Sunday, April 25, 2010

Cleveland Avenue

My maternal grandparents occupied a thin slice of a house on Cleveland Avenue in Trenton, New Jersey, the city of my birth and the recent subject of a History Channel "Gangland" show. Until I reached school age, I spent most of my days in their care.
Gram played the bad cop, a stout, white-haired Irishwoman with severe spectacles outfitted in plain, loose-fitting dresses and seemingly always sporting an apron. She scolded, against the backdrop of the pressure cooker's thwap, thwap, thwap in the hallway-like cooking area, when Gramps took me to Harry's and loaded me up with candy before dinner. Jesus and the apostles bore witness as they sat at their Last Supper table overlooking my grandparents' dinner table. The cast-iron radiator, folded like intestines, hissed intermittently beneath the decorative cover on which I used to sit until the heat became too much.
A narrow hallway connected the kitchen to the "parlor," in which I used to nap with Gram on a couch the color of a faded salmon. My head rested on her ample rump as Jesus, with the sacred heart exposed, overlooked us there, too, a palm leaf tucked into the frame. Stained-glass windows on either side of the fireplace helped keep the room suitably dark, and on the fireplace itself hung the old Irish blessing that i read countless times as a child but failed to grasp: May the road rise to meet you/May the wind be always at your back/May the sun shine warm upon your face/The rains fall soft upon your fields/And until we meet again/May God hold you in the palm of his hand.
Part of my problem stemmed from the fact that my grandmother's name was May. Syntactical confusion set upon my young mind as I tried to parse meaning. Was this fireplace-hung banner of sorts directly addressing my grandmother? If so, it didn't make sense, telling her the road rise up to meet you.
Uncle Tommy, my godfather and namesake, lived with my grandparents. His wife had died, but I'm not sure when, relative to my birth. Uncle Tommy had been a Seabee in World War II and then worked as a tool-and-die man at General Motors forever and smoked unfiltered Camels by the carton and drank a lot of Schaefer beer. He also bowled. He once observed me trying to remove small pieces of fractured asphalt from our driveway and likened the activity to "picking fly shit out of pepper with boxing gloves." He also made his own bullets, ostensibly for hunting, in the basement, but I don't remember any venison. As Christmas approached, he would tell me that he was going to shoot Santa Claus, which would induce more than a little anxiety in me. He also infuriated me by feigning interest in feeling my muscle, and when I would flex my bicep, he would squeeze my head.
He scolded me when I, home sick from school, would run the hallway like a 10-yard dash, and I, momentarily chastened, would retreat to the family room and Felix the Cat. Uncle Tommy eventually gave up the cigarettes and the beer, when diabetes threatened to exact a severe toll. He, loquacious like his siblings, in his later years liked to discuss his grocery list and his job as a hospital parking-lot attendant.
Uncle Tommy liked auto racing, specifically the Indianapolis 500. I once wanted to watch a basketball game instead, and he called me a "nigger lover." He yelled down the hallway to Gramps: "Hey, Dad, he's a nigger lover." The 6-year-old nigger lover--the worst kind. I hadn't been embarrassed before about liking basketball. I'm not sure where Uncle Tommy slept when Gram was alive, since the first floor of that house had only one bedroom. Aunt Virge and her brood lived on the second floor. After Gram's death, he slept in the bedroom with Gramps. My mother attributed such cohabitation to the Depression, when it sometimes was a necessity.
My cousin Joanie lived there sometimes, too, I think. She was divorced from Bob, who had served in Vietnam. Bob once shot up his parents' house with a shotgun. He also held hostages at a local drinking establishment, and his profanity-laced tirade appeared verbatim on the front of the local paper the next day. Joanie had a rabbit, which she sometimes kept tied up in the back yard. I spied Gramps one day from the kitchen window as he gave the rabbit some slack in the tether and then jerked it back, bringing the rabbit up abruptly. Not just once, either. So I, naturally, did the same the first opportunity I got. This time, though, Joanie spied me from the kitchen window. She took exception, and I became confused.
I remember sitting in the doorway that led from the family room, a.k.a. parlor, to the louvered-window front porch with my leg extended across the stoop. Gram didn't walk so well, with diabetes having claimed part of her foot, and I wanted to see her trip. She was on to me, though, and made a remark to the effect of my wanting to see an old lady trip. She surprised me more than once, taking the time one afternoon to regale me with a story about how she once beat up the school bully, the other kids henceforth taunting that boy by threatening to sick May Keenan on him. She also gave me the A.A. Milne book "When We Were Six" on my 6th birthday. She wrote a note inside the front cover telling me about how she and her siblings never could fall asleep as they lay awake on Christmas Eve and awaited the sound of bells on Santa's sleigh. She wrote that I was getting to be a ripe old age and that I was a very special boy. I gave that book to my son when he turned 6.
Gram died not long after that, when I was in first grade, too young to really grasp but old enough to appreciate the attention I received. Another lifetime. The mailman happened by while I played outside our house as the post-funeral reception took place. He asked me what was going on, and I told him my grandmother had died. He asked her name, and when I told him, he said he was glad it wasn't anybody he knew.
Gramps, the retired 40-year fireman, used to take me to the church carnival, where I would lob ping-pong ball after ping-pong ball toward glass bowls on shelves in an effort to win a goldfish. He made me soft-boiled eggs and would walk me around the block at Christmas to see the lights. When my mother and I would leave his house, Gramps would run along and knock on the car window, delighting me to no end. The grandchildren, 15 in all, if I'm counting correctly, fell prey to his failing memory, and he variously would refer to us as George or Harry. We have no Georges or Harrys in the family. But he usually gave me a dollar, just because, and he ran alongside my bike as I was learning to ride on two wheels. Cancer claimed him in 1979, 10 days before my birthday, and I ensconced myself in the bathroom and cried with abandon. I saw him the day before, a shell of his former self, less than a hundred pounds and fetal-like in his bed, and Jesus, head bowed, hung on the crucifix on the wall.

Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Pearls Of Wisdom (P.O.W.)

What follows represents a sampling of advice and general observations shared with me in my youth:

Italians love concrete.
My mother, offering her take on a neighbor's driveway-replacement project.

"Down the alley the dago flew, stuck a knife in the bald-headed Jew."
This little ditty came from Uncle Ed, who was actually my mother's uncle. I would recite it in the backyard, oblivious to the notion that it might offend our Italian neighbors.

Way down south, where the trains run fast, monkey stuck his finger up a baboon's ass. Baboon said, "Goddamn your soul, get your finger out of my asshole."
Courtesy of Aunt Marge, Uncle Ed's sister. Also a sister to my grandmother.

Shit and molasses, sugar and snot, 24 assholes tied in a knot." This from Aunt Marge, also, in the nursing home, summoning me with her claw of a left hand to bend closer, the better to hear her faint voice. It was longer, but I could only make out this part of it.

Opinions are like assholes...everybody has one. From my father, via my mother. I might have mentioned it before, but it's a gem that bears repeating.

Don't ever grow up to be a nigger. This from a neighbor who also was a friend of my brother's and a regular presence in our house.

There are black people and there are niggers. Courtesy of my mother, making allowances for the possibility that good black people do exist.

There are three things you can't get back: The flown arrow, the lost opportunity and the spoken word. My mother wrote this on a scrap of paper, I think when she was trying to get me to reconsider my college choice and not forgo a particular school.

The Lord works in mysterious ways. My mother, time and again. In fact, the Lord works so mysteriously, you don't even know he's there.

The Lord always answers your prayers. Sometimes the answer is no. My mother, of course, and ain't it a beauty.

The Virgin Mary never refuses the prayers of children. Also my mother. And for the record, Mary refused my requests, which I didn't think were unreasonable. I didn't pray for material items or to get in someone's pants; I just wanted to not feel like jumping off a building all the time. And to be able to sleep, maybe.

You never know who that might be knocking at your door. My mother said this is what her mother used to say when she gave to beggars knocking on the door during the Depression. Her mother's apparent rationale was that the person looking for food might be God incognito. My mother later chastised me for offering one of my brother's friends orange juice to drink, saying it was too expensive and that we needed to keep it for ourselves. I guess that was okay, since we were pretty sure he wasn't God.

The sky clouds up in the afternoon. My mother's take on Good Friday. Her contention is that the skies darken around the time Christ died. I think this one came from her mother, too. It seemed eerily plausible for a while in my youth, but it hasn't since been borne out.

Don't ever buy sheets with less than a 200 thread count. About a week after offering me this sage advice, my mother gave me a 150-thread-count sheet set.

Make milk shakes out of it. My mother's advice for how we should use the shitty ice cream she routinely bought. I guess, if you want a shitty milk shake.

We've been in a recession for years. Mom, during the Clinton boom times.

What are you, a little faggot? My oldest brother, after he pulled up alongside me in the car as I was skipping home from second grade.

Every time they shoot a rocket into space, the weather changes. Grandma, allegedly, who my mother described as being ahead of her time.

You can write your own ticket. This via one of my mother's male companions, parroted by my mother, in an effort to persuade me to attend the elitist high school. Well, I went there, but I don't know about writing my own ticket, whatever the fuck that means.

Gotta have a funnel. Some drunk girl brandishing a plastic convenience-store funnel who jumped on the hood of my car in Montana. She was with another girl and a guy. Not sure where the funnel came in.

Truckers eat pussy. A friend spotted this on a bumper sticker. Said there was no rhyme or anything.

Don't tell my mom I'm a lawyer, she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse. From an acquaintance, also from a bumper sticker.

Next time, I'm just gonna find a woman I don't like and buy her a house. From the same acquaintance, who had been married three times.

Don't get married. Women are wired different. My Uncle Lee, at my cousin Timmy's wedding.

When you want to be with a girl, jerk off and throw a dollar in the trunk of your car. This appeared in former Yankee Sparky Lyle's book, "The Bronx Zoo." Some gentleman gave this advice to Sparky, ostensibly to keep his career on track. I would certainly have more money had I followed this guidance.

You have no sense of humor. My mother, to me, numerous times. Trust me, her fucking jokes weren't funny.

You don't need it. One of my brothers, in reference to antidepressant medication.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. This comes from Hamlet, though my mother favored variations. I once heard George Carlin say there were certain things nobody would ever hear him say. One of those was: "I think I'll stick this red-hot poker up my ass." Now, do you suppose if someone were to find himself with a red-hot poker up his ass, he would be able to think good thoughts? Unlikely. Sometimes depression feels like I imagine a poker in the ass would feel, and it's just as impossible to think your way out. So this notion that someone can shake the blues with a little exercise or getting out and about or whatever has inherent flaws, and nobody should expect that a person so afflicted can snap out of it or retains control over the ability to do so.

Tuesday, April 6, 2010

Cascade

The footings begin to give way under the cold veneer of surface ice before collapsing completely and making way for the shattered pieces from above to cascade downhill like a wave gathering upon itself and crashing toward the beach. And you try to swim out from under as the avalanche overtakes you, but your own taut skin hems you in and and tingles from the piercing cold.
So began the approach toward electroconvulsive therapy, wires driven down through the layers under which I was buried, providing enough of a thaw to stave off suffocation. Recently an article about the late Townes Van Zandt said he had survived ECT. Alas, he couldn't outlive self-destruction, but the characterization of him as being an ECT survivor struck me, for I, too am that. But I pondered whether I considered myself in that light. Yes, I've thought of myself as a survivor, but of life in general, not specifically of a broken home or a questionable upbringing or meddling priests or 20 different medications or of electroshock therapy. They have made up my life. Just as I didn't consider the absence of a father as anything particularly abnormal, I thought ECT was the natural progression of a process I had begun in an effort to shake free of the depression.
At least that's what I think I thought. Witnesses exist who might provide a different account, but their views came from the outside. But to call it a natural progression is not to discount the emotional toll or the haze through which I subsequently have had to peer when recalling that time. I periodically felt ravaged by ECT and less than sanguine, and it had a greater emotional impact than protracted experimentation with medication, in part because of its temporal concentration.
My perspective has evolved, however, with additional exposure to a side of life that could be considered the polar opposite. Having had ECT makes me unique among my peers, and they weren't bothered by it; if we all had 12 beers, everything would be all right. But now I have kids, and they go to school and absorb information like sponges and sleep over friends' houses and fight with each other and laugh and play sports. And they're not exposed to violence and drug dealing and drug using and a general atmosphere of lunacy. Through them, I've received exposure to a side of life that at one time would have been as familiar to me as a Maori existence. I haven't become completely immersed in that life, and I can't fathom that I ever will, but it has demonstrated to me, like I'm watching a movie on a screen, that not everyone would consider a natural progression as I would. Okay, so being an ECT survivor makes me unique among a certain set. Apparently Ernest Hemingway and Judy Garland had it, too. That might not bode well. Speaking of Judy Garland, could anybody help but fall in love with her in "The Wizard of Oz"? But then things got a little messy.
So, what was I like in and around the time of my brush with destiny? As far as I can gather, if people who had never experienced depression suddenly became depressed, they would long for their worst day when they were "normal." The lack of an escape hatch proved troubling. I needed to get away from myself but couldn't. Drinking didn't give me that evacuation route. Antidepressants weren't working. You can't escape yourself. Unless you kill yourself, I guess, but with my luck, there actually would be an afterlife, and I would have fucked myself for all eternity by committing a mortal sin.
It becomes a cliche after a while. Depression haunts me, and I get tired of myself. And bored with it all. Tired of being in pain but not wanting to be a drama queen. And faring better than some people, anyway. Then I worry that I'm being a whiner. When virtually every day that you can recall consisted of a struggle, a fatigue element certainly exists. The weight of decades tests the limits of resilience. On the dash of my car rests a button labeled "ECT." When engaged, the button activates some kind of additional power reservoir for the engine, and the driver can accelerate more quickly. I used to think that if I could plug myself into the cigarette lighter and engage the ECT button for home electroconvulsive therapy, I could give myself a maintenance treatment every once in a while.
Maybe during those I'm-a-cliche-to-myself times, support from people familiar with my perspective mattered most. Getting over oneself, overcoming the notion that people shouldn't want to spend time with you, allowing them to make decisions for themselves in that regard and not supposing that you know what is best for them, presents a formidable challenge. Not wanting to be around myself, I questioned why others would. Nevertheless, support from those people mattered, though that wasn't always apparent to the support providers. I sometimes kept people at a distance, as much to turn away from my old, tired self as to keep them at bay. My fatigue and disgust led me to a sometimes insular existence, perhaps as part of a self-defense mechanism designed to preclude additional pain. Somewhere within the depression literature, I read that sometimes a depressed person should rely on others' judgment with respect to behavior. In other words, if you're too fucked up to recognize how fucked up you are, you should listen to someone else. That can be a slippery slope. If the person to whom you turn for guidance about your fuckedupedness has always been telling you how fucked up you are, then that particular avenue might not be the one down which to travel. On the other hand, if someone has judgment that you've deemed prudent in more lucid moments, then that might be the person or people on whom to rely.
I, somewhat necessarily consumed with myself, don't think I stopped to consider then the perspectives of other people involved in my life during the dark stretches of Amazonian depth and range. What must it have been like for them? Most commonly, the people in this situation have felt helpless. As I've gotten a little older, my perspective has undergone somewhat of a realignment, with children the primary force behind the adjustment, and I've attempted to assess the difficulties people in my life must have encountered in trying to penetrate an intensely personal experience. I look back through 16 years' worth of nebulae and the further accumulation of experience, and I'm appreciative of their forbearance. My mother at least kept track of the bills, which probably distracted her from considering too disturbingly that upon her son every other day were being visited sedation, restraint and electricity.
I can see myself now in a different light because the children can see me with relatively untainted perspectives. They've only known me as their father, a comparatively stable presence in their lives. An inevitable legacy from the past persists, but the bearing it has on now need not always be destructive.
As part of a management class group exercise in college, the professor told us to come up with a word to describe ourselves, how we would like to be remembered. "Tenacious," I said. That drew some oohs and aahs from my classmates. "Good word, good word." Those fuckers wished they thought of it first, but, not being as tenacious as me, they didn't. The instructor also told us to come up with a phrase, or a personal slogan, that we would want to use to communicate something about ourselves. I didn't know this was coming, but I thought about my mother, and I said to my fellow classmates: "It's not my fault." I kind of surprised even myself. Unfortunately, the recognition that I considered myself culpable when outcomes failed to please, particularly the women in my life, didn't provide a runway down which I would travel on my journey to self-awareness and healing. Not then, anyway. If it had, life as I know it would be much different.
Even when depression hurled me headlong toward ECT, I shouldered blame. I failed, and shame washed over me. No longer am I ashamed. And it really wasn't my fault. For some people, the stigma and shame associated with depression persist, and they can't bring voice to their frustration. "Don't worry 'bout a thing, every little thing gonna be all right." I guess, if you're smoking ganja all the time. "Don't worry, be happy." Fuck that guy and that stupid fucking song.
Warren Buffett says he hit the genetic lottery by being born in the United States. He contends that his U.S. citizenship conferred upon him advantages unavailable to people in less developed countries. That point of view has a certain validity when considering life from an economic perspective, as he has been inclined to do. But being born in the U.S. doesn't automatically bestow riches, material or spiritual, on everyone. Obviously. But the point is that there can be tremendous disadvantages inherent in being born into a particular family in a particular place. I guess I, at least, haven't been a depressed Chinese coal miner, but I think I would rather feel okay most of the time and have less access to what the West commonly provides, for it doesn't necessarily a happy man make. I once heard Paul McCartney say that if he had had to live through what John had to live through to write the songs that John wrote, he wouldn't have taken the deal. Touche.