Posted on by michaelwconrad

BRANDO

I lost several important figures from my life story in 2020. I didn’t write about them… I’m not entirely sure why, other than avoidance. The entire year seemed to be out to end us, and now, tucked behind the imaginary wall of a new calendar, I felt safe. I felt like we survived, but “happily ever after” only happens where the author stops, follow it long enough and it’ll certainly end in death.

I recently heard of the passing of an old friend. This wasn’t the kind of friend I exchanged blood oaths with, or even really got to know all too well. I’ve written about such friends before and my journey to learn about them via their social media after their deaths, but in this case I haven’t even got that. 

His name was Brandon, we called him Brando, and frankly I never suspected there were extra letters on his birth certificate. Brando was the perfect name for this guy, “a real pisser” is what Stephen King would call him. He was the kind of person whose face apparently never aged, even as he covered his body with tattoos and scars. Brando was sweet, heartfelt, and someone who would fight an entire VFW hall of hardcore kids if things went sideways. I barely knew him and I loved him.

In those days we were up to all kinds of nonsense, both admirable and shameworthy. The whole group had a code, it wasn’t clearly defined or studied, it was just the way we were. Our value system included a self awareness that I don’t think I’ve encountered in as pure a form in any other chapter of my life. We were a pack, guys, girls, the oldest and youngest among us. We put a premium on humor (especially of a self deprecating variety) and Brando was the reigning champion. Tucked into track jackets and youth crew hoodies we were legion, and in that crew Brando was well known to be the first one to make a joke and the last one to stop laughing. He was also the one you would see huddled in quiet contemplation when one of ours was going through it and needed an ear. He had discovered a balance at a young age that many take a lifetime to discover.

But who was he? What had I missed out on? That kind of mystery is unkind because there is no real way of knowing for certain how different life would have been if I had gotten to know him better. I read these anecdotal stories of his generosity and authenticity and I feel robbed. I feel like I should have paid more attention to the folks with whom I spent long summers swimming at Wildcat Falls, smashing ceiling tiles at the Knight of Columbus, and spitting in the face of looming adulthood responsibilities. I lost touch with Brando, with the whole group really, when I moved to Boston in effort to find myself.

My dad used to quote the Three Stooges (I think?) saying “No matter where you go, there you are.” I never found it funny, and now that I’m sitting here a grown man of 41 who has spent the bulk of those years in transit seeking my secret identity I realize it is less of a joke and more of a Zen Koan. I was there… I was with Brando in a basement watching Jackass. I was front row screaming along with the incomprehensible lyrics of our friends bands. I was in the car, fingers crossed that it would live long enough to get us back to Manchester. I was standing by his side when Hammerskins showed up at the warehouse show. I was there, and still looking down the road believing that I could find some greater truth if I kept moving.

Part of losing track of old friends (for me anyway) involves creating this mythology about them, good and bad. I would believe my old friends no longer loved me, but I’d still exploit my friendship with them by telling their stories, catching some shine for having known such colorful characters. Brando was an exception, perhaps because we were never particularly close, maybe because I knew he wasn’t the sort to give a damn about such things. Brando seemed a transcendent sort who would just pick up and resume friendship, even a malnourished one.

I don’t know who he turned into. Guys like him can become monsters, a rebellion against this “nice guy” reputation, an effort to achieve a level of dynamism and establish that you are more than folks thought. Based on the stories I’ve heard about his life I’d say he never did… amazing… he was just kind and genuine (not perfect) from start to finish. That’s goals.

When people die we dig up every little kind thing they did, in the case of Brando it seems he was so kind that it’s all right there, still sitting on the undisturbed ground, no shovels required. There doesn’t seem to be a need to dress up his behavior or to let go of undesirable elements, they either didn’t exist or were so few and utterly human that they left no mark. Again, I reflect on someone who was several years my junior showing a degree of wisdom I continue to work toward.

Brando represents a major turning point in my life. I grew up in a fairly isolated community in southern New Hampshire and it was only after getting a car that I discovered that there were others like us in surrounding towns and cities. We had our own tight pocket of weirdos in Merrimack, but just north of us by 20 minutes, were others. When our groups merged it was a doubling of numbers and a surge of new influences. I imagine this to be how early human communities came together, cautious at first, then an exuberance to discover so many new perspectives. Were this a period of history prior to ours Brando was certainly positioned to be in a position of prominence, someone we could all trust and set our compass to.

Listen… I’m sure he had his shitty moments. I’m sure mistakes were made, feelings were hurt, and he wasn’t some cherubic ideal for any number of people, but I’m not concerned about that. Death reminds us that we shouldn’t be defined by our worst moments, or even our best; our lives, and indeed our value may be based on how much we worked with what we had at the time. Brando legitimately seemed to give more than he took, he loved more than he hated, he provided more laughter than tears; life is short and scary and at times terrible… for him to share so many gifts in that little time he had is remarkable. 

I’ll finish with a letter directly to Brando. Thanks for your time, reach out to an old friend.

Brando,

I don’t think you would find this blog entry very cool at all, I suspect that you’d make fun of it if I’m being real… but it’s been helpful to write, even if it didn’t capture a fraction of my feelings on the matter. Really I don’t care if you liked this or not, it’s kind of selfish anyway, and I thought others who might have known you would find some catharsis in such a thing… so fuck you.

Anyway, I deeply regret not getting to know you better. I respect the hell out of the fact that you didn’t keep a social media account, believe me I’ve been looking to see if you had anything and I keep finding these wack ass dudes with your name… ok I’m sure they’re fine, but they aren’t you.

I wanna thank you for accepting me and my friends. When we encountered your group it could have turned into some lame rivalry or whatever (I remember seeing others like me in the mall and calling them posers) but it didn’t and I think you were a critical component in that. You were immediately cool with us and I think even the older kids knew you were the leader…

I hope that life gave you what you wanted, and that you got to live it on your terms. I hope that the smiles weren’t hiding too much, and that when the end came you left us without too many regrets. I bet you did more in your brief life than most do in long, grinding ones, so let’s call it a win.

I’m going to learn from losing you. So many of us will.

That’s a promise,

Mike 6

Posted on by michaelwconrad · 2 Comments

An Unnamed-Unknowable Place

I used to have these bad ear infections as a kid. Apparently this was something that had been going on since I had been a baby, but there were a couple standout moments in my early childhood that I can still recall.

Ear infections are tricky to describe, it’s a pain that has no analogous value, if you’ve had one you know. It isn’t exactly a headache, or a sinus issue, it walks the line in a way that generates agony of an exquisite nature that we lack the language to describe. Something interior, hot, a pressure, it isn’t a migraine, but similarly it cannot be escaped, and sensory input can exacerbate it. In my case the afflicted ear would boil with heat, the outer elements would feel swollen, ablaze with radiant torture from deep inside.

I must have been five or six when the last real bad one gripped me. I’ve had them since, but life dulls the intensity of all things. When I was young there were many foods I struggled to eat, things like onions and tomatoes. I’ve read that it’s the acidity that makes kids less likely to enjoy such things. Young, sensitive palates that have not yet beaten into submission by whiskey shots and packs of Pall Mall. I suspect that this is the case with pain as well. Suffering is something we learn to rationalize after years of torment inflicted by virtue of existence and all the nastiness of feeling our bodies slowly become less and less capable. While I can no longer engage in some of the high impact foolishness of my youth, I am well prepared to accept pain and to move through it.

Maybe this was an exceptional infection, it’s hard to say, I just remember my parents showing great concern and preparing hot packs to hold to my ear. Little was expected of me, I was allowed to heal, I was allowed to cry and even to feel sorry for myself. I was given affection, my back was rubbed and I was told that I was a beautiful boy, that this would pass, that I was loved.

The pain that comes later in life is generally more existential. We fear bills and betrayal by our lovers. We start to think more often of death as a cruel eventuality rather than a freak thing that happens to the unfortunate. We start to see the celebrities we admired meet their ends, old school friends pulled away from this life by the kinds of ailments that were surely only dangerous for the few older people we had in our lives. We start to look at our failed dreams and those still lingering as foolish trappings of a time when pepperoni was too spicy. We get cigarettes punched out on our dreams and we’re left with the ashen reality of the situation. The rent is due. You don’t have good ideas anymore. Whiskey shots.

This sadness can’t be properly addressed. Mom can’t rub your back and tell you that you are her little pumpkinhead. The person you love is looking at their own mortality with the same terror you are, your friends are reconciling their orphaned dreams with the same degree of regret and woe. Most importantly, you can’t talk about your pain and fear because it’s too strange to describe.

This last earache kept me up at night. I was allowed to stay on the couch with the TV on, my parents knew that a bit of distraction goes a long way in situations such as these. I don’t recall what was playing, I just remember laying there in the stillness of twilight. The program on the TV was of little comfort- I had this pain I couldn’t figure out, no end in sight, no way to end it, I just had to endure.

So I screamed.

It was from somewhere deep, not from the lungs or the diaphragm, it was from a deeper place, a place beyond my body, somewhere in a distant time before me, a place that will still be there when I am gone. This mysterious place, this unnamed-unknowable place, a place I suspect mothers who have lost their children know. A place the clinically depressed are too familiar with. A place of suicide and loss and grief. An echo shot back in time, a scream that I cannot find today, but I know it’s sound, I’ve just lost the threshold with which to hear it. It’s the sound of the vacuum. It’s the sound of the universe mourning itself. I had stumbled across that tonality through the pain, but was well aware the scream would bring me no comfort… I was just out of options.

My parents came to me, both with great concern. They understood the sound to be their little boy in pain. They just didn’t know that this was the start of the long, hollow, now muted bray that would live inside of me, as it does in you, forever.

I took up meditation very young, several years later. I explored religious thinking, trying to understand this new pain. The ear healed, the details now live on an island in the fog of my memory, the pain was an effigy of the yawning terror of living. I didn’t suffer like that again, I had graduated. The meditation has tamped it down at times, but there is no silencing the bellows. It’s always there for me, my truth.

I started eating onions and swearing and living on less sleep. I started drinking booze and not sharing my fear. I stopped complaining and lived with it; rubbed some dirt in it, walked it off. I took work helping others, ate up all their “sins” and tried to forget what I learned. I changed my worldview, I abandoned hope, I became something other than myself.

Earaches are caused by lifeforms setting up shop in the cave of your tympanic cavity and struggling to live. Theirs is an existence so completely strange I cannot even imagine. They find somewhere suitable to reproduce (in this case your ear hole) and build communities. These communities use resources and produce waste and in time their world will die. I wonder if in those short generations there are ones who peer from the depths of the ear canal? Do the young fungi scream? Do the mature bacteria mourn their squandered time? Do they miss their dead? Does the ear speak to them as it spikes with heat attempting to stem-the-tide of growth and consumption? Do they dream, in their viral incompleteness, for something we understand less than simply living? 

My mother stayed up with me, consoling me, holding the hot compress to the side of my head. A tiny dying Christ tableau in the darkness. Somewhere in her heart she had that scream too. Somewhere we all scream within. The ear of the universe too infected to listen, an atonal plea to be seen. 

I cannot describe this pain.   

Posted on by michaelwconrad

Two Brief Cases of Note

Like most of you I have social media on multiple platforms. I often consider that one day I will die and I hope that I haven’t done or said anything on these sites that would misrepresent my life. I have a real fascination with peoples final posts, here I have changed/omitted certain names and places in the interest of respecting the privacy of the departed and their loved ones.

CASE 1: 

It was the day after Halloween 7 or so years ago. I was living in a midsize city just North of San Francisco. The city was small enough that it didn’t have a ton of crime, but just big enough so that it wasn’t incredibly uncommon it to be the setting for several murders a year. 

I lived in a duplex, sharing a wall with one of my best friends. The house was in an area we called The Grid which happened to be where the bulk of our friends lived in during that era. Now most of us have been priced out of that county, but at the time every third house would be home to friendly faces. Ours was one of the more frequented spots to hang out, in part due to its centralized location, and in other part due to our rather inviting street facing porch. We would sit on that porch for hours at a time, sometimes with so many of us there that it was standing room only.

Our friend Ian came through that morning, all of us worse for the wear, residual makeup on our faces to punctuate the dark circles under our eyes that resulted from the late night and celebratory libations from the previous evening. Immediately after greeting us Ian told us of a mysterious situation going on a few blocks over on the lawn of the Junior College. He claimed to have seen a body.

“I doubt that. Musta been some drunk kid KO’d over there.” I said with a skeptical sneer, Ian had a level of charming gullibility that made his report a bit less than airtight.

“No dude, he was dead, cops are already swarming over there.”

I hopped up asking the others if they wanted to go check it out, all wisely declining. I’m not the kind of person who typically goes out of his way to see such vestiges of mortality, but a body in the middle of the expansive JC lawn was too compelling for me to resist. It couldn’t have been a murder, the middle of the lawn was not where such an act would be committed and the last place one might think to drop off a corpse. It must have been an overdose or something, while the town had its share of homeless folks, death from exposure was unlikely.

I made my way up the few short blocks to the main street, directly across from it was the lawn, and sure enough, in its middle several members of law enforcement patrolled the area and were actively hanging crime scene tape around what was obviously a body, covered by a pristine white sheet. There were several other community members around speaking in hushed tones. Most remained on the far side of the road near me, afraid they might be barked at by law enforcement should they get too close.

Most seemed clueless looking on, but several from the crowd who had arrived on the scene earlier described a man face down on the lawn. Some described blood, but their tone wasn’t entirely convincing. Oddly the police had failed to cover the feet of the victim, which remained sticking out of the bottom of the sheet. He was wearing very new looking black and red Nike sneakers, they were gaudy and reminded me of the kind of shoes some folks take extreme steps to prevent from getting dirty. These were not the kind of shoes one wears to walk over the soggy lawn on the JC, not when there was a perfectly good sidewalk a few yards away. I couldn’t make sense of what had happened… were the reports of the blood true? The whole scene captured my imagination and as I walked back to the porch I made a note to follow up on the reports of this that were likely to start hitting the internet by later that same day.  

This wasn’t the first murder victim I had ever seen, but the memory of this one was striking, I suspect it was due to the fact that the shoes communicated something about the individual I could relate to. No, I have never been a shoe person, but it seemed to me to be a young person’s interest to indulge in such things. I suspected that the person under the sheet was of similar age to me, and when online news reports started to come in my suspicion was confirmed. 

The reports were limited and vague, as these things tend to be. One thing that was made clear in the articles I found was that this was not a homicide investigation. Various social media comments confirmed (at least in a rumorous way) that there had been a good deal of blood on the scene. No guns were recovered, according to reports, so it seemed to me that this was likely a suicide, with a knife or razor being the means with which the grisley act was committed. All of this was very unscientific, but I was interested in unspooling the narrative of this young man’s final days.

I managed to pull up his Facebook before someone took it down. His privacy settings were almost nonexistent so I had access to all he shared in the years he had kept it active, and what I found was a very troubling story indeed. The young man was convinced that he had stumbled upon a government conspiracy, one that reached all the way to the top. He was calling upon angels to protect him as he exposed the misdeeds of those whom we trust to keep society up and running, hopefully with the interests of the people guiding them as they made choices and passed laws that we were all to adhere to.

His photographs were another story. Yes there were the typical uploads of conspiracy minded types There were images of Masonic origin, hidden symbols in film and tv. There were codes and ciphers that made little sense. There were even images of the World Trade Center complete with breakdowns focused on their rate of collapse and what was portrayed as incongruous math to to bolster the idea that the destruction was not in fact due to the impact of the commercial airlines. Along with these, and other half cocked conspiracies were images of angels, both from the Renaissance masters, as well as newer images put together by someone with Photoshop skills and a penchant for lens flares. These images were far less interesting than the ones of the man himself.

His pictures, mostly solo selfies, showed what appeared to be a happy, well kempt 20 something. His eyes looked deep and meaningful, his hair was always perfectly cut and maintained, and his smile was wide and generous. Many of the pictures had inconsequential settings, the bathroom, seated in front of a computer (clear from the illumination of a screen), and in what I could only imagine was his yard, on the grass. He didn’t express his fears in these pictures. In checking the time stamps, one shot would be uploaded of him grinning like a child at Chuck E. Cheese with a caption saying “Just kinda feelin’ myself lol” and moments later he would post in text “The Illuminati designed DC in the shape of a Luciferian star, look it up, they got no love for us.” 

The warnings were just the start though, often he would lead in with such a thing, and then spiral into more and more dire personal anecdotes until hitting a fever pitch with posts about black cars following him, and feeling like he in danger for getting too close to the truth. The following day, or sometimes even in the midst of a paranoid flurry he would pop in again with a selfie, smiling, “Just got blessed up over at Avenue Barbershop by my boy Chuy!”

It all seemed to start for him maybe a year or two prior, beyond that his Facebook had the usual stuff, pics of food and cars, family photos, a couple memes that struck me as very typical. There was little to indicate that his future was one of great fear, terror so great that he would seek the aid of angelic forces to keep the men that hunted him at bay. 

At the time I worked in the mental health field, so I had some education about this kind of thing. I have never been the type to fully disregard anything as simply delusional thinking, but it was hard not to land on that when reading his posts. I wished that he had found help and that his smiles wouldn’t have been buttressed by concerns for his safety and the dark forces that were undoubtedly taking their toll, real or imagined. I wondered where his network was, noticing that the likes on his pictures and posts had been in steady decline over the past few months. He was alienating everyone with his wild ideas. He was scaring away the people who loved him, or maybe they were turning a blind eye because they were embarrassed about the kind of person he was becoming. We all notice in our own lives that our friends rally when we are on the upswing, when we’re in the struggles it can be a really lonely place… but this guy had almost completely spooked off everyone. 

I noticed that no one had written on his page anything like “Damn, I heard the news about ______, I love you man, Rest In Power.” or some other lightweight remembrance. If he had alienated his people I could understand not showing up pulling out your hair and weeping, but not even a simple “You will be missed.” It really made me wonder. He had a fairly typical number of friends for the site, what had this guy done that was so horrible as to not attract a single mourner?

As I closed my investigation I began to wonder if I had found the right guy, and then in his recent uploads I found undeniable proof that it was him. Unlike his other pictures this one had a lengthy bit of text. It went on at length and how he had found the links he had been looking for, how the secret empire had its claws firmly set in the small city we lived in. He named certain elected officials and members of law enforcement as instruments of this Satanic cabal that ran the world in secret. He cited a number of police shootings and the victims and painted a portrait of suppressed information and police misconduct. He did all this while calling on Michael and Gabriel and a number of other Seraphim to protect him as he continued to pull the veil. He said the Illuminati would eliminate him out for speaking up. He said his days were numbered, and that he was working to make peace with the fact that he would be killed by the police for doing what he was doing. After this lengthy piece of text there was a shot of his new shoes, those black and red Nikes I had seen on the lawn of the JC. The post script stating simply “These the boots yer boy gon be sportin’ when they take me.”

CASE 2: 

I had become a fixture in the Boston punk and hardcore scene in the early 2000’s when I made a hasty retreat from my childhood home 30 minutes North in Southern New Hampshire. I was in bands, played a ton of shows, booked out of state bands, and went to concerts almost nightly. For several years this was my life, music. During this time I made a lot of friends and even more acquaintances that I would see regularly at the same venues and basements that were home to such affairs. It was during this time that I met this guy who I will now call Jon.

Jon was older than me and if I’m being truthful he seemed a bit out of touch. He was into a lot of the same stuff that I was, but his eccentricities forbid me from ever considering him someone I really had an interest in knowing better. He was a weirdo, but he was close with a number of my friends, and seeing him so often we came to engage in friendly terms. He was at many of the parties I attended, always loudly gregarious. At shows he would dance wildly before the crowd was even warmed up, he was a real individual and he literally wore it on his sleeve.

This was a time in hardcore when fashion was moving away from the jockish appearances of the Youth Crew era, and was drawing more from Mod culture than anywhere else. I found myself wearing “girl jeans” and polos, huge faux fur lined parkas, and allowing my dyed black hair to hang to one side in a look that would become more identified with Justin Bieber in a decades time, and become a cartoonish reflection of what I considered hot shit at the dawning of this new millenia.

Jon owed his look more to gutter punk or industrial sensibilities. He would cut his hair into these wacky nonsense styles, half shaved, with a strange patch here and there. He wore a ring in his nose that had to be 00 gauge, lips pierced all over, eyebrows, cheeks, on his body spotty home done tattoos visible through his fishnet tanks. He had sewn bizarre patches in strange places on a rancid military surplus jacket. His boots that seemed comically large and he smelled like a dumpster. He was one of a kind, so unique in fact that I struggle to convey his appearance because any description sounds almost rational, but I assure you it wasn’t. His attitude was similar, Jon didn’t care when the party started or ended, he had his own clock, and at shows if he was enjoying the bands he could give a flying fart if the energy of the room was there, he had his own engine. I have to repeat these bits because everyone has their moments, for Jon it was his default setting.

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t leave Boston gracefully. I told a lot of people off, feeling like I’d never see them again. I didn’t mind burning a few bridges on the way out. I felt like my move was allowing me to speak truths that the folks I was leaving behind had been wanting to say but couldn’t due to being stuck in the same scene with those who needed to be humbled. Even the folks who would have maintained a friendship with me were met more often with unanswered phone calls and more unanswered internet messages than even the most steadfast could persist in the face of. I didn’t like who I had become in Boston and the move would serve as a soft reset, a means of personal reinvention, and a renewal in my journey to find out who I was.

Years later, things looped around and even some of the folks I was rude to found their way back into my social media circles. Time is the great healer, and a lot of the stones I had thrown were forgiven, many of them having done the same, or at least having developed the worldly quality of knowing that different seasons of life have different weather patterns. I hadn’t done anything too rotten, and nostalgia for the good times and all those shows and all that magic helped heal the wounds I may have caused as a self righteous kid.

It wasn’t as if we spoke all the time, someone would pop up, friend request, chat a second, and now you’re in my feed and I’m in yours. You know all about me that I find fit to share and I know all about the stuff you wish to share. We leave out a good deal, but most of us are pretty open about the good and the bad, and it felt good to see where life had taken my old friends. Most were doing really well, so well in fact that I often wondered what they thought about Boston’s Prodigal Son, who went to sunny California and spent the better part of a decade in some of the deepest depressions he had ever known. I was still doing the same shit, and most of them had nice careers, kids, and had moved on from those old fanciful dreams we shared. Most were contented to live good, wholesome lives and not worry about creation, or late nights and impossible dreams.

I never got a friend request from Jon (naturally) and I had all but forgotten about him until a mutual posted about his death. He has died AT A SHOW. Any idea I had about being the one true lifer dissolved in an instant. Here it was, proof that Jon was the real one and I was a fraud. This was something I had already begun to suspect years earlier when my interest in maintaining social stature by being en vogue began to give way to a mindset less concerned with such things. In shaking such aspirations I was able to reflect more clearly on certain people with queer tastes and understand that these were the real punks, and that all the posturing and posing I had done was quite the opposite.

When I became interested in punk I had very little information about what it all meant. The definition was added to as I went along, and with each new piece of information my prejudices as to what was and was not punk became more and more constrictive and antithetical to what attracted me to the lifestyle. For example, in the beginning I made no delineation between hippies and punks. It seemed to me that it was about counter culture, rebellion against the imposed status quo of the mainstream. When I got word that punks and hippies were in fact diametrically opposed, I threw in with the punks, they had better music. This kind of foolish thinking narrowed my scope to a pin hole. Folks like Jon missed that memo and as a result they were able to skip, what for me was an important part of the identity I had assumed in the name of rebellion. I had to build walls around myself, lock myself into a dogmatism so that I could execute on the greatest skill that punk ever taught me, the one where you initiate the most important rebellion one can undertake. This great revolution is the one that takes place in our own hearts when we realize we have become the bad guy.

I wondered how many other incredible people I had dismissed or alienated with my dumb rules and expectations. I felt ashamed about how vapid and shallow my attitude had been. I had traded in the exclusivity and elitism of my small town’s social cliques and had upgraded to being the one drawing up designs for a brand new caste system. I had become a part of a problem that got me into punk and hardcore in the first place, and now from my imagined place of esteem, I had appointed myself gatekeeper to a counter culture that mirrored all the worst parts of what made the social piece of public education so foul. Jon had apparently been immune to that toxic trap. Maybe if I had access to his perspective I wouldn’t have felt stuck in that old imagined identity, but then I might would have missed out on the important growth that takes place when you burn down your former self like a hated effigy.

Jon was not a drug user and had no diagnosis of heart issues or anything like that, at least as far as I can tell. People have a way of indicating such things, even in brief memorials. He just went to a show, like we had all done so many times, and died, right there on the dancefloor. He wasn’t assaulted or struck by a stagediver. He didn’t OD in the bathroom, and according to all records of the night he hadn’t even seemed unwell, right up until his very end. I don’t know what killed him, an aneurysm? Sudden heart failure? Something mysterious had taken this man and I had so many questions. Again, I would use social media to investigate.

I plumbed the listings on Facebook and I found him. He didn’t have privacy set, so like in the case of ______, the man on the lawn, I had access to a good deal. Unlike the man on the lawn, Jon’s facebook was loaded with mournful friends recounting memories, sharing their grief, and saying all the things they wished they had said to him, or would love to say to him once more. Jon was someone that everyone loved, because there was little to not love. He remained true to himself, something I had scoffed at when I was masquerading as one whose authenticity circumstantially was what everyone else wanted. It felt like such a joke, this guy I hardly knew died knowing who he was and even as I type this I am still peeling away layers of an old facade to find an honest expression of the universe I carry around in between my ears.

When I got to his final post I found myself smiling unconsciously as I read it. Jon really was a great and beautiful enigma and I had missed it. The last post was about the show. Some band from long ago was doing a reunion and he was looking for friends who would like to join him. He recalled a number of previous performances of theirs that he had enjoyed 10-15 years prior before their long pause. He was really excited to see them and to feel that wondrous feeling again, to feel young and to dance and to be free. He closed the post with something brilliantly prophetic.“If I don’t come back from this show it’s because I’ve fallen into the Time Tunnel. I’ll be back in 96’ dancing with myself in the past- forever.” 

Posted on by michaelwconrad · 2 Comments

Dewey(?)

I hid it in my closet. I promised myself I wouldn’t look at it anymore. 

My memory is such now that I can’t even say for certain that it even existed and I wouldn’t even know where to begin with a Google search for proof of it actually being a real thing. I’m pretty sure my brother wouldn’t remember it so that’s a dead end too. In reality it doesn’t matter if it ever existed anyway, memories serve the purpose of informing future choices, and nothing- even a revelation that it was an item I simply imagined- could undo the idea of it. This is the kind of thing that comes to mind when it is idle, or at the precipice of sleep, times when the mire of the subconscious rises and floods over manufactured ideations of the self. This is fundamental now, it’s veracity is no longer relevant.

It was a coloring book, a cheaply produced and easily purchased means of keeping the kids tied up, even for a few fleeting moments so that my mother could have a second to attend to the other pressing matters of keeping the home. The book had a high gloss, color cover and ragged newsprint interior, the perfect vector for the broken assembly of crayons we kept in a snap-lid tupperware container. This book was a Huey, Dewey, and Louie theme, and it haunted my young life.

Crayons were a big part of my youth, and remain a medium that interests me. I love the chaos they bring to the table, and their versatility. These are especially valuable when you’re young because they’re cheap and don’t require much to keep them in use. One might use the plastic sharpener affixed to the large collections, the ones with the coveted metallic hues, but most of us didn’t have that did we? Upkeep requires only that you peel the paper sleeve back if they get too short, and some of us would remove those entirely. I’m pretty sure that the kids that removed the paper all the way are among those most likely to have sociopathic tendencies, or the types who buy cases of single use plastic water bottles, the ones full of water stolen from municipal sources and redistributed to wealthy. The removal of the paper was at times unavoidable, but to willfully do so (without intention of broadside fill applications of course) seemed sinful to me. Many of the cheap crayons I used would slide from their paper in their own rebellion, and this always caused me some dismay. I would make an effort to ensure that they remained paired, which was often impossible, as they would again escape the sleeve in the jostling of their container.

Melting crayons on a hot lightbulb was a whole other matter. Yes it was wasteful, but it was 1 part science and 2 parts art to my brother and I. The act was taboo in the Conrad house, but we couldn’t stop. The evidence was impossible to obscure, between the smells and the dripping stains left on the bulbs, we always got caught. I don’t recall any heroic efforts made by my parents to prevent such actions, but we must have been dressed down a time or two for our indiscretions, I simply cannot remember those reprisals.

  We had filled out a number of the pages, my brother being a couple years my senior, was able to stay in the lines and even incorporate advanced shading techniques. I emulated his touch, but often in an effort to complete the piece I would leave streaks of darkness where I had applied too much pressure, run fills of the wrong color on elements, and of course find my crayon dancing its way outside of the line art in ways that revealed my lack of fine motor skills. My mother was always supportive, and was bold enough to let me know that when I colored I could use any color palate I desired, and to remind me that the lines were mostly a suggestion. She was very kind, and while we weren’t exactly the “hang it on the fridge and give this boy a bow” kind of family, her support of the arts was as genuine as a tired mother of 2 (soon to be 3) could muster. 

I made a discovery though, one day, one that would require me to hide this book away and hope to never see it again.

I have been called many things in my now 40 years of life to shame me for my empathy. New England remains a bastion for machismo and gender bias, and while it wasn’t the hot topic then that it has become in today’s world, this too was something that my mother protected me from. She had her reductive moments, but when I would cry she would console me. When the other kids called me a “cry baby” or take shots at my sensitive nature, she would always remind me that the world needs more heart, and that I should never be ashamed to express my sadness.

Even with my mothers support I kept some of these expressions to myself. I knew that understanding had limits and that there were going to be times in life I had to march forward with the stoic knowledge that our existence is defined by pain and suffering. I was 5 years old and already learning unavoidable truths that stood like monoliths in my developing world view. I had become aware of death. I knew that when a baby was born there would be blood, and pain, and tears of both the mother and her child. I knew that this would be reflected in the end, having seen hardened adults weep at the loss of a loved one. I was beginning to see that while tragedy and sadness at times summoned tears, sometimes we cry for reasons mysterious to the world, and these tears often called for explanation.

I had to hide the book because it had made me cry and I didn’t believe that my expression of grief would be understood or accepted. I had to tuck it away under winter clothes and sundry storage items because I knew I would be unable to find the words to validate my cry baby showing. The book was hidden now and I would never have to look at it again.

But something strange happened and I did look again. In fact it became a bit of a preoccupation to sneak off to the bedroom, pop open the closet, dig deep for it and look at it, but only when I was alone and wouldn’t have to explain why I was crying. I didn’t enjoy the crying, and I’m not entirely sure what it was all about or why I insisted on revisiting this private pain, sometimes multiple times in a day. At times it felt like a compulsion, but it wasn’t as if I feared some malady if I didn’t look, or felt incomplete if I didn’t conduct the ritual. I think I was trying to make sense of what I was seeing and trying to conquer the empathy, or at the very least define it.

I guess I liken it to pulling out love letters from a former partner, or gazing at a picture of a departed loved one. Aside from rolling around in memories for comfort, this process seems to me a brave act of confronting pain rather that keeping it tucked away in the folds of a wounded heart. I have never been the kind of person who indulges in such activities routinely, but this situation with the Huey, Dewey, and Louie coloring book might have been my young version of such an act.

The cover was hard for me to look at.

We must have had that particular book for awhile before I noticed it, but when I did it bothered me in an exquisite way that I hadn’t felt in my short life prior to that. You see, we were a poor family, my mother would later tell me that we were not poor, we were just “upper-lower-middle class” which in a town of straight up middle-upper class folks felt poor. She was a writer, so her language was well honed and able to reframe our economic status in a way that felt less dire, but we were poor. We ate, we went to the doctors (sometimes) and were clothed and housed, but otherwise the struggle was there. We lived on a fixed budget, even food was, at times a commodity that proved limited toward the end of the week as my father awaited his paycheck. It was tight enough that I remember my brother getting chewed out for hiding a few slices of salami under his pillow- this stuff was for lunch, but he was hungry and only the mealy apples were to be used for snacking. We eventually got put on the free lunch voucher system at school to the ignorant ridicule of our peers, which only added to our hunger. We often opted not to use the vouchers for fear of harassment from our schoolmates who knew no better. It may have been this economic limitation that was contributing to my tears, but I suspect I was too young to understand all that. I just understood toys. If a toy became broken or lost it would be gone forever, there would be no replacement- maybe the tears were about death after all?

The cover showed the duck brothers playing with Matchbox cars. Having launched the cars off of a ramp two of the cars had collided, resulting in one becoming broken in the process. Two of the brothers laughed and smiled while the third Dewey(?) looked on in dismay at the destruction of his toy. He had a single tear squirting from his avian eye, a look and a tear that informed me that he would be left out as the other boys continued to play with their cars. That’s all. Was I crying over the idea of the loss of a material thing, something that in my adult life I have made an effort to not place too much stock in? Was I somehow preparing myself for the loss of my material goods? Feeling left out? Poverty? Death? Empathy? Sadness over the great truth that while some suffer others continue to laugh a play? Cruelty? The end? Lack of control? Why did I keep returning to this  painful meditation on losing something you love?

In a way it now feels silly to confess. While I say I was poor, I was taken care of. I wasn’t being raised in a dirty field under a corrugated tin roof, drinking befouled water from the creases left behind by a machine of war. I wasn’t watching friends and family get erased from existence by explosions and gunfire, or diseases long thought conquered by the developed world. I wasn’t scrabbling for government cheese, wearing shirts printed for the losing team of the Super Bowl. I was upper-lower-middle class, white, American, male, I had it easy by almost every metric of comparison, maybe I just didn’t know that yet. I had a coloring book hidden in my closet.

NOTE- So I did it with remarkable ease. I found the book in question in a single Google search and was surprised to find that Dewey(?) is in fact, not crying. I wonder now if that was an addition that my brother made, or worse, I may have been the one to do so. I could have added that and felt shame over what I did, which would only add to the bizarre quality of the whole situation. It’s entirely possible that over the years I tagged it on in my remembrance to give some context to my interpretation of what was going on with that cover to explain to myself why the book lingers on in my thoughts some 35 years on. 35 years of remembering SOMETHING, some pain I have never fully identified and reconciled. 35 years of self pity, or sympathy, or guilt, or fear. 

I don’t know what ever happened to the book. I suspect in time I grew tired of the routine, or my mother tossed it when the seasons changed and the winter clothes were moved to our drawers. Most likely it was trashed when my little brother was born and I moved to the basement, room was needed for the new member of the family and that seems to make sense to me.

When my brother was born I was 5, around the time of the coloring book and my secret crying sessions. I remember being woken early in the morning, night really, and being taken to my parents friends house not far from where my mother would go into labor. I barely remember the events of that morning, but I do remember speaking to my mother on the phone when my father came back to tell us that we had a new brother. I was able to call her before visiting the hospital later that day. I asked her if her tummy hurt. A picture once existed of me in my pyjamas, standing in some strange kitchen on a hardline phone holding my stomach as I spoke to her. She told me she was ok. She told me my brother was ok. I don’t remember ever seeing that book again after we all came home later that day.

Posted on by michaelwconrad

Dead Rabbits

One Easter when I was quite young, my brother and I were surprised with two pet rabbits. They were sisters, and while I cannot recall their true given names I don’t think that Honey and Clover are bad guesses. They were full grown and lively, much different than what I expected from bunnies. Their ears stood tall, erect, unlike the floppy things we had grown to expect from a solid diet of the Saturday Morning Cartoon Express and Cabury commercials. They were lean and brown like dead grass and would use their deceivingly strong hind legs and their little claws to scratch at you furiously of you held them for prolonged periods.

Clover and Honey would live in the chicken coop, along with the hens, all named Martha after our developmentally delayed elementary school custodian. They all seemed to get on fine, as we had expected, the “coop” was actually a hastily renovated back shed area of our single car garage and it provided both insulation against the fickle New England weather as well as plenty of room for all.

My brother and I were responsible for feeding the animals, clumps of alfalfa and bitter pellets for the rabbits, and a coarse cornmeal from a large aluminum trash can for the hens. The animals had free reign of the yard during daylight hours, and while our yard had no fences these deceptively brilliant little beings seemed aware of the boundaries of the yard for the most part, and would come running for the coop at dusk. They were easy pets, all of them, rarely needing much, always giving more than they took.

Turns out one of the rabbits was in fact male. We never identified which one, but I seem to recall my father postulating that the slightly smaller one, Clover, may have been male based solely on that clue. The big gender reveal came in the form of several squirming beings nooked away in a bundle of straw in the corner of the coop.

I don’t recall much of the young bunnies early days, I may have been afraid to look at them. We must have brought them in and put them under a heat lamp, safe from the predation of the Martha’s, or have sequestered an area in the coop where Honey would be able to care for them naturally. The bunnies became rabbits in no time, three of them, again I cannot recall their names because none of them lived long lives and the resulting pain seems to have cast shadows over those memories.

While I’m pretty certain we started with more than three, I don’t remember any loss of life until after the bunnies were large enough to join their parents in the yard. At first they bobbled and struggled to find agency over their limbs, but in short order the little ones were just as fast and wiley and independent as Clover and Honey.

I killed the first one.

It was winter and the rabbits spent most of the time in the coop. The snowfall in New Hampshire was intense that year, and the show in unplowed/untended areas rose several feet. The top of the drifts a brutal crust of ice, the show so cold it wouldn’t even stick to itself, try as I might to construct snowballs and castle walls, the snow would crumble between my clumsy gloved fingers. It was cold, it was real cold on the morning I was tasked to run out to the coop and feed the “ladies” as my mother called them, I would correct her sometimes, reminding her of Clover.

I threw on those ugly tan and brown rubber boots that defined my aesthetic as a young boy and decided to forego the jacket, I would be quick, and get back to more pressing matters like Lego and Atari, and another endless day of indoor activity. In youth the days last forever, a great lamentation of my adulthood is that now the days live in tight margins, over just when I feel like I’m about to get to the good part. 

Rushing, I swung the door open and closed to prevent the escape of any of the ladies, but I should have known better. The Martha’s sat on their perches and in their laying boxes, their mottled feathers puffed out, plumed balls trying to mitigate heat loss, and make the most of the lazy days of winter. The rabbits huddled in the corner on the other side of a partition that marked off their area and the hens seemed to respect that their roommates needed their own area. I didn’t count them off, I simply shovelled the meal into the Marthas trough, and I checked to make sure that their water was full, clean, and free of ice. I had no way of knowing that one of the yearlings was up and exploring the confines of the coop.

As I crossed the cement of the shed toward the hay covered rabbit area with a large scoop full of pellets I felt something irregular under my boot, followed by a sound that haunts me into my 40th year. 

The bunny squirmed and bucked, its head kicked to one side unnaturally, a small siren of agony and shock emitted from it, from it’s once wiggly, sniffy nose, now ran a crimson trickle. I had never heard a rabbit make any noise, much less one so plaintive and pathetic. It was loud, filling the coop with a squeaking swirl of pain. The hens cocked their heads from the trough, the other rabbits, it’s family, ran anxious circles in the straw, they had never heard such a thing either.

I ran from the coop to the house with tears streaming from my face, blubbering I could barely explain what had happened, but “something’s wrong with the bunny!” Both parents sprung into action, so automatic they failed to notice that I was following. My father peeked into the coop then dashed over to the garage returning with a pillowcase. Returning to the garage from the coop with the pillowcase bundled close to his chest. What followed were two sharp strikes, hammer against the cement floor of the garage. The siren stopped wailing. 

Father returned from the garage, visibly shaken, I don’t think he cried, but he pushed up his glasses and pinched his brow at one point while my mother held me and told me it wasn’t my fault. The standing rule of thumb to follow was that when you were in the coop to make sure to shuffle your feet. Years later after all the animals were long dead I found myself in the “coop” now a storage area for our bicycles and I realized I was still shuffling.

I didn’t kill the second one.

One sunny spring day my brother and I returned from a bike ride, I don’t know where we kept them in those days. We lived in a conveniently shaped neighborhood that allowed us to loop endlessly passing the house as we did skids in the sand left from the salting of our roads in the winter. My mother would have been tending the yard, getting her bulbs in and removing dead matter from the flowerbeds that lined the house. We would have been waving to her every time we passed, each time she would smile and wave back. I don’t remember these moments well, but this is what would have been happening.

When we passed and saw she was no longer in tending the soil, I do clearly remember her buckled over in agony with a shoebox in her hands. She was in the grass now, wearing all white, pristine, the box in her hands, weeping. My brother and I made it up the driveway before dumping our bikes in a violent pair of crashes and we ran to her side.

“The fucking cat! He killed my baby!” She wept, in the box one of the yearlings, on its side on a bed of tissue paper. Still breathing with great labor, puff-puff-puff. The other animals unaware this time, it was dying without sound, just my mother softly weeping. I was in such shock I just stared at the pathetic last moments of the bunny for what seemed like an eternity. I was in a tunnel, I remember touching my mother between her shoulder blades, feeling her heart through her back. A broken heart is easy to feel, it shakes the whole body, a priest beating the pulpit in a vain attempt to get the attention of an absentee savior. I thought it would never stop. It’s not going to stop. It wouldn’t stop, the death would just last and last.

My brother took the box away, he wasn’t much older than, my senior by only 3 years, I guess this would make him 9 or 10, doing the work my father struggled to do as a grown man. Remember how my father may have cried? Remember how even in generational stoicism he had shown the pain? Dad had finished off the rabbit in the garage, a man who had killed deer as a lifelong hunter. In that same garage I would see him lay our broken boxes and string deer up from the rafters, split from their loins to their throat, their swollen tongues pushed out between their teeth, eyes wide still from the shock of the slugs impact. They would drip onto the boxes. They would hang above the boxes and no one wept.

From that garage I heard a clumsy wack. Several others to follow. My brother weeping. Later he would come out, my mother would hold him, then he would go inside, into the bathroom and emerge with a new expression, one that he shows at times today. This look was one of knowledge of the world. It’s the expression of Adam exiting the garden, it’s the look of a man, not a boy, his mind alit by Apollo, a fire that I would see again when my brother returned from the room occupied by mother’s body after her passing. I didn’t look upon my mother’s body. I just wept then as I did when we lost the second rabbit.

I only wept later when the third rabbit died.

I never saw the body of the third rabbit. He had a problem and we couldn’t help it. A couple months dissolved into summer and toward the end of the spring we knew something wasn’t right. It’s face was swollen and hot to the touch. 

Maybe a year before my toe had been jammed and became painfully infected. It was nearly twice it’s size, the skin drawn thin and if prodded it would split oozing out an ochre fluid, rank smelling stuff of infection. My parents had been really concerned and helped me clean it twice daily, speaking maybe a bit too freely among themselves about the dire nature of the infection and their fears of gangrene, amputation, and a variety of other horrors that would feed fuel to my budding sleep issues. The infection persisted until we made it to the ocean, I shit you not when I say the sea water did what all the medication and antibiotics had failed to accomplish.

My father had made a decision, the last baby rabbit had to go, and so, we all got in his truck and drove to the river for which my town was named. Deep in the surrounding woods we set the last one free, I remember father telling me that it would live in the woods and the woods would make it better. “This is where he wants to be. They all want to be free, but they let us live with them.” Those are his words, I remember that bit like it was yesterday. “They let us live with them.” I wonder if he did that on purpose or what? I would ask him what it meant but I’m sure that the memory has faded.

Even with this idea in my head I did get the feeling that the rabbit was out of sorts when placed on the forest floor. Blinking at us over his abscess he just sat there in frightened stillness. He didn’t bolt to freedom. I think I even said something about it not wanting to go and my brother clapped me on the shoulder and said something about it saying goodbye. My brother was crying.

I don’t recall what happened to the older rabbits, we didn’t have them much longer and the Martha’s met their own fate at the hands of a skunk while we were camping (a story I still question at times) but I think we brought the other rabbits to a farm. To a farm? As I type that it feels unlikely, but that’s all I have to offer. I was young. I knew better than to ask a lot of questions.

We never had rabbits again, but on a walk through the woods with my father we found a tiny black bunny, just out there in the open. My father was concerned for it, a lot of people have these ideas of hunters being callous alcoholic killers, but I have never met a man who was such compassion for animals. His relationship with other species is one of a bygone era, as I am vegan it’s complicated but I feel in many ways his engagement with the animals we share the world with has a level of purity lost on me. I once watched my father swim half a mile into the violent Atlantic Ocean to save a dying bird, but this is a story about rabbits, I’ll tell you about the birds another time. 

My father said it was a domestic bunny and would die in the wild (the ugly truth about the fate of rabbit three now apparently no longer taboo) and we would bring it home. Unlike the other rabbits who had a more feral quality this rabbit was indeed, clearly domestic. Its “fur” something unreal like a synthetic Claire’s Boutique fur boa, almost otherworldly in it’s whisper softness. This was not a wild thing. This was an animal specially bred by man to be cute, to meet some imagined standard of petness, impossibly alive and yet- there it was.

We only had it for a few hours and it was gone. It slipped from the enclosure we had made for it in the living room and wasn’t seen again for nearly a decade. We looked all over for it, but it had completely disappeared without a trace. We left out food and water hoping it would eventually emerge from whatever nook it may have escaped to and become part of the family again, but it never did. My mother, who had never seen the bunny laughed it off and said that it must have slipped out the door when we had left the house for supplies, but I knew it must be around somewhere.

My father has a handy quality I have long admired and been envious of. I have seen the man swap gas tanks on his truck, put a new roof on our house, knock down walls and rework the wiring, the man has a depth of understanding of such things that continues to impress me. A big one was when fate dealt us a poor hand and our furnace shit the bed in the depths of yet another cold winter. It took days to replace the thing, I helped as much as I could, I was much older now, but a bit too young to help haul the corpse of the dead furnace from the basement. Dad must have bribed an uncle into helping with the backbreaking task, I was on hand to “move shit out of the way” and to collect some pieces he would hand out from the secret places behind the beast as he disconnected it from the rest of the home’s central nervous system. One by one nuts and bolt and obtuse elements and connective tissue were handed out to me, I carefully collected them, a surgical assistant to the task. When my father emerged laughing, covered in dust and grit from the spot behind the furnace he met with my uncle who laughed as well. My father held the petrified remains of a small bunny, it must have slipped into the ventilation (under the sink… the spot missing its grate) all those years ago mistaking it for it’s genetic memory of a warren it had never inhabited. It died in quiet solitude. I didn’t understand the laughter, gallows humor being a foreign concept at the time. I collected the remains and buried them under the pines in the backyard while they hauled the furnace through the bulkhead. Neither asked me to return to help with the task, I don’t know if it was out of sensitivity or of simply being able to do the task easier without some broken kid around to get underfoot.

The furnace kept us warm until we left the house one by one, first my older brother, then me, then my mother, my little brother, and finally my father. When I visit I drive by to see what became of the house and see the yard has been fenced in, they have chickens. The garage has been remodeled, I wonder if the coop area still smells like alfalfa. I wonder about what else has gone on in the car port of the garage. I wonder about a lot of things these days.