I used to be able to hear my brain sizzle like bacon. The irresistible urge to get high was ever present. Being "under the influence" had the kind of charm of looking through a View Finder-only the pictures were in motion. My thinking has always been visual, but it was in this time that the visuals became filled with colors that were not on my 64 Crayola Crayon pallet. I learned to see, like a bird, in an ultraviolet spectrum. Today if I were to ingest a fraction of what I could tolerate then, my head would boil up like a pressure cooker, and I'd run screaming for my stash of ativan, huddling under the blankets and watching reruns of Laverne & Shirley, shaking like a leaf.
I wouldn't recommend my teenage life to most. It's a miracle that I was never rehabbed, an O.D, incarcerated, missing teeth or placed in a cemetery by the time I was 18. Also, I was never a thug, and I was too much of a goof to play the "cool" card. Though I had friends in all the categories I just mentioned. I had friends in many categories, and I never would have met them had I not been in the lifestyle that I was in. These were good people. Some of them were lost and/or had never been properly cared for from the moment they breathed their first breath like Mike Anderson. Ava recently showed me a picture of us-her, him, me and some random guy, who was passing through. I suddenly feel saturated in thoughts and feelings of my dear friend Mike.
He came from an abused home. He was knocked around as a kid and thrown out onto the street when he was 16. His dad was a total dirt bag. I remember him scoring crank from a kid I went to high school with and coming over to our house, and, later finding out that he had shot up in our bathroom. Total peach.
I don't remember how or when exactly I met Mike. I was about 13, but it was like I always knew him, there was no beginning or end to my friendship with him, and it was a relationship that was quite unusual. I met him through Ava (not her real name). She had dated his brother, Dave, for a while. After she broke up with Dave, she came and lived with me. My Mom had just split up with her boyfriend, who is a surrogate Dad to me. She moved into a condominium and left Pops at the house where he took on the role of a Dennis Hopper character, heavily drowning in his cups. Basically, the house was mine. This was how I spent the last year of the 80's
There are times in life when you can feel that electricity between yourself and others around you. It's as though divinity has covered you with a giant shroud, and every moment, every second has a sacred element that can never be explained, only felt. Societal rules don't apply here. They can't apply here. It would be like wearing SCUBA gear in the desert-it doesn't work, and it's okay. Nothing in this state registers as wrong. It's like ecstasy has been intermingled with the air you breathe. It's a glowingly, happy place. I have been blessed to have experienced this in my life in a few circles that I've run in-but this time was my first, and because it was my first, it was the most intense. I gladly busted my spiritual cherry and surrendered to the phenomena. Even writing about it frustrates me because the experience can never be properly described in the magnitude of what it was.
Mike and I were sexually intimate, and he had the same relationship with Ava. There was no jealousy. It just was. There was nothing more normal. Let's get this straight. I don't share my significant other. I won't share my significant other. The very thought of my mate being with another person can make me go postal. It doesn't fly with me. If my other has sex with someone else, they are cheating on me, and like any betrayed lover, I react negatively to it. This wasn't like that. It was free. I loved them both so much, and there was never even a strand of any ugly emotion flowing between the the three of us. We laughed a lot. We had fun. All of our friends didn't think twice about it. Maybe if we were physically unattractive with slimy personalities, it would've been gross, but it wasn't. It was beautiful.
We used to play games to freak people out like when Abby(not her real name), another sacred soul of our sanctuary, would walk in feeling floaty, with a daily low level hang over, we would each pick up a book, magazine or newspaper and start reading loud and fast at the same time just to see Abby's hilarious reaction, as she would pause, stare at us, eyes welling up with tears before she would start cracking up laughing, turn around, leave, drive around the block a few times and come back ten minutes later, and hang out as though nothing had happened.
Our absurd, silly sense of humor was peppered on everything we did or said. I had a perma-grin and my stomach was always sore from laughing so much, and when things got serious, which they did, we stuck together and did our best with the situation until the grey skies cleared. Then we carried on, open-hearted and well humored. This was the situation upon when I first slept with Mike. Ava had already been carrying on with him on and off, but it was friendship. They were with other people, and again, it was no big deal.
Looking on it today, Mike had bipolar features. His ups and downs were very evident though he never turned on us, just others, and it was scary because he became very dangerous. This one night, we had been drinking booze, smoking pot and maybe partaking in blowing lines, like we did once in a while. We were at a friend of Mike's place, and there were maybe six or seven of us there. I'm not sure how it began because I was doing my own thing, and Metallica's Ride the Lightening was blaring on the stereo, so I couldn't hear past five feet of myself. Mike's friend or one of the guys there had mistakenly tripped Mike's switch. Whatever the reason, Mike blew his stack. He began throwing chairs high in the air with such a force. They popped holes in walls, cleared tables and knocked over plants. The guys who lived there were terrified. Mike was like an angry bull hell bent on demolition. Fire flew from his eyes. Ava and me went over to him and escorted him out. Abby and her friend, Richard, grabbed our beer and bottle of Smirnoff and followed us out. We drove away, ending up on Palomares Rd-our remote, hang out spot in Niles Canyon.
Abby turned off the car, but left the radio on-a cassette tape of The Eagles' The Long Run played. The three of them got out and began to wander the trees. I sat alone in the back seat with Mike. He was quiet, frustrated. Tears rolled down his face like a stained pair of tapestries being unfurled out of tragic windows. His pain was so sharp. It's presence wrenched my guts and I had to shake it off. I had to heal the burn that seared us both. I started kissing him, straddling him, building, igniting, erasing the dark pain and replacing it with a more pleasurable one. Back then, I occasionally wore skirts and that night I had one on so it made it easier than having untangle myself from 501 jeans that, no matter what, takes a second to crawl out of. At that moment, I loved him more than I could ever love anyone. It was real, and we were free again. Some time into our haze, Ava jumped into the front seat and changed tapes-Led Zeppelin's Physical Graffiti-Kashmir played-best sex song ever. She playfully looked at us and gave us a wink before she left again. Afterwards, the darkness had dissipated, the intense darkness morphed into a psychedelic bright light. We started talking, goofing around and laughing again. Once again, it was all okay.
We used to sneak Mike into our bedroom windows often since he didn't have a home of his own. He would take turns sleeping in mine and Ava's rooms. Sometimes things happened-sometimes they didn't. On nights when he didn't sleep over, I would sleep in Ava's room with her and snuggle-no funny stuff-it wasn't like that. I was no where near realizing my homo tendencies. I was all about the boys. Ava would put on classical music, and we would drift into the next day when I would wake up early and we'd sing our song-dubbed the "hangover song"-Summertime Rolls by Jane's Addiction-uplifting song- then I'd head to school. Even without much supervision, I always went to school. It was continuation school, but it was still school. Whoever wants to claim responsibility for my finishing school, can. But really, it was all me.
The hammer came down in the summer time. A group of us were hanging out in the front yard, mostly sitting on Abby's car with beer-lots of beer. Abby was driving the car ten feet forward then ten feet back. The image to me were drunken clowns on a 1979 Honda civic. Somebody handed me a pint of peppermint Schnapps when I noticed two cop cars creeping towards us in one direction and one car prowling from the other side of the street. Abby grabbed her keys and threw them in the back seat. I poured out the Schnapps and followed Ava inside the house. I hadn't noticed that the cops had already parked and were out of their cars because one-a mustached rookie with an axe to grind-was right behind me, and Mike was right behind him with his hands clasped together over his head, ready to knock this cop out. Police officer or not, Mike didn't want anyone coming after his girls. Two of the other police officers quickly pounced on Mike and threw him face down on the ground, cuffing him then throwing him in the back of one of their cars. We had all paused long enough to see this then proceeded into the house-cop still on my heels. It was illegal for him to come in the way he did because he hadn't seen us doing anything. The party had been on the sidewalk-the street, but it's the words of a group of stoned, drunken teens against Fremont's finest-the police here have a reputation for being conniving and relentless. If you so much as made a complaint against them, the brotherhood of police would all take turns constantly pulling you over and make up reasons to bother you. Essentially, we were screwed.
This cop was after Ava for some reason. Maybe she reminded him of the girl who dumped him at the prom or his mom-he probably hated his mom. I kept myself wedged in between them. Ava refused to talk and sat in a chair in the back yard as I gave Officer Dickless a fake name for her. She got up again and locked herself in the bathroom. He was about to break down the door when one of his buddies called to him from out front. He rushed out in a hurry, behaving as though he had discovered Al Capone's hide out. I followed him out and locked the front door. Officer Dickless saw that I'd done this and knew he couldn't do much about it so he started grilling me and I answered him with upper vocabulary statements that I'd acquired from all of my literary reading. Every now and then I'd throw in a reference to the law so that he could know that I knew exactly what he shouldn't be doing, and how his illegal entrance into my residence had already ruined any chance of this being a successful collar. All of my sentences ended in "Sir."He tried to follow me with his pad and pen but he couldn't spell, much less understand me so he scribbled away his errors on his pad of paper and yelled at me for being "a delegate or an attorney". I was surprised that he knew the word delegate. He stalked off.
The neighbors, especially the ones across the street, were all gawking from their front lawns, Draconian, hungry for our blood. I was pretty sure that they were the ones who made the call in the first place. There were two guys in our group, Mike and this kid Craig. The cops decided to focus on Craig, who had been silent and cooperative the whole time. He was cuffed and escorted to the same back seat where Mike was sitting. As they began to open the door, Mike started kicking until the door swung wide open, and I'm not sure how it happened, but one of the cops ended up falling, slamming his back against the curb and lay there in pain, motionless. Mike sat on the curb next to this injured guy and started laughing hysterically. He was experiencing one of his crazed episodes. What started as three cop cars, now ended up with four cop cars, a fire truck and an ambulance. Fuck!
They got Mike back in the car, threw poor Craig in roughly, put the hurt cop in the ambulance and everyone drove away. The street was quiet again, as though nothing ever happened. Mike showed up the next day with a fractured arm. When he was initially handcuffed, the police officer had given him a spiral fracture. When Mike kept trying to tell them he was hurt, they ignored him, and that's when he did what he did. Because he was only 17 years old, he was patched up at the hospital then released without charges. Yes, he attempted to assault a police officer but he didn't get a chance. He could've just been cuffed, but they hurt him unnecessarily.
This was the beginning of the end. The cops began driving past the house several times a day, every day. It got tedious. Mike got a bus ticket to Wisconsin where relatives had offered to take him in. I never saw him again. Ava found a room for rent in Modesto and moved away. Not long after arriving in Wisconsin, Mike turned himself in for a warrant he had out there. He was sent to jail and I wrote him regularly, once slipping a hit of acid under a postage stamp. Acid in prison sounds awful to me. It's like a prison in a prison, but hey, to each his own.
I heard from Mike here and there but less and less as time went on. Ava had gotten married and moved away. Abby and I got boyfriends, so we didn't see much of each other anymore, even though we lived in the same town, but that's how it is sometimes.
Four and a half years after I last saw him, Mike died. It happened on February 4, 1994, one month before his next birthday. He was 21. He had gotten himself into trouble and ended up in a stand off with the cops. He stayed holed up in a hotel, and had them convinced that he had a hostage by faking voices. This lasted for a while when Mike decided to open his hotel door, while crouched down low. He was six feet tall, even huddled, he couldn't make himself that small. He was big enough for the police officers to shoot him and kill him.
It crossed my mind that it could've been suicide by cop-a deliberate act on Mike's part to check out. It broke my heart when I got the news. He went out a bad guy, and from the eyes of many, he's considered an undesirable-a low life, but I know, we know, he was more than that. I would never deny him even in the most polite circles. If I denied him, I would deny myself because he was a part of me.
I've cleaned up and no one could guess where I've been unless I reveal my past like now. I've never spoken about this. I never wanted to explain it. I didn't think it was possible. Mike will always be in my heart, and I know I'll see him again. When I do, we'll pick up from where we left off-in laughter.
I say this to him, "I won't ever forget you. I'm still writing like how you encouraged me to and when days get rough, I turn it around by finding the humor in it when I can. Thank you for the memories that you've given me-for sharing your soul with me and letting me SEE you. I love you. I'll always love you..."
Mike was a scared kid, lost, and for a while, we gave him sanctuary, we gave him peace, we loved him unconditionally. It was probably the only time in his life that he had that. Once in a while, I can still hear his hearty laughter, and it makes me nostalgic, mischievous, yet my heart throbs in sadness at the same time. If he can see us all today, it would make him happy. Inside that battered body and conflicted mind, a radiant soul walked this earth, at one point, his steps were right next to mine. This soul is now in peace, every once in a while, he may pop down and check out the scene. With dancing eyes and that wide smile, he sees it all, and this time he really is free, and the only thing he feels is love. He deserves to feel good-as good as he made us feel when we were around him. God shines on Mike, and he can finally rest. Thank you, Mike.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment