things and it’s a primary reason why parents and offspring see life so differently. But I believe that if children could somehow feel, in any temporary way, what life will eventually dish out, physically and psychologically, they would find an easier  generational commonality and gain some valuable perspective on the fine art of living.

I’m beginning to really experience the wheels coming off and the train jumping the tracks and, frankly, it’s taking with it some of my last remaining cool mojo and that’s nothing if not a sobering alert that stuff is wearing out. On the other hand I’m, at this precise moment in time, almost perfectly straddling youth and old age. I’m still playing basketball with guys 30 years younger than me and I’m being told by an orthopedic specialist that my knees are a wreck and will, eventually, have to be condemned out of concern for arthritis and years of pounding and abuse.

This is a weird place to be. I can’t say that I’m fully embracing advancing age because I’m not, but I’m not fooled by the illusion of youth anymore either. Is this what Joni Mitchell meant by “I’ve looked at life from both sides now”? I’m not sure, but that’s what’s happening to me. I’m having to become an advocate for both my youthful side and my aged side, both at the same time. I can’t emphasize how much of a weird place this is to be.

I’ve got the psychology of a 16 year old and the knees of a 90 year old. Stuff happens to me now that I’ve never even seen or heard of and my cries of “what the hell now?” are mostly exasperated pleas for mercy. I’ve got crap happening that I can’t even put down in print! I’ve heard it remarked that aging is not for sissies and it is so true because if you don’t decide to ignore the things that bog you down and carry on in defiance, then you’ll be in a wheelchair in about 5 minutes. This is where youthful obliviousness comes in handy because it is that bravado that keeps us cooking.

So, I have an approach that I’m using that I hope will serve me until I am no longer, and it involves a little measured prudence with a little kamikaze. Sound dangerous? Not really, because the greater danger would be sitting on my sorry ass tabulating my infirmities. Now that sounds dangerous, so I have no intention of doing that.

Anyhow, my formula for future success is 1) let only the severity of pain dictate what I will and will not physically do, 2) ignore the pain, 3) make good friends with ibuprofen and, finally, 4) leave all pride parked at the door since it won’t be needed.

Have a nice day…

For the most part, I do not understand any families that I’m associated with. They often seem like foreign countries with agendas and a language that is, well, foreign to me.

They hide things from me that they think I shouldn’t know or create attributes for themselves that they don’t possess so that they might appear noble. They do this in the name of St. Coping; patron saint of head games. But all it does is cause me confusion because their actions do not, like a badly dubbed Japanese film, match their language. I see their mouths moving but little of what is said seems to correlate to reality and, more often than not, leaves me wondering if these people haven’t actually invented bullshit.

With a few exceptions, my own family is like that, my wife’s family is like that and, not to let myself off the hook, I’m sometimes like that.

Speaking for myself, when I make crap up to suit a need, I do it because it supposedly helps me dodge some uncomfortable circumstance that I can’t deal with. I do it because the truth is confrontational and hard to handle and makes me feel like entering the witness protection program.

But that feeling of flight betrays the benefit of truth because, although painful initially, it’s way less time consuming and energy sucking than constantly manipulating the facts of the matter so you come out looking good on the other end.

I know this is true because my wife says it is.

Alright, I’m being cute here but it’s true because that is how she tries to live everyday and while she might not have a perfect track record, she adheres to the truth when it matters the most; when it’s necessary for healthy living and that’s when it should count the most. When it’s crunch time, she picks up the ‘truthteller’ standard and carries it fearlessly into battle and a lot of people are not going to like you for that.

How crazy does that sound…’people are not going to like you for that’.

No, my brother, when the truth is not welcomed you will see all sorts of flailing and bailing, denying and lying, bobs and weaves, and every manner of avoidance a person can conjure up. The more intelligent, the more sophisticated the ruse but, in the end, it’s the same nonsense.

Our neuroses take on such a powerful presence that we lose perspective on the reality of what is before us. While we’re massaging our damaged psyches we totally lose sight of actual good, for ourselves and others, that could be done if only we’d give up this mental chain-gang labor.

And it’s not only others that fact-shifters are working on…it’s themselves and it is immensely hard to convince yourself of a fiction and then sustain it for ridiculously long periods of time. Pure, back-breaking labor.

Dysfunctional families do this all the time. It’s their bowl of Wheaties; their energy drink; their psychotropic of choice and I’m beginning to have strong feelings of repulsion for the whole thing. While they’re avoiding reality, I want to avoid them.

So, here’s my pact with anyone I’m related to. If we’ve got a mutual problem and it takes a village to figure it out and you make yourself a worthless paper weight in the middle of negotiations, stop talking to me or interacting with me because you’re nothing but a distraction and I’ve got no use for you.

You know who you are…or maybe you’re so delusional, you don’t.

After years of assessing my strengths and weaknesses, there’s no doubt I’m a highly distractable person. What would that be in today’s coded vernacular…HDP? I’m sure if I were in high school now, psychologists would be breaking it all down into a neat little prescription to be filled at the pharmacy but all it really boils down to for me is an inability to focus sometimes in the midst of surrounding activity. When I’m creating something (this story for instance) and the phone rings or someone calls to me, it’s like one of those near-death accounts where, on your way to the glorious light, you come reeling back to mundane life. It’s jarring and causes an automatic restart.

It’s why my creativity has always thrived in the wee hours of the morning. I like being awake when most people aren’t. It’s like being in one of those sci-fi flicks where the guy realizes that the entire human race has been wiped off the planet and he’s the only one left and he’s got the run of the roost, but unlike the sci-fi guy I’m comforted to know that the isolation is temporary and, eventually, the rest of the world will get out of bed and I won’t die alone.

I’ve been this way since I was a kid and after this many years it is an easily definable part of my character. When I was young, if school hours permitted (and sometimes even when they didn’t) I’d be up at 2am doing virtually anything; reading, writing, making model cars, writing songs, studying the jokes on comedy albums, creating lists of anything that came into my head and sometimes I’d just sit and think of shit.

It may sound like ‘thinking of shit’ is an empty activity but that is far from true because most of my best ideas are formulated in this vacuum of uncluttered time. It’s in this time that my brain becomes well-ordered and everything makes sense in a way that the cacophony of day to day activities do not. I admire those who retain clarity while standing on a teeter board, juggling 4 balls and reciting the Gettysburg Address. I just don’t seem to be one of them since all I want to do is get really good with the teeter board and then move on to the juggling.

My wife, on the other hand, is a marvel of powerful thinking in the eye of the storm. With a teeter board under each foot and a bucket full of balls flying at her, she can quickly breakdown the situation and reign it in like Einstein herding relativity into an understandable theory. It’s amazing to watch her in full operational gear.

Now, this is not to say that I’m not quick since in my profession as an entertainer I have to stand in front of groups of people everyday and corral an audience with off the cuff comedy and a perfect flow of music. In the midst of what most people might consider a frightening chaos, I’m as clear as a laser and know exactly what to do and when to do it.

But that’s a controlled environment (when I control it) that I’ve become skilled at over 4 decades of repetition and practice and doesn’t quite have the randomness of the majority of daily encounters. That’s what separates the thinkers from the sinkers and it’s why I do my best thinking when the bats are getting their exercise. Life just sort of gets put on ‘pause’ while I get some work done.

There are only a couple of other comparable times where there is perfect clarity and that’s in the morning when I’m just coming out of my nightly coma, before I set one foot on the floor. I’m at my organizational best at that very moment…lining up the days events, assigning myself a series of necessary tasks and planning a well-appointed day. I only run into trouble when I get out of bed where the quandary of order becomes an issue. Up until that time I’m the best secretary I’ve ever had. Too bad the secretary ends up being a temp.

The other time is in the shower. The shower is like an isolation tank where your only task is to bath, which leaves it wide open for thought. Nothing but you, falling water and an open mind. I have come up with some great stuff in the shower and if I were wise I’d install a waterproof, digital recorder on the wall.

I think my DNA is hard-wired this way and as much as I struggle to make it work more like my wife’s I know it never will be. Getting older is worthless for running faster and jumping higher but for knowing what you’re good or bad at; it’s the perfect clarifier.

I am what I’ve always been; a very, very, very poor man’s Stephen Hawking, a sharp intellect that only comes out after midnight and is this close to being interviewed by Anne Rice.

I don’t think I ever quite got the worth of Kindergarten. Back in 1956, pre-school hadn’t been created and kindergarten was the launching pad for your school years. Most of the kids in my class were discovering the wonders of their newfound social circle, while others were simply enthralled with their own boogers or the taste of white paste.

After careful examination of all the circumstances involved, I decided that kindergarten might hold some untapped value; the only question being what and how.

First of all, the teacher was well past the nurturing stage and into basic little-twerp management. So, there was nothing to be had there.

Secondly, 5 year olds are so random in there interests that I had a difficult time connecting with anybody. Why did I want or need to be there? You sat around all day dicking with insignificant whatnot and making a mess and I could do that at home. Really, nothing to be had there either.

Thirdly, my main mover, music, was commandeered by a dispassionate piano hack (hereafter referred to as Mrs. Piano Hack) who turned off her hearing aid every time she led us in song. My innate musicality found that approach highly offensive and I just wanted her to stop mauling the piano.

Finally, as a result of points one, two and three, I was painfully bored and needed a reason to hang in there long enough to make it to the 1st grade. That reason was to work on my performance skills and give my classmates a lift at the same time.

Most of the kids just banged around gormlessly but others brought their own specialties to the table. One little dweeb, Jimmy, liked to set fire to the boots in the coat closet using lighter fluid until Mrs. Piano Hack would see the smoke and have to douse the flames with a fire extinguisher. That was Jimmy’s go-to move and while temporarily exciting, the long-range consequences were potentially disastrous.

My go-to move was far less dangerous and, hopefully, a lot more memorable, although to Jimmy’s credit, burning boots are hard to forget. No, I decided that the one thing that was lacking in that boring classroom was good entertainment and I devised a plan to provide that.

The plan went thusly: At exactly the same time every day, Mrs. Piano Hack left the classroom to go down the hall to retrieve those little milk cartons for us on a metal tray. I could pretty much estimate how much time it would take for her to plod her way down there, stack the cartons and get back. As soon as she left I would leap on the table, air guitar in hand, and lay into a blistering rendition of Elvis Presley’s “Hound Dog”. By the time I got halfway into the first verse all the kids were surrounding me, dancing and yelling as I swiveled my 5 year old hips and sang my ass off. The kids loved it and I made it a daily ritual, but there was one fatal flaw to the plan.

I had a hard time getting off stage and lingering too long on the table always led to Mrs. Piano Hack walking back in, grabbing me by the back of the shirt collar and tossing me into the hallway and its makeshift solitary confinement. I’d have to sit out there for long stretches until Mrs. Piano Hack figured I’d served my time and then she’d let me back in.

Actually, there was a flaw in her plan as well. I liked it in the hallway and I’d rather be there than in the classroom with all that chaos and bad piano playing. So, it was kind of a win, win for me because sitting out there allowed me ample time to let my mind wander and daydream all sorts of wacky things and it gave my imagination quite a workout. That imagination was atrophying in Hack’s classroom so the hallway was a blessing in disguise.

Periodically, my mother would be called down to the school to deal with my constant removals from the classroom and the first time she came to find me in the hallway, she said, “I’ll go down to the principal’s office and get you back into class”. I begged her not to do that and explained my reasoning for not wanting to return. Unfortunately, I was going to have to get back in the classroom or I was in danger of repeating kindergarten.

It was hard for me to believe that I had to go back to that soul killing kindergarten room but faced with another year of Mrs. Piano Hack, I lightened up my table show schedule and made it out of there at year’s end.

Kindergarten wasn’t a total waste because I learned some valuable lessons in show biz and public relations: size up your audience carefully and know when to stop basking in the glory and get off stage. When I finally became a professional musician, those revelations became useful in nearly every gig I’ve ever had.

Mrs. Piano Hack wasn’t much in the guidance department but her quest to squash my performance creativity helped give me that rock and roll edge.

Rock on, Mrs. Piano Hack!

My dad (father #2) loved the grandiosity of staged illusion and made it a major part of his performing repertoire. When he spoke of the history of magic and magicians it was with great reverence for the craft and he worked hard to hone his own skills so that they were a worthy contribution to the greats that came before him.

He made himself, Frederick the Great, and while that smells a little like Michael Jackson dubbing himself the “King of Pop”, my dad realized the marketability of ’sounds like’, ‘acts like’, ‘is like’. So, he was Frederick the Great and all his promotional material lauded his superior feats of prestidigitation.

My mother was his assistant and between the two of them, they cornered the market in the looks department; she, statuesque and beautiful and he, dashing and debonair. Coupling that asset with my dad’s work ethic to the act and they had a very successful regional show.

The legendary illusionist, Harry Blackstone (from the same state), was his benchmark and he carried himself with as much class as the great master, decked out in tucks and moving through his routines like a ballet dancer. He was serious about this art and meticulous with detail, and before long they were not only working locally but traveling to other cities to open for other, bigger acts.

To my dad, this was show biz on a grand scale and, while I never asked my her if she really enjoyed this act, I have the feeling that my mother joined him in the small scale glory that was theirs. As good as my dad got, however, he still ran into the same road block that always seemed to arrest his dreams.

The nearby bar.

On the road or 500 feet from our house, the challenge was always the same…how to keep Frederick the Great out of the bar and going on with the show. Sometimes he just didn’t make it because he tried to mix the two worlds and they would, like a bad lab accident, create a cloud of mayhem.

They performed a large illusion surrounding a wooden coffin on wheels that my mother would lie down in and then the Great one would light the thing on fire and the audience would eventually see her skeleton ablaze, Frederick hunched maniacally over the charbroil, madly dumping more lighter fluid onto the remains. This was a real crowd pleaser and he would take bow after bow, the crowd cheering over my mother the ember.

The only problem was that, one night, in a less than sober state he had gone a little too theatrical with the lighter fluid and some had leaked into the chamber below where my mother actually was lying and her dress caught on fire. Frederick the Great wouldn’t notice this because he was still in the process of soaking up the adulation.

Fortunately for my mother, an off-stage hand saw the smoke and tore into the box, getting my mother out before she suffered additional burns and this, to my dad’s dismay, took a little of the sheen off of the illusion.

Another time, during an Elks Lodge performance, Frederick found the lounge before finding the stage and was so besotted that he, for one of the rare times, couldn’t go on. What to do? They’d already been paid, the audience was primed and so my mother, thinking quickly and taking stock of what she knew and didn’t know, assembled every trick she thought she could handle, made up a story about Frederick and went out on stage and did a show.

At this point in time, the fabulous 50’s, there were no female magicians on the circuit and her appearance got a little more attention than normal that evening. Not only that but she pulled off what she could with enough style, having watched my dad rehearse, that the show was a smashing success and the Lodge owner deliriously happy.

Several days later, the Lodge owner called our house, not to re-hire my dad but to check on my mother’s availability. This struck a mortal blow to the ego of the Great Frederick and he made my mother come up with an excuse why she couldn’t make it.

It was hardly a surprise, then, that when Frederick was hired to levitate a woman on top of a downtown building to celebrate the grand opening of a hardware store, my mother politely declined the gig and dad had to find another assistant for the day. She hasn’t lived a long life because of bad judgment. Yes, the fill-in survived but my mother recognized a gamble when she saw one; tall building, levitating on a  board, nearby tavern.

On those days, though, when all his brain cells were in line, for the relatively small man he was, his skill level was exceptional. His hands were so small that those tricks, like handling ping pong balls, coins or other small props, requiring such agile manipulation, were made even more impressive by the constant work he put in to making it look that good.

Although unintentional, perhaps his greatest moment was in Milwaukee at a large hall, opening for Jack Benny. He was in the middle of one of his tricks where a chaffing dish was lit on fire (a dangerous running theme), the top of the metal dish was put on to smother the flame then lifted off to reveal a live dove who would be taken out of the dish and quickly placed in a cage.

Nifty trick, except this time the dove, sensing opportunity, took off into the auditorium, eventually landing on a rafter at the top of the building. Since this wasn’t in the script, neither my dad or mother knew what to do to get the dove back to the stage.

Finally, just taking a stab in the dark, my dad pulled out his blank revolver and fired a shot in the direction of the dove. The bird jumped and, probably sensing familiarity, flew straight back to my dad and landed on his finger. The audience, amazed at Frederick’s aviary mastery, burst into tumultuous applause, thereby deifying what was essentially dumb luck.

Ah, the occasional randomness of show biz.

In later years when his lavish visions succumbed to the reality of his lack of motivation, a few cans of Stroh’s would get him to talking about putting together a traveling 1920’s style Chautauqua, complete with musicians, jugglers, magicians and other assorted entertainers and tour the countryside, moving through hundreds of little towns.

Even though he’d constantly revisit this idea when I’d go over to his house after my parents divorce, I think we both knew that it was never going to happen and the magic equipment would remain in mothballs.

In many ways it was ridiculous that he gave up so easily but he was a chain-smoking, full fledged alcoholic in a mind-deadening job and, regardless of his bravado, he would never give that up until the day he crapped out on his sofa at age 57.

If you’d seen him through my eyes when I was growing up, you’d have seen how great he really could have been. You’d have seen that his pretentious moniker had tremendous potential. He was Frederick the Great and if only he could have gotten past his own demons and not drifted into hopelessness, sky was the limit for that guy.

With the recent passing of my step-dad (father #3, more on him later), the inevitable barrage of morbid thoughts have been pouring into my brain. I’ve also ratcheted up my macabre humor to previously unheard of levels but that is how I’m personally dealing with his death. Everybody’s got their way.

So for the past month or more, my life (and the lives of my mother and my wife) have been forever altered and big changes are in order.

A short time beyond my dad’s service, something especially wonderful happened that was born, inadvertently, from his passing and something I shall cherish forever.

I died.

I have to tell you, I didn’t see this one coming…nobody did. O.K., I have the diet of a 15 year-old and I believe in the power of beer, but other than that who would have guessed that my demise was so imminent? Certainly not my wife, who received a greeting card in the mail two weeks ago.

When I walked in the door that evening, my wife handed me the card and said “you have to read this”.

Addressed to her only, it read: “Dear (wife’s name here), We are sad to learn of the death of (my name here). You our(sp) in our hearts and thoughts. Our Deepest Sympathies, (organization that shall remain nameless)”

I started laughing so hard that tears were running down my face and then we were both convulsing, and somewhere during all that I realized what a wonderful gift this giant faux paux was. We had been wound tighter than a drum through the deathwatch that was my dad’s final week and somehow the sheer absurdity of this card broke the tension right where it needed to be broken; a laugh in the face of our own mortality.

It had always been a dream of mine, and I imagine many other folks, to be able to read your own obit, hear your own eulogy or even attend your own funeral and eavesdrop on all the things people really thought about you. With this card, a bit of that fantasy was coming true. Of course, we felt it responsible to let the card issuing party know that I still had one foot in the land of the living and, of course, they were mortified. But my wife also told them what a tremendous comedic service they had done us (they didn’t quite get that particular point).

I understand why they were embarrassed but for me it was one of the coolest things. It’s amazing how much attention you can generate for the simple act of dying and this card has become the best party favor ever. The one-liners flow like an endless river and imagine the obligations I can get out of.

It seems so improbable that a mistake like this could have been made but the more ethereal theory is that my Dad put his sly sense of humor to work for one more fling from the cosmos. All I know is, it’s working for me.

Dead translates into pure success.

Michael Jackson’s record sales are through the roof, syndication fees for Charlie’s Angels episodes with Farrah Fawcett just went up, Ed McMahon clips from the old Tonight Show are probably being assembled into a triple disc DVD set as we speak, David Carradine ‘Kung Pao Chicken’ stands are opening all over Bangkok, loud TV pitchman Billy Mays is still so loud that he got an even better contract to project from the beyond and I’m going to suck every last ounce of humor from this sympathy card if, well, if it kills me.

I’ve always had a problem with cliques; the little exclusionary groupings that insulate people from one another for, usually, superficial reasons. Cliques are most common in school settings, even through college (although they’re usually on the wane there) and, hopefully, by the time a person enters the real world, these things are gone for good…but don’t bet on it.

My basic distaste for cliques started in grade school where the seeds are sown, junior high school where these divisions normally germinate, before coming to full bloom in high school. Everyone receives a random category and is expected to act accordingly, except that didn’t feel right to me and I crossed boundaries whenever and wherever, which likely caused some confusion among the various cliques as what to do with me.

The fact that I was as easily a friend to one of the nerdy kids as to one of the jocks or one of the popular kids, left my standing with all the groups a little murky, which is just the way I wanted it.

If I liked somebody, I never stopped to consider their status, only whether or not I liked them. Pretty simple, eh? Well, not so much when you’re a kid facing the judgment of a pecking order in school. But the kids who were comfortable with my approach were the kids that I ended up befriending.

I just didn’t give a shit about these various factions and so, ignored all of it. If it couldn’t be ignored and I was being required to be exclusionary by one group, I resisted.

In grade school I took the unpopular step of playing marbles with Cathy out on the playground. This was 2nd grade and Cathy was taller and probably stronger than all the boys, had a mouth like a longshoreman and was coming from the poorest of circumstances. Nobody much liked her but I wanted to play marbles with her because she was uncharacteristically bawdy for a 2nd grader and I got a charge out of her shtick. I even took it one step further and, God forbid, deliberately sat next to her in class! By doing this, of course, I got myself inadvertently pigeon holed by some of the popular kids but, at the time, I didn’t consider the social consequences.

I was like fucking Switzerland, lodged between partisans, having no compelling attachment to any of them.

In junior high I was an athlete but even though I had friends in that group, I avoided the social pack as a whole. I’m convinced that some kids got into athletics because it put them in a more elite class among their peers, especially if they were good at their sport, but I ran track and played football because I had lots of energy to burn off and was somewhat of a masochist.

At the same time I ran with the athletes, I was pals with the guys in the audio-visual room and AV guys were some of the most renown nerds in the entire school but I thought all that tech stuff was fun so I hung around those who knew it best. Ah, the sweet smell of mimeograph paper!

My random allegiances continued on into high school and eventually college, where I again played utility fielder with my relationships. By then, I was playing music professionally and when my music partner and I got together with friends for partytime and the inevitable ‘joint passing circle’, I always passed the joint to the next person, declining to partake.

What? You were a musician, in college, hair down to your shoulders, idle time galore, no reason to go to geology class, taking a 1 credit course in golf and you refused to get high with your buddies?

Yes, because they made it a ritualistic clique and if I passed on the joint I was no longer part of that inner circle and not properly partying and, I always felt, not trusted to even be in the circle. That pissed me off because these were my ‘friends’, so then I went from disinterested to radically committed to never smoking that joint with them.

You see the mental quandary here? Well, maybe you don’t and you just think I was a big weirdo and maybe you’re right but that’s how it played out in my personal code so I had to see it through.

About the same time, one of the sorority girls asked me to be her date at a formal dinner with another fraternity. I was a scruffy hippie/musician with a mustache in training, so it was not immediately apparent why she asked me, except that I knew her through other friends and she thought I was funny. Uncharacteristically, I accepted an invitation to the ‘clique of all cliques’ because, I’m afraid to say, she was kind of quirky cute, and I was terribly curious as to what this was all about, even though I was going to be pathetically under-dressed for the occasion.

When I went to pick her up, one of the first things she asked was if I had brought my guitar and then it dawned on me that this was the catch and it was hoped that I might literally be singing for my supper at the post-dinner party. Unfortunately for her, there was no guitar in her future as I was there for the food (musicians are like that) and to be her date and nothing else. Even though I was seriously out of my element with the frat scene, we still had a relatively good time, drank a lot, ‘made out’ in front of her apartment after the ride home and, as a night capper, she puked just outside my car door. Priceless.

I always understood, to some degree, why cliques naturally occurred in school settings. Young people are a little unsteady on their feet at that point and there’s comfort in something that walks and talks more like you, but it also denies you the chance to learn things outside your sphere of knowledge and, at its extreme, takes on that exclusionary role that can be a harbinger of social misunderstandings to come.

I don’t think I rebelled against cliques for any reasons that were particularly noble. I just didn’t like them and refused to, as Groucho Marx once said, join any club that would have me as a member.

If I had a child, I’d tell them the same thing: don’t get hemmed in by your own insecurities…it’s a big world.

It didn’t take a detective to see that there were aspects of my childhood that struggled for lack of a paternal influence and with my biological father (father #1) hiding out in parts unknown, avoiding his children like the plague, and my adoptive dad (father #2) just plain ineffectual, my mother decided to pull a card from beneath the deck and took me down to the Big Brothers of America office.

I have to say I didn’t see this coming. I was in Junior High School by this time and somewhat resigned to being ignored for the remainder of my youth. I thought she felt the same way and we’d both call it a loss and go on with her single parenting but she also realized there were large gaps in my development that she couldn’t fill.

I wasn’t all that excited about this but, then again, I had nothing to compare it to since I was an only child so, what the hell, let’s at least hear what they have to say and so we met with the representative. My situation was discussed, likes and dislikes, and finally my consent was given and a Big Brother was chosen for me. We left the office with an appointment made for our first meeting at my house.

Beaver had Wally (Leave it to Beaver), Ricky had David (Ozzie and Harriet), Chip had Robbie (My Three Sons), so maybe I should have a big brother to show me the ropes and make manhood a little easier to grow into…at least that was the theory and since it looked good on TV, then…

Todd showed up on the designated evening and met me and I can’t say that I was all that connected to this, because I wasn’t, but he seemed like a very nice guy and I decided to give it a fair shake, for both our sakes. Here was someone, who had no part in my history to date, willing to step into my life and give something to it, and that was awkward for me, a kid who was already awkward in most social situations because I didn’t have a decent frame of reference who wasn’t my mother. I didn’t know how to relate to this.

But I’m sure that he felt equally awkward in his role and, though I sensed his sincerity in wanting to do this, I also felt the trickiness of the situation that he had signed up for. This whole Big Brother/Big Sister thing is, no doubt, a wonderful concept and something that has lead many lost kids out of isolation and into a life of being cared for but it is, nevertheless, an unnatural setup despite its nobility.

Where are the folks who originally signed up for this duty? I’ve got a middle reliever coming in from the bullpen because the starters couldn’t go the distance and, I’m thinking, am I so impossible to be around that a father couldn’t care for me? And now here’s this stranger who I don’t even know, trying to insert himself into my life and I’m confused. I was confused then and, writing this many, many years later, I’m still confused. Who found it so incredibly difficult to be my father that they either doused themselves in alcohol or ran far away so as not to be found?

I was that much trouble, eh?

I did what I knew to do with that confusion. I stuffed it deep down in the little reservoir I kept for such shit and I soldiered on like everything was fine and steered the boat myself even when I didn’t know what I was doing. I had no father to reference when things got ‘male perspective’ crazy. All I had were my own instincts and those, frankly, weren’t always reliable because I didn’t have a lot of life experience to rely on.

If you’re reading this and you have a son or daughter who you marginalize or neglect for any of a hundred no-good reasons, just remember that you’re setting them adrift to sort it all out in ways that aren’t necessarily reliable or healthy. I am someone who believes that everything works from the top down, from corporations to fast food joints to parenting. You do what is necessary to make the business strong, the customer happy and the child strong and self-reliant. Anything short of that is just one big fuck-up.

But my hats-off to Todd because he put in the effort and really tried to relate to me even when I was relatively disengaged and mostly quiet. I had learned to relate to myself and that made it hard to relate to Todd the way that Big Brothers would have envisioned.

I didn’t know how to do Norman Rockwell.

Todd became a friend and I have many good memories of our time together. I was very much into cars during my early teens, as was he, and so we went to the drag races and the auto shows and I remember those times very fondly. He taught me to drive a stick shift in his prized 1965 canary yellow Pontiac GTO and endured, with patience, as I popped the clutch over and over to the dismay of both of us. He was a good companion and he was very earnest in his attention to me and for that I will always be grateful but after a period of time, as I got older, we drifted apart and saw each other rarely until I left the state altogether and lost contact.

Still, Todd did, in a short time, what my fathers were unable or unwilling to do and that’s to give me attention that wasn’t warped by their own nonsense. We spent time together that was really about me and, for that relatively short period of time, Big Brothers of America worked. Todd wasn’t perfect but he didn’t need to be.

He made a magnanimous gesture that was unfamiliar to me; unselfishness. So, if I walked away with anything from our relationship, it was that and I’ll never forget it. Thanks, Todd.

P.S. 12/11/08

It wasn’t until I had written this story about half way through that I realized what an impact Todd had made on my childhood and I’m sure I did not or could not articulate that when I was a kid. Subsequently, I’m making it a priority to find him (I’ve narrowed it down) and let him know what I think I revealed to myself in the process of crafting this piece. This oversight of gratitude probably occurs often in Big Brother relationships (we were children afterall) but I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge what I gained through this program and, specifically, Todd’s addition to my life.

I began running track in junior high school because, number one, I was an athlete with energy to blow off but, number two, it was the kind of singular endeavor that I could approach all on my own without the immediate concern of teamwork. I loved sports like basketball and hockey but my natural inclination was to find an outlet that channeled my lone self and success and failure would rest solely on me. Yes, the track team mattered in terms of overall points and beating whoever the other school was we were competing against but each challenge, with the exception of relays, was dependent on only one person’s ability.

I was long and lean, almost the prototypical long distance runner body but for some weird reason I saw myself as a sprinter and worked to get stronger and faster, eventually succeeding in my senior year in high school as a viable member of the team. The difference in how I achieved that success was to, ironically, begin running long distances almost a year before my final track season.

My theory was that I’d be able to match what speed I had with the untiring mindset of a long distance runner. At the end of sprints I’d be speeding up rather than slowing down and in the end it worked. But the result of my hard work wasn’t the best part of it because, as it turned out, the process became a nocturnal ritual.

I began to run in the dead of night.

In fact, all throughout the summer preceding my senior year I ran almost every evening but only after it was pitch black with nothing but the streetlights at intersections to guide me through my lightly trafficked neighborhood. Most of our streets at that time were dirt and gravel but to keep the dust in check they would send out trucks that laid down a coating or two of oil and after the road had been traveled enough times the oil mixed with the dirt and would harden into a deep, blacktop facsimile of actual asphalt. That made the road beneath my feet almost as black as the night and I loved running on it.

The neighborhood kids on their bikes liked to follow me around but it was best when they’d head back to their homes and so I began running later and later at night as they peeled away to their families.

There was something ethereal about running through the darkness and as my body settled into its mechanical gate and the endorphins filled my system, I was enveloped by this comfort that made everything work effortlessly, floating through the night, lost in space, unable to even calculate or care about distance or stress.

I have no firsthand knowledge of drug addiction but I imagine that I was having the natural equivalent of that high without the downside of expense and bodily destruction. On the contrary, I was getting stronger by the day and totally addicted to this training regimen.

Throughout the summer of 1968 I ran pretty much every night with little exception other than bad weather or girls and sometimes even that wouldn’t stop me. The fascinating thing about distance running, and I imagine that any distance runner will tell you this, is that after awhile it becomes an automatic function, like hitting ‘cruise control’ on your steering column, you hit the button and then it’s all down to making sure you stay on course.

That’s exactly how it felt to run into the night and the accompanying euphoria that made me want to do it endlessly. In this time and space I could shed the confines of physical exhaustion, temporarily free from the mundane.

In the hold of the darkness there was nothing of importance but the sound of my own breathing and the feint light at the end of the street.